You can be sure that they’ll be watching Barack Obama’s inauguration on television in Tehran a week today. Iranian officials scan everything to do with Obama, every appointment, every word he lets slip, for clues to his views. Then the Tehran press analyses it, with a fervour and wordiness rivalling the Washington media.

Good luck to them; his policy on Iran remains opaque, despite his declaration that his team would talk directly to Iranian officials, breaking with years of US policy. He wanted to bring “a new emphasis on respect and a new willingness on being willing to talk” to Iranians, he said on Sunday.

But what will he say? His remarks are short on substance, except where the demands are sky high. “I think that Iran is going to be one of our biggest challenges,” he added on Sunday. That is beyond banal. Iran is central to the US’s most urgent foreign problems. The Israel-Palestinian conflict, Iraq, Afghanistan – Iran plays an intimate part in all, generally malign to US interests in the first two, but potentially helpful in Afghanistan. In the seven-year drama of its nuclear ambitions, it has persisted in work that the US and the EU regard as threatening, although Iran insists that its aims are peaceful.

Mr Obama added that “we also have certain expectations”. That is an understatement; they begin with an insistence that Iran drops the most controversial nuclear work. They also include a demand for an end to “Iran’s support for terror organisations”, referring to Hezbollah and Hamas. Mr Obama is entirely right to observe that US policy of berating Iran has got nowhere. But he is asking Iran to change its core policies, in response to threats he has not yet made, or in return for rewards at which he has not yet hinted, other than the supposedly exhilarating novelty of contact itself.

As it happens, it is a better time to put a deal to Tehran than at any point since the covert nuclear work was exposed in 2002. Iran is worried by the fall in the oil price and the growing alliance of Arab countries with the US and Europe against its nuclear aims. Leaders vocally objected to the Arab participation in the December 16 meeting in New York between the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China to discuss Iranian nuclear aims.

The restrained (and contradictory) reactions to Israel’s military assault on Gaza suggest that the leaders are watching cautiously, noisily condemning it, but holding back from moves that would trigger US or Arab government fury. In one sense, the pictures of Israeli tanks have been a gift to President Ahmadinejad, up for reelection in early summer and facing the electorate’s fury at his failure to hand them the benefits of the oil boom. The parliament is also preparing to pledge money to Gaza. But on December 30 police stopped students from demonstrating outside the Egyptian interests section and Jordanian Embassy in Tehran in protest against their support for Israel.

That doesn’t mean that the cacophonous and contradictory leadership will resolve itself into clear policy. In words, and noise, and sheer talkiness, Tehran can outdo Washington. But Iranian leaders are clearly listening, if Mr Obama works out how to fill in his policy of “just talk” with real words.

Times Recommends

• Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too
• They’re still wriggling to avoid the flak on Iraq
• Rule the waves? Not any more we don’t