Barack Obama gets it right and wrong about Iran

For Barack Obama the deal ending the nuclear stand-off with Iran was a signal achievement. The question now is whether it will last. Having got it right in choosing diplomacy over war, the US president now risks getting it wrong. The nuclear deal will prove a durable legacy only if it maps a path to something bigger. Yet the US has been insisting that nothing else will change.

There is a curious consensus in Washington that says that now it has persuaded Tehran to trade uranium enrichment for sanctions relief, Iran must be returned to diplomatic isolation. I say curious because the view seems to be shared by supporters as well as opponents of the agreement; and more curious still because it defies the very logic of that accord. What is the argument that says we should bargain with Iran about so strategically vital an issue as nuclear proliferation but then refuse to talk to it about anything else? And this as much of the Middle East burns.

The ferocity of the opposition to any deal with America’s old allies — senior Saudis talk scathingly of Mr Obama’s “pivot to Iran” — made it inevitable that the White House would offer reassurance it is not abandoning Sunni Arabs to the hegemony of Shia Iran. The administration had also to neutralise powerful resistance in Congress, much of it fuelled by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

So Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have been offered sophisticated weapons systems. Israel has escaped retribution for Mr Netanyahu’s scandalous effort to subvert the US political process. To his great discredit, Mr Obama has also turned a blind eye to the violent suppression of democracy in Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s Egypt.

Tehran’s record in stoking the sectarian fires in the region scarcely makes an obvious case for wider engagement. Iran is an unabashed supporter of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria. The Quds force of its Revolutionary Guard trains and equips Hizbollah in Lebanon and sponsors Hamas in Gaza. Tehran backs the Houthi rebels who have turned Yemen into another broken state alongside Syria, Libya and Iraq. It underwrites Shia sectarianism in Iraq, and exults in its enmity towards Israel. And, yes, it would like to be the pre-eminent power in its neighbourhood. No, this is not at all a nice regime.

So, taking a narrow view, it was unsurprising that in advance of the deal, John Kerry, the US secretary of state, sought to assure America’s allies that “nothing will be different the day after this agreement . . . with respect to all the other issues that challenge us in this region”. No one, Mr Kerry insisted, was talking about a grand bargain with Tehran. The US would remain the counter to Iranian power and guarantor of Gulf security.

Unsurprising, but illogical. By seeking hermetically to seal off Iran’s disavowal of the bomb from the wider conflicts, the US administration undercuts the essential strategic purpose of engagement on the nuclear dossier. The aim surely was to reshape the geopolitical dynamics by changing the balance of incentives in Tehran. A deal to forestall Iran’s nuclear ambitions was never going to put an end to the proxy wars between Saudis and Iranians. It would, though, shake the kaleidoscope.

The opportunity will be lost if the US reverts to a strategy of coercive containment. So too will the chance to turn what is after all a temporary nuclear moratorium into a permanent disavowal of the bomb. The choice of negotiation over Mr Netanyahu’s eagerness for war was informed by an understanding that an agreement offers the only foolproof way of preventing Tehran from joining the nuclear club.

Tougher sanctions would have hurt Iran, and bombing might have delayed the nuclear programme, but to be sure, the west had to persuade Iran it was better off without the bomb. Along the way, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had to be assured that Washington was no longer in the business of promoting regime change. Those two insights are as vital to securing the permanence of the deal as they were to reaching it.

The present regime in Tehran is anything but pleasant. Destructive abroad, it is deeply repressive at home. Engagement will never be comfortable. But Iran can neither be ignored nor indefinitely contained. It is a populous and potentially very rich nation, an ancient civilisation with a burgeoning middle class and, incidentally, has something more closely resembling democracy than the so-called “moderate” Arab states. Any imaginable security arrangements for the region must necessarily accommodate Iranian power.

The corollary is that none of the fires in the region — the Syrian civil war, the rise of self-styled Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the insurrection in Yemen among them — can be damped without the collaboration of Tehran.

If that is an uncomfortable fact for Washington, so too must be the behaviour of America’s allies. Violent Islamist extremism has gained purchase in Iraq and Syria in part because of Sunni ambivalence. Saudi Arabia still exports the Wahhabi theology that plants the seeds of jihadi terror. As western nations bomb the extremists, Turkey is attacking the Kurdish forces fighting the jihadis on the ground. The most hard-bitten foreign policy realists must hold their noses in this part of the world.

The New York Times has been reporting this week that Mr Obama is considering a meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. If he can engage with Moscow he can talk to Tehran.

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