bottom of the hour, i m brooke baldwin. you re watching cnn. big, big story coming out of the united nations today. the u.s. and iran will hold their highest level contact since the iranian revolution of 1979. that is to happen on thursday when secretary of state john kerry is scheduled to be in a meeting with the iranian foreign minister. president obama said today that diplomacy must be tested in the effort to keep iran from developing nuclear weapons. at this very hour, we are awaiting the new iranian president s speech to the u.n. general assembly. he is a key component of the push for better relations. cnn s barbara starr has a look at him. reporter: all eyes are on hasan rouhani, iran s new president. still largely a man of mystery as the u.s. trying to figure out whether he is really willing to
house is so keen to see from them. meeting or no meeting, you have president obama speaking there today saying that diplomacy with iran must be tested. does that begin with thursday with the secretary of state john kerry and his iranian counterpart, once they meet? reporter: well, certainly. that s a substantial bit of progress. it s not necessarily one on one. it s part of a broader meeting. that s about the iranian nuclear program. a huge step forward to be meeting at that high level. plus, obama saying he had tasked kerry with getting that diplomatic path back on track. i think the real message we hear is the west, the p-5 plus one wanting to see how serious iran necessarily is here because there s been a lot of rhetoric here, but they ve seen this dance before. every sort of six, seven years there s an uptick in iran s desire to get friendlier with the west and then the hard line
weird photo ops. so finding that moment where you can thread that needle. then you have problems like alcohol being served at the lunch. it becomes almost insurmountable. that was not going to be the substantive thing that would happen. it will happen when john kerry sits down with the nuclear negotiators and iranian foreign minister. that s when they can really talk some turkey. a simple handshake would have been purely symbolic today. so the needle will be threaded, as you point out. that does appear to be a breakthrough. frank, reading your piece in the times, and this metaphor about evoking charlie brown and lucy with barack obama and rouhani. do me a favor and explain where you were going with that. let me first of all say thank god for alcohol. i think it s important that we not have had this even symbolic gesture of an opening of relations with rouhani. this is a man, after all, who is presiding over a regime that is
able to persuade the supreme leader in iran to suspend iran s uranium enrichment. that went on for a few years and collapsed around the time of the election of ahmadinejad. so he has got that background. further more, he says that he has the authority from the supreme leader now to negotiate on a diplomatic resolution to this situation. again, iran has said it doesn t intend to give up its right to enrich but we ll see whether there s any possibility of some kind of meaningful negotiations. the previous reform president wrote an op-ed. it s quite extraordinary, actually, all of this outreach, saying this is the real thing. when i was here, i tried to do it, but i didn t have the backing of the leadership, and i wasn t able to forge a consensus inside iran. he says rouhani has been able to forge a consensus and that the iranian leadership wants to figure out a way how to resolve this diplomatically.
way to get out of the cess pool it created. whether he and barack obama shake hands today is still to be seen. joining me now from new york, cnn s christiane eamon poa aman. why the change in heart? how bad is iran hurting now? reporter: well, obviously the sanctions really do hurt. but we haven t heard about a change of heart from iran about the nuclear program. in fact, iran insists it should still have the right to a civil nuclear program. the issue is, are they prepared to have real negotiations that build up confidence after these 34 years of incredible mistrust so that the west can see and the rest of the world could see what it professes to be just a civilian nuclear program and not one that s diverting to military