Obama’s Iran Gamble

It was one of the great promises of Barack Obama’s presidency: that the world might be transformed by the leadership of a President who had an African Muslim father, who lived in Indonesia as a boy and who offered a foreign policy vision that promoted talking to enemies above threatening them. The idea literally brought some of Obama’s supporters, shell-shocked by the horror of Iraq, to tears. Not so his opponents, who warned that the idea was dangerously naive and that negotiating with the U.S.’s enemies was a formula for disaster.

Obama’s vision didn’t change the world overnight. For much of his first term, his critics claimed vindication, particularly when it came to Iran, which rejected his early olive branch and marched steadily toward nuclear weapons capability. But Obama’s new nuclear deal with Tehran undermines that narrative. His biggest foreign policy gamble has achieved a success–a tentative and fragile one, to be sure–in a presidency desperately in need of forward momentum.

The deal could still go badly wrong, and the critics may yet be proved right. The U.S. and Iran are not friends, and serious people from Israel to Washington warn that Obama may find himself outfoxed by hard-liners in Tehran who still condone chants of “Death to America.” It’s also possible that the document signed by Secretary of State John Kerry in Geneva on Nov. 24 is the first step toward a legacy-making accomplishment, one that leaves the U.S. safer and the world more peaceful and meets that early promise of transformation through communication.

The agreement, which trades temporary relief for Iran from international economic sanctions in return for limits on its nuclear program, lets Tehran off easy, Republicans and even some Democrats complain. “We have just rewarded very bad and dangerous behavior,” House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers told CNN. Republican Senator Mark Kirk said the deal “appears to provide the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism with billions of dollars in exchange for cosmetic concessions that neither fully freeze nor significantly roll back its nuclear infrastructure.”

Israeli leaders, meanwhile, were furious that the deal hadn’t forced a total halt to Iran’s uranium enrichment, the complex scientific process that imbues a harmless metallic element with almost supernatural explosive power. “A historic mistake,” declared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “If a nuclear suitcase blows up five years from now in New York or Madrid, it will be because of the deal that was signed” in Geneva, warned Naftali Bennett, Israel’s Minister of Industry, Trade and Labor.

But here’s another five-year scenario: American tourists visiting Tehran, Iran’s unrestricted oil supply keeping global energy prices low and the Middle East more stable and free of a nuclear arms race. The Geneva deal may only be a first step, a six-month trial that pauses Iran’s nuclear program while diplomats pursue a long-term agreement that would halt it permanently. But if such a grand bargain could be reached, the future bends. “If Iran seizes this opportunity, the Iranian people will benefit from rejoining the international community, and we can begin to chip away at the mistrust between our two nations,” Obama said in remarks shortly after the deal was struck. “This would provide Iran with a dignified path to forge a new beginning with the wider world based on mutual respect.”

Let’s Make a Deal

Even the tenuous trust between the U.S. and Iran that delivered the Geneva deal has taken years to build. You can trace its roots to a 2007 Democratic primary debate in Charleston, S.C. It was there that candidate Obama proclaimed his heretical willingness to talk directly to the leaders of hostile nations, including Iran. His rivals pounced, warning that the youthful Obama could not be trusted with foreign policy. Hillary Clinton branded him “irresponsible and naive.” John McCain called the statement a sign of Obama’s “inexperience and reckless judgment.” And George W. Bush told Israel’s Knesset, in a clear shot at Obama, “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.”

Obama survived the political fallout and soon after taking office sent a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, offering to talk. Events would complicate his plans: in September 2009, Tehran was caught red-handed violating its U.N. treaty obligations by building a secret uranium-enrichment facility deep in a mountain near the town of Fordow. Talks would have to wait.

So Obama worked a tougher second track, building an international coalition to impose harsh economic sanctions on Iran. The U.N. had already found the country in violation of its international agreements in 2003, when it failed to disclose its original nuclear program. The new revelations led to further U.N. sanctions as well as new ones passed by the U.S. Congress and the European Union. The combination slowly strangled Iran’s economy. Oil exports were slashed by 39% last year, and net oil-export revenue, at $69 billion, was down 27%. An estimated $50 billion in assets remained frozen abroad. Iran’s currency, the rial, lost 80% in value against the U.S. dollar.

The sanctions also had a political impact. Three years after the country’s hard-line regime crushed a 2009 popular uprising, last June’s presidential election elevated Hassan Rouhani, a seasoned and sophisticated diplomat and close ally of Khamenei’s who promised engagement with the West–in contrast to his gleefully bellicose predecessor, the Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Some Iranian officials suggested a new opening was possible with Rouhani, though it has never been clear whether such an opening was due to Rouhani’s approach or the tightening sanctions. Either way, it looked like an opportunity to the White House. “We decided to take that seriously and test it,” a senior Administration official says.

Beginning in 2011, Obama sent mid-level envoys to the Gulf nation of Oman to hold secret talks with the Iranians. But the process gathered momentum earlier this year, according to an Associated Press report. More senior officials, including Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, met with the Iranians in March, even before Rouhani’s election–and then five more times after it, from August to October. It was the most active diplomacy between the two nations since Washington and Tehran negotiated the 1981 release of the American hostages. While Obama hid the talks even from many Administration officials, the meetings produced some visible signs of progress, like a friendly Sept. 27 phone call between Obama and Rouhani, the first direct contact between an American President and an Iranian leader since 1979.

All that work paved the way for the multinational meeting in Geneva. There the U.S. joined Russia, China, Germany, France and the U.K. in two sessions of laborious talks. The first, in early November, ended in discord. The second, in a five-star luxury hotel where coffee cost $11 and an armored vehicle was parked outside, seemed unlikely to succeed. Negotiators from six nations met in a second-floor conference room adjacent to a party where drunken revelers danced to Irish folk music completely unaware that hand-edited documents about nuclear technology were being passed around a table down the hall. It wasn’t until after midnight that Kerry felt confident he could reach a deal with an Iranian counterpart who, as a senior State Department official said, seemed “anxious” and clearly under pressure from Tehran.

At 3 a.m. on Nov. 24, the parties agreed to a four-page document setting out the terms. “For 25 years, hostilities between Iran and the United States was an uncrossable chasm, but with these negotiations we have built a bridge,” Amir Mohebian, a Tehran-based political analyst, tells TIME. “We have broken the taboo of meeting face to face.”

Was the Deal Worth Striking?

In any deal between adversaries, it’s more important to pay attention to what is done than what is said. The Geneva agreement requires Iran to neutralize its stockpile of uranium enriched above the level needed for the research and medical purposes it says are the chief aim of its nuclear program. It limits Iran’s production and use of centrifuges, which enrich uranium to higher levels of purity by spinning up to a hundred times as fast as a washing machine. Iran also agreed that it will freeze its construction of a heavy reactor whose plutonium by-product offers a second path to a bomb. In return, Tehran will gain access to an estimated $6 billion to $7 billion in foreign-exchange earnings and be allowed to again trade petrochemicals, automobiles, airplane parts and precious metals. That pales compared with the $25 billion in oil revenue U.S. officials say Iran will lose over the six-month life of the deal. The world, the officials say, still has Iran in a box.

Critics say Iran has gotten something worth far more than what it lost: the world’s implicit approval of its nuclear program. Iran has, after all, sworn to eliminate the state of Israel and has sponsored terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies from Afghanistan and Iraq to South America. Israel and much of the U.S. Congress believe that Khamenei’s regime can never be trusted with the ability to enrich uranium at any level, for the same reason you wouldn’t let a dangerous man keep a dull knife if he knows how to sharpen it.

Iran’s reaction to the deal hardly consoled the skeptics. When Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif strode into the Geneva press center for a briefing Sunday afternoon, the Iranian journalists present burst into applause. Back in Tehran, Rouhani held a triumphal press conference with the families of Iranian nuclear scientists killed by assassins presumed to have been sent by Israel or the U.S. “World powers have recognized the nuclear rights of Iran,” Rouhani declared, adding that the sanctions regime “had been broken” by the deal and that in time the cracks in the sanctions “will widen.”

In a worst-case scenario, Iran will resume progress toward a nuclear bomb. Critics rightly point out that the terms set in Geneva are markedly softer than past U.N. edicts, which insisted that Iran halt all its enrichment activity. Obama’s critics believe Khamenei has played the President for a fool–dispatching the Western-educated, English-fluent Zarif to charm the world and put the onus on Obama to show that he’s serious about diplomacy.

Obama officials insist they’re no fools. They say no long-term resolution to the issue of Iran’s nuclear program is possible without giving the Islamic Republic some indication they can trust the U.S. to deliver sanctions relief. And they say strict, expanded international inspections, along with limits on Iran’s centrifuge capacity and uranium stockpiles, make it virtually impossible for Iran to build a bomb–at least without being discovered in time for the U.S. to crack down with new sanctions or an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In any case, it’s not clear whether Obama could have snared a better deal. In the days before Geneva, some members of Congress called for new sanctions to choke off what remains of Iran’s oil flow, with the goal of forcing Iran into more concessions. But Obama officials challenge that logic. “The U.S. does not accept the argument that if you just kept cranking up the sanctions, the Iranians would ultimately cry uncle,” says a senior State Department official. Doing so “could be counterproductive and drive the Iranians away from any deal.” More sanctions could also alienate China and Russia, whose pressure on Tehran is already grudging.

Now Comes the Hard Part

Even if Obama’s trust is well placed and Iran negotiated the Geneva deal in good faith, a long-term agreement remains unlikely. “There’s a fundamental conflict of national interest between the U.S. and Iran,” says Gary Samore, who served as Obama’s coordinator for weapons of mass destruction and nonproliferation policy until earlier this year. “They want to have a nuclear weapons capability, and that means they want a very large-scale enrichment capability. We want to keep their enrichment capability very small so that they don’t have a nuclear weapons option.” Persuasion won’t change the Iranians’ minds, Samore says, only “coercive pressure.”

Some of the most powerful figures within the Iranian regime also remain deeply hostile to the U.S. The day of the talks, thousands of volunteer Basij militiamen attending a Tehran speech by Khamenei chanted, “Death to America.” Many close observers of the Supreme Leader, who has final say over Iran’s foreign policy, say his loathing for the U.S. may keep him from striking a larger deal. “He is an isolated, paranoid figure who is convinced the U.S. and the West raise concerns over the nuclear program only as a fig leaf for a hidden goal of regime change,” says a former Obama Administration official who worked on Iran issues.

That hardly sounds like a man Obama can trust. But after 30 years of conflict, trust may be too much to ask. That’s why Obama aims to set strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program, with aggressive international monitoring that can blow the whistle on any move to make a bomb in time to stop it. (The Geneva agreement already gives U.N. inspectors the right to daily access to key Iranian enrichment centers.)

The next few months should reveal how serious Iran is about living under such limits. In a best-case scenario, Iran shows good faith and the talks move toward cooperation on larger issues like Syria’s civil war and Afghanistan. But if the Iranians are caught cheating or disputing terms of the agreement, the bargain could collapse. Obama’s critics will crow, and the prospect of military action, which he desperately wants to avoid, will again loom large. Which is why the next few months matter hugely, both to the security of the U.S. and Israel and to the fate of Obama’s presidency.

–With reporting by Aryn Baker/Beirut and Zeke Miller/Washington