What makes Barack Obama an extraordinary politician is the audacity and hope with which he has held out time and again when adversity hemmed him in. The U.S. opening to Iran carries the full stamp of Mr. Obama and has all the hallmarks of his presidency. The “thaw” has the makings of a historic breakthrough, the significance of which is comparable to Richard Nixon’s overtures to China in 1972. The fascinating part is that Mr. Obama is laying a foundation with the bricks that were thrown at him.
The health care reform plan, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic crisis, the declining global influence of the U.S. (as painfully shown by the Olympic Committee’s snub to Chicago’s claim to host the 2016 festival) — the list is indeed lengthening in the politics of spite, as Paul Krugman put it, targeted at Mr. Obama. Also, when it comes to Iran, the powerful Israeli lobby invariably circles the wagons that would drain the urge out of the most determined U.S. President to talk to Tehran.
What needs to be factored in is that Mr. Obama senses that the time for the U.S.- Iran normalisation has come and the process may advance with a rapidity that is probably least expected. Already, there is an acknowledgement by American scholars that Mr. Obama has extracted more concessions from Tehran in flat seven-and-a-half hours — the duration of the talks between the “Iran Six” and the chief Iranian nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, in Geneva on October 1 — than what the George Bush administration got in eight years of sabre-rattling. Mr. Bush refused to talk to Iran; deliberately racheted up tensions; dispatched two aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf; constantly threatened that “all options” were on his table in the Oval Office; and pressured the U.S. partners — including India — to atrophy friendly ties with Iran. And what he got to show for as he left White House in January was that during all of his eight years of adventure in the Persian Gulf, Iran went up from 0.2 to 3.8 per cent in being able to enrich and significantly increased its stock of centrifuges.
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