These shifts, which have so far attracted little attention in the United States, mean that any escalation of violence in Syria will allow the Romney team an opportunity to target Obama's alleged softness (symbolised too by his precipitate withdrawal from Iraq). Here too, the political change of pace would be welcome on the Israeli right.
The AIM risk
The third element is the problem of crisis-escalation, referred to in earlier columns in this series as the "AIMs" - accidents, incidents and mavericks - any one of which can turn a crisis into a war.
This is particularly so with the current build-up of United States military forces in the region. It looks likely that the US navy is going to deploy a third aircraft-carrier battle-group in the region, coinciding with twelve days of naval exercises involving thirty countries.
The focus is on mine-clearance, an area of naval operations in which the US navy is relatively weak. The main other players are Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and the UAE; the first of these contributes four minesweepers, a logistics ship and its most modern Type-45 destroyer, HMS Diamond. These exercises will be followed closely by a major series by the Iranians that stretch well into October. Over that whole period the AIM risk will be particularly high.
The other way
Together, these three factors guarantee weeks of tension, when the chance of confrontation is as high as at any time since a comparable crisis in 2006. There are also two more positive notes. The first is that the European Union and Iran, in the persons of the foreign-affairs representative Catherine Ashton and the envoy Saeed Jalili, held informal but useful talks in Istanbul on 19 September 2012 in an effort to restart the main "P5+1" negotiations. The second is that if war is avoided and Barack Obama wins a second term, there will then be intense pressure on Israel to refrain from war, and Iran will soon reach the point where its nuclear facilities are vulnerable only to US attack.
If that point is reached, everything changes. The west will have to adopt an entirely new approach to Iran, of the kind President Obama might be prepared to embrace. This prospect accentuates just how much is in the balance over the next six weeks.
