A historic if preliminary deal to stop Iran's bomb

The nuclear agreement with Iran, reached after excruciating haggling in Lausanne and several false starts, is like a streak of lightning across the pitch-black sky of a disintegrating Middle East. To resolve an international stand-off as dangerous as this by diplomacy is not just a signal achievement. It might just get to be a habit, in a region where the threshold for resorting to violence is lethally low and tolerance of mayhem is unhealthily high. President Barack Obama may finally have earned the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded shortly after taking office.

This framework deal has solid foundations, and more detailed constraints than it ever appeared Iran was willing to contemplate. It sharply reduces Iran's uranium enrichment capacity and existing uranium stockpile. It cuts the Islamic Republic's nuclear infrastructure and places its supply chain under unprecedented international invigilation - such that if Iran should decide to build a bomb, it would take a year and should be possible to spot. In exchange, international sanctions on Iran would be lifted, in phases contingent on proof of compliance.

Vital details must be nailed down by the end of June. That gives rejectionists time to sabotage it - Republicans in Congress who echo Israel's dismissal of the deal as a sell-out, and Revolutionary Guards who see Iran's reintegration into the global economy as a slippery road to regime change.

Mr Obama's White House speech after the deal was broadcast live in Iran. Jubilant crowds came on to the streets, cheering Iranian negotiators and President Hassan Rouhani, whose election in 2013 opened the way to Lausanne. Iran's final arbiter will be Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has still to pronounce on the preliminary outcome. The ageing supreme leader, conscious the country's young population is restive and that sanctions have bled its economy, must now judge whether to cash in Iran's winnings while the international bank is still open.

He can claim to have brought the US to the negotiating table and to have secured the right to enrich uranium Iran had been denied. The shrill opposition of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, to a deal he calls a "historic mistake", can only help Mr Khamenei sell it at home.

The purpose of Tehran's nuclear programme has always been ambiguous. Is it strategic, a bid to deter adversaries by creating a "threshold" ability to build a bomb without actually doing so? Or is it a symbolic insistence on the right to enrich uranium - a modern proxy of the sovereign right to own the country's oil wealth, once denied to Iran by the Anglo-American coup that toppled an elected government in 1953 after it nationalised the oil industry.

In reality it is both. Once Iran reached its current level of nuclear sophistication the options left were war or negotiating to constrain that capability. As John Kerry, US secretary of state, said on Thursday night: "simply demanding that Iran capitulate makes a good sound bite but it is not a policy".

Mr Obama warned Congress against killing a deal endorsed by every significant world power, and recalled that Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan made imperfect deals with more dangerous antagonists during the cold war. He might also have recalled the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Congress declined to ratify it, but the US still eventually exchanged ambassadors with the republic of Turkey that emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. It is too early to know whether a pariah Iran can be re-socialised into mainstream geopolitics. But this diplomatic triumph, preliminary as it is, marks a real start.

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