Iranian President Hassan Rouhani held an off-the-record dinner last month in New York with an elite group of former US officials. Among the guests were three former US national security advisers and a former secretary of state.

Rouhani spoke generally about the potential for further US-Iran cooperation if a nuclear deal is reached, but did not delve deeply into the details of the nuclear negotiations underway between Iran and six world powers as they seek to conclude a deal by Nov. 24.

In comparison to a similar gathering last year with the then newly inaugurated Rouhani, which was “full of hope and excitement and a sense of history being made,” a US expert who attended the Sept. 23 dinner told Al-Monitor that what struck him most this time was that US-Iran relations have “become more normalized.”

If the positive trajectory of the relationship that followed Rouhani’s replacement last year of the Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues, some of the credit will go to a soft-spoken former US ambassador to Czechoslovakia and Venezuela, William Luers.