It goes without saying that the only near-term deal with Iran worth partially lifting sanctions for would be a deal that freezes all the key components of Iran's nuclear weapons development program, and the only deal worth lifting all sanctions for is one that verifiably restricts Iran's ability to breakout and build a nuclear bomb.
There is something else that still needs to be said: We, America, are not just lawyers negotiating a deal for Israel and the Sunni Gulf Arabs, which they get the final say. We, America, have our own interests in not only seeing Iran's nuclear weapons capability curtailed, but in ending the 34-year-old Iran-U.S. Cold War, which has hurt our interests and those of our Israeli and Arab friends.
We must not be reluctant about articulating our interests in the face of Israeli and Arab efforts to block a deal that we think would be good for us and them. America's interests today lie in an airtight interim nuclear deal with Iran that opens the way for addressing other issues between Washington and Tehran.
Some of our allies believe the only outcome is bombing Iran's nuclear facilities and keeping Iran an isolated state. They don't trust this Iranian regime. I don't begrudge their skepticism. Without pressure from Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and the global sanctions on Iran, Iran would not be offering to scale back its nuclear program.
But that pressure was never meant to be an end itself. It was meant to bring Iran in from the cold, provided it verifiably relinquished the ability to breakout with a nuclear weapon. "Just because regional actors see diplomacy with Iran as a zero-sum game — vanquish or be vanquished — doesn't mean America should," said Karim Sadjadpour, the expert on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment.
Why? Let's start with the fact that Iran has sizable influence over several of the United States' most critical national security concerns. Whereas tension with Iran has served to exacerbate these issues, detente with Tehran could help ameliorate them. Iran played a vital role in helping us to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and can help us get out without the Taliban completely taking over again.
"Iran has at least as much at stake in a stable Iraq, and a stable Afghanistan, as we do — and as an immediate neighbor has a far greater ability to influence them, for good or ill," said Nader Mousavizadeh, the Iranian-American co-founder of Macro Advisory Partners, and a former top aide to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
There is a struggle in Tehran today between those who want Iran to behave as a nation, and those who want it to continue behaving as a revolution in a permanent struggle with the United States and its allies. What's at stake in the Geneva nuclear negotiations — in part — "is which Iranian foreign policy prevails," argued Mousavizadeh. A deal there could open the way for cooperation on other fronts.
There is nothing that threatens the future of the Middle East today more than the sectarian rift between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. This rift is being used by President Bashar Assad of Syria, Hezbollah and some Arab leaders to distract their people from questions of economic growth, unemployment and political legitimacy. It is also being used to keep Iran isolated and unable to exploit its rich oil and gas reserves, which could challenge some Arab producers. Our interest is in quelling these sectarian passions, not taking one side.
The Iran-U.S. Cold War has prevented us from acting productively on all these interests. It is easy to say we should just walk away from talks if we don't get what we want, but isolating Iran won't be as easy as it once was. China, Russia, India and Japan have different interests than us vis-a-vis Iran. The only man who could unite them behind this tough sanctions regime was Iran's despicable previous president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The new president, Hassan Rouhani, is much more deft.
All this is why the deal the Obama team is trying to forge now that begins to defuse Iran's nuclear capabilities, and tests whether more is possible, is in the U.S. interest.
There are those in the Middle East who prefer "a war without end for the same tribal, sectarian, backward-looking reasons that are stunting their own domestic development as open, integrated, pluralist societies," Mousavizadeh said. "They can have it. But it can't be our war. It's not who we are — at home or abroad."
Thomas L. Friedman writes for The New York Times.