The negotiations being conducted by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the U.S., the U.K., France, China, and Russia) and Germany with Iran over the Iranian nuclear program have assumed a very high importance in American domestic politics, even as the subject becomes steadily more urgent in the Middle East. The principle that the United States would not negotiate with terrorists, though it has been allowed to lapse from time to time, is being left in tatters as these discussions drag endlessly on while Iran’s status as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism is intensified, as indicated by the success of the faction it sponsors in Yemen, the Houthis. (They are allied to the local al-Qaeda, which claims responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris that brought on a march of 2 million French led by representatives of 60 countries, including the leaders of three of the countries in the talks with Iran, and the foreign minister of one.)

It seems hard to believe, but President Jimmy Carter fired Andrew Young as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1979 for conducting clandestine negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose almost imperishable leader, Yasser Arafat, was received by President Bill Clinton, with Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres (Nobel Peace Prize winners all, with, eventually, Carter, Al Gore, and Barack Obama), in 1995, though Arafat, despite being heavy-laden with peace laurels, had not allowed his terrorist activities to abate at all. When terrorism persists as it has, respectable countries have either to obliterate the terrorists (as the Obama administration claimed to have done, causing the reprehensible effort of the president and then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton to say that the murder of the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi, Libya, was the result of anger against a crank Islamophobic video-maker); or ignore them, no matter the scale of their outrages; or negotiate with them. Whatever the failings of George W. Bush, including rather mindlessly promoting democracy in unfertile ground where it produced pro-terrorist results, as in Gaza and Lebanon and Egypt, his deeds were consistent with his words. This regime has talked the talk but stumbled and crawled from the path, and will negotiate with everyone on a no-fault, equal-opportunity basis.

The agreement being contemplated with Iran disturbs almost everyone. The ostensible outline of an agreement is to bring the number of centrifuges (which are the means of enriching uranium to nuclear-fission purposes) down from around 20,000, which is about ten times as many as are required to pursue the civilian nuclear potential that Iran claims to be its goal, to between 7,000 and 9,000 centrifuges. While it is, to say the least, discreditable that the negotiating powers are apparently content with such an arrangement (which also includes handing over a large quantity of processed material to Russia), it is to some degree comprehensible, as all of them except Germany are nuclear powers with retaliatory capacities far beyond anything Iran could conceivably aspire to; and though Germany does not have such a capability, the Iranian leadership, in the full efflorescence of its lunacy, could not possibly imagine that it could threaten Germany, much less act on a threat, without bringing down on its thickly clad heads the maximum military response of some of the other contracting powers.

Evidently, Iran’s neighbors, and especially Israel — whom Iran has not ceased to threaten in the most blood-curdling terms since the day after the Shah’s departure (a departure that occurred owing in large measure to the hostility of Nobel laureate Carter) in 1979 — see a militarily nuclear Iran differently. Israel sharply disagrees with the United States and the other negotiating countries about the level of nuclear capability it is safe to leave in Iranian hands. So also do Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and even Turkey, though Turkey does so very quietly given its posturing around the Middle East as co-avenger of Islam against the impudent Jewish interloper-state (whose greatest ally outside Western Europe and North America and Australia Turkey was until the onset of the Erdogan regime). None of them can be so abstractedly theoretical about Iran’s arrival at the nuclear threshold as the five Security Council powers. Obviously, Shiite Iran is at daggers drawn with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which are the chief Sunni powers in the great dispute and rivalry between the two major branches of Islam (to which is added the ancient Persian-Arab animosity). Iran could dangerously threaten its Sunni adversaries, including Turkey. Egypt and Saudi Arabia would feel themselves much more threatened than Israel, which, whatever the genocidal and sectarian polemics of the deranged theocrats in Tehran, possesses a very sophisticated anti-missile defense and a retaliatory capacity that could obliterate Iran. This has chiefly caused Saudi Arabia to tank the oil price and lay the rod of potential national bankruptcy on Iran, and has warmed Egypt and Saudi Arabia up to Israel, as the only country that has both the ability and the will to take down Iran’s nuclear capacity.