Was this weekend’s nuclear deal and Washington’s surprise prisoner swap with Tehran the final high point of a one-off diplomatic initiative or the start of a real realignment
Was this weekend’s nuclear deal and Washington’s surprise prisoner swap with Tehran the final high point of a one-off diplomatic initiative or the start of a real realignment
Some 35 years after US-Iran ties were broken amid the chaos of the Tehran hostage crisis, might the Great Satan and the Axis of Evil linchpin be on the brink of real détente
Most experts see a formal restoration of diplomatic ties as far off and progress as fragile, but Washington at least is ready to see how far the diplomatic track will take it.
“We do believe we should test whether or not there can be additional cooperation, or at least constructive dialogue,” a senior US administration official told reporters.
On Saturday, the UN nuclear watchdog confirmed Iran had put a nuclear bomb beyond its immediate reach and the US and EU lifted their most draconian economic sanctions.
At the same time — in a surprise gesture — Tehran and Washington revealed they had reached a deal to exchange two groups of prisoners held in each other’s jails.
“We were able, over the course of the last couple of years, to have more diplomatic engagement with Iran than I think we’ve had in total since 1979,” the US official said.
US diplomats insisted, to widespread scepticism, that the two breakthroughs were entirely separate.
The Iran nuclear deal was the product of years of careful negotiations between Tehran and the P5+1 — the permanent UN Security Council members and the European Union.
The prisoner swap, by contrast, came after 14 months of back-channel negotiations, conducted in secret between US envoys and Iranian diplomats and intelligence officials. But taken together, the initiatives have fed speculation that President Barack Obama is rewiring US networks in West Asia to end the decades-long stand-off.
Détente with Iran would make it easier to resolve the crises in Iraq, Syria and Yemen — even if it would unsettle traditional US allies Israel and Saudi Arabia.
“Deeply encoded in Obama’s software, the answer was Iran,” Joseph Bahout, a West Asia scholar at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace, said.
“His team thinks that Iran is a natural future partner.”
