By Joel Gehrke, Washington Examiner–

President Trump’s willingness to meet with Iranian leaders does not imply any easing of the maximum pressure campaign, according to a top White House adviser.

“He’ll meet with anybody to talk,” White House national security adviser John Bolton told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-backed outlet. “But talking with them does not imply — for President Trump, [it] does not imply — changing your position.”

Trump rattled Iran hawks in Washington and around the world by saying publicly that he might support offering the regime a “line of credit” to support the regime’s flailing economy, even though the administration has been implementing a maximum pressure campaign designed to weaken the economy. He aired that idea Sunday while signaling a desire to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, but Tehran rebuffed the invitation.

“We seek to resolve issues and problems in a rational way, but we are not after photos,” Rouhani said Monday. “For anyone wanting to take a picture with Hassan Rouhani, this is not possible.”

Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the clerical supreme leader who dominates the regime, has rebuffed formal negotiations with Trump for months, while Iran stages attacks on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf in an apparent effort to gain leverage in a future meeting. But it is unlikely that any productive meeting will take place before the 2020 presidential elections.

“They’re going to cling to their stance of not negotiating with Trump until they’re sure they have to,” James Phillips, a Middle East expert at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.

Rouhani’s snub might come as a relief to the biggest proponents of Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and renew sanctions on the rogue state.

“I believe and hope that President Trump will not meet with senior officials in the ayatollah regime before they announce they’re giving up their nuclear program and ballistic missiles and cease terrorism against Israel,” Israeli opposition lawmaker Yair Lapid, a leading figure in the Blue and White party, tweeted Tuesday.

That’s an explicit public statement of a fear shared privately by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which reportedly worries that a Trump-Rouhani summit could empower Tehran to engage in the kind of provocations that North Korea has staged in the months since meeting dictator Kim Jong Un’s last meeting with the president.

“We have no interest in talks between the U.S. and Iran, but our ability to influence Trump or confront him on this issue is pretty limited,” an Israeli Cabinet minister told local media.

Trump has a famous affinity for historic summits, but his public olive branches to Iran following a weekend of meetings with European allies who hostile to his insistence on withdrawing from the nuclear deal was still an unusual development.

“They may need some money to get them over a very rough patch,” Trump said of Iran during a joint press conference Sunday with French President Emmanuel Macron. “And if they do need money, certainly, and would be secured by oil, which means, it means great security. And they have a lot of oil. But it’s secured bail. So, we’re really talking about a letter of credit-type facility.”

Phillips suggested, due to the inherent tension between that attitude and the idea of using economic sanctions to curtail Iranian aggression in the Middle East and to begin negotiations over new restrictions on the regime’s nuclear deal, that Trump made those comments under pressure from Macron.

“If Iran is thrown a lifeline without making major concessions, then that could undermine the administration’s strategy,” the Heritage Foundation analyst said. “It would be a major error to back away from maximum pressure.”

Bolton agreed. “The idea that Iran would receive some tangible economic benefit merely for stopping doing things that it should not have been doing in the first place is just a nonstarter,” he said Tuesday. “If there is a comprehensive deal, then, of course, the sanctions will come off at that point.”