©AFP

The US and EU are holding a potentially historic meeting with Iran from Sunday, in the final stretch of negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear programme. The talks are in Oman, where secret contacts that led to the interim nuclear deal with Iran a year ago took place. That might be seen as an augury of success, but for this week’s midterm election debacle, which left President Barack Obama facing a Republican lock-hold on both houses of Congress.

Iranian leaders are wondering out loud whether, if they do compromise on their nuclear ambitions, Mr Obama can deliver his side of the deal. The cacophony in Tehran, with vested interests such as the Revolutionary Guards trying to shout down President Hassan Rouhani and those working to reintegrate the Islamic Republic into the international community, is already deafening. It would be a disaster if an issue of such vital interest to the stability of the Middle East and the world became a collateral casualty of America’s ultra-partisan and parochial politics.

Any conceivable end to the sectarian bloodletting between Sunni and Shia Muslims, which has dismembered Syria and Iraq, and conjured the totalitarian death cult of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) into a position where it can threaten Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia – and the west – begins with a deal with Iran.

This would, in reality, need to be three deals: a rapprochement between the US and Iran, visceral antagonists since the 1979 Islamist revolution; a verifiable agreement monitoring Iran’s uranium enrichment and heavy water programmes; and detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Some sort of modus vivendi between Saudis and Iranians is in a sense the most vital – because only when they stop reflexively supporting their (respectively) Sunni and Shia proxies will the sectarian wave roaring across the region start to ebb.

Smart sanctions that currently block foreign investment in Iran and cut it off from the international financial system brought Tehran to the table. It is high time pressure was brought to bear on Saudi Arabia, whose Wahhabi extremism informs the doctrine of Isis and other jihadis who abominate the Shia and all other religious difference.

Leaks from the nuclear talks suggest differences are narrowing, for instance on the number of uranium-enriching centrifuges the Iranians can keep spinning. If there is a deal on this – a big if – it needs to be saleable in Washington.

But Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who has built his credibility on opposition to any deal with Iran, has always had more support in the US Congress than in the Israeli Knesset. Presumably that grew further with this week’s Republican triumph.

Earlier this year, Mr Obama saw off moves in Congress to adopt tougher Israeli- and Saudi-incited sanctions on Iran while talks continued. But that was before the midterm elections, when candidates were wary of appearing as warmongers before a US public weary of wars in the Middle East.

There is, furthermore, the possibility of a breach between the US and the EU, which might be able to agree to an Iran deal that Mr Obama cannot deliver. The EU is rightly regarded as glacial in many of its procedures, but it would take just a few meetings for it to lift sanctions.

http://www.ft.com