South Asia Center Nonresident Senior Fellow Barbara Slavin writes for Al Jazeera America on the ways in which the recently negotiated deal to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons may lead to greater cooperation among the nations involved:
Iran and a United States-led consortium of the world’s top powers have achieved a historic agreement that should keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons for at least a decade and potentially lay the basis for broader cooperation on the multiple crises roiling the Middle East.
US officials were quick to underline that other differences with Iran remain, over its support for groups on the State Department’s terrorism list, its human rights abuses and its challenge of Israel’s right to exist. But there was no disguising the sense that the tectonic plates of international relations are shifting in promising if, for many old US regional allies, unsettling ways.