At last week’s AIPAC meeting, President Obama was the voice of calm in a sea of reactionary calls for war. He rightly railed against “idle talk of war”, a war that would disastrous and unnecessary, and made a stirring case for diplomacy.  Now with Iran signaling its willingness to restart talks and pull back from the edge, the United States needs to make the case to both the American people and to its allies that diplomacy, not war, can bear fruit.

But as Bloomberg commentator Vail Nasr writes, the window for negotiations is narrow,

“Whatever Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have agreed to in his recent meeting with the U.S. president, in public he offered no endorsement of diplomacy. Obama’s critics on the right will look for the slightest opening to dismiss diplomacy as having failed and again push for war. Doing so would have the added benefit for them of potentially driving up oil prices at the cost of the fragile U.S. economic recovery, on which the outcome of the election hinges.”

Instead, Mr. Nasr believes that the United States should push to lift a larger package of sanctions in return for bigger concessions from Iran.  Officials would like to see Iran suspend its enrichment of Uranium to 20% and allow Iran to purchase enriched Uranium fuel rods for its medical isotope reactor from abroad. In exchange for this, Mr. Nasr believes that,

“…Iran’s right to enrich uranium up to 3 percent to 5 percent should be formally recognized — that would be sufficient for a civilian nuclear-power program, but not for bomb making. Iran should also agree to intrusive international inspections and implement the IAEA’s Additional Protocol, giving the U.S. and its allies a measure of confidence that Iran isn’t working its centrifuges overtime to create weapons-grade fuel.”

This would let the Iranians to keep their enrichment program, a key Iranian demand, and allow them to retain their indigenous nuclear power program under strict IAEA safeguards.  It would allow both the United States and Iran to save face, and would go a long way to building trust between the two nations- paving the road for future diplomacy.

Read the full article here.

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