Night had fallen here in the Iranian capital as Hassan Rouhani, the new president of Iran, sent a message via his now-famous Twitter account: He had just gotten off the phone with President Obama, who had called him.“Wow, this is fantastic,” said Armin Kay, an engineer reacting to the news. “The most important thing is that Obama took the initiative. This will go down really well with our leadership.”It was the first direct conversation between leaders of Iran and the United States since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
In Iran, many had been disappointed when Mr. Rouhani failed to show up Tuesday at a United Nations luncheon, where he had been expected to shake hands with Mr. Obama. But the Friday call as Mr. Rouhani was heading to the airport to fly home to Iran, after four days of frenetic diplomacy in the United States, was almost as good as a handshake.“After the positive meeting between the foreign ministers of Iran and the United States on Thursday, we could see this coming,” Amir Mohebbian, a political adviser close to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in an interview after the phone call, referring to Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Secretary of State John Kerry. “This was a polite farewell, a thank you for all the positivity from Iran.”If talks on Iran’s nuclear program next month go well, he said, “we could witness a meeting after that.”Another analyst close to Mr. Rouhani praised the phone call by Mr. Obama as “the best thing he could