Obama faces hostile US Congress after compromise with Iran

Barack Obama is taking the defining gamble of his presidency as he seeks to nail down a "historic" nuclear agreement with an Iranian leadership that has long denounced the US as the "Great Satan" and prevent a sceptical Congress from scuppering the final stages of the marathon diplomatic talks.

The political framework revealed on Thursday leaves Mr Obama within touching distance of a final deal with Iran that could become his signature diplomatic achievement in office - a foreign policy bookend to stand alongside his first-term healthcare reform.

At a time when his White House is being buffeted by crises around the world, a nuclear agreement in the coming months would be a personal vindication for Mr Obama. He has made diplomacy with Iran a priority since he was a presidential candidate - which earned him at the time the derision of both Republicans and Hillary Clinton, and which has been loudly denounced ever since by Israel.

Yet it is a measure of the high stakes involved that if Congress was to intervene in a way that derails the negotiations, it would represent the most humbling rebuke of a president's foreign policy since the Senate blocked Woodrow Wilson's push to join the League of Nations.

In his speech on Thursday outlining a "historic understanding" with Iran, Mr Obama said that if Congress "kills this deal" without providing an alternative, international unity behind sanctions would collapse and military conflict would become more likely.

"When you hear the inevitable critics of the deal sound off, ask them a simple question," Mr Obama said. "Do you really think that this verifiable deal . . . is a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East?"

The political sparring in Washington over the Iran talks has quickly restarted. Shortly after Mr Obama spoke, Republican leaders in the Senate said they would start voting this month on a bill to allow Congress to block or approve a final agreement with Iran and which Mr Obama has threatened to veto.

The Iran talks are so central to Mr Obama's legacy because they are one of the few foreign policy issues that he has made his own and managed to stick with into the seventh year of his presidency.

A president who pledged to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still has troops in the latter and was forced last year to return military "advisers" to the former. His "reset" with Russia has given way to a Cold War-like stand-off over Ukraine, while his effort at personal outreach to the Muslim world, which he kicked off with his 2009 Cairo speech, has been overwhelmed by events in the Middle East.

The effort to negotiate a deal with Iran is also one of the last chances for Mr Obama to be the sort of transformational leader that his supporters hoped for when a young, charismatic African American was elected to the presidency.

Despite being mocked as naive by his rivals, he called during the presidential campaign in 2007 for "aggressive personal diplomacy" with Tehran and has backed the approach ever since.

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With his Cuba diplomacy still in its infancy and the political transition in Myanmar uncertain, an Iran deal remains the biggest potential fruit of Mr Obama's personal efforts at engaging enemies.

However, such a large presidential investment in the Iran talks leaves Mr Obama vulnerable on two fronts. If he is unable to get Tehran to cross the finishing line of an actual deal, or if the agreement unravels through Iranian backsliding, the charges of naivety will be made even more intensely - especially from Republican presidential hopefuls.

There is also the question of how Mr Obama sees relations with Iran after an agreement. The president has hinted at a broader rapprochement with an Iran that some US officials believe could play a more stabilising role in the region. In Thursday's speech, Mr Obama said a deal would allow Iran "to fully rejoin the community of nations", adding: "That would be good for Iran and it would be good for the world."

However, a changed relationship with Iran is exactly what worries US allies in the region, notably Israel and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh fears the US will install Tehran as its preferred partner in the region, just as it was under the Shah, while Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, warned on Friday that the agreement threatened the "very survival" of Israel.

Even strong supporters of nuclear diplomacy with Iran worry that a deal will release billions of dollars in funds to Tehran at the exact moment Iran is expanding its influence around a chaotic region, often at the expense of the US.

As a result, the short-term response of the Obama administration has been to strengthen its ties with the Sunni autocrats in the region that have been traditional allies. Over the past week, the US has backed the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen and restored military aid to Egypt. In a call with King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Mr Obama insisted a nuclear deal would "not in any way lessen US concern about Iran's destabilising activities in the region".

For all the risk-taking surrounding the Iran deal, many aspects of Mr Obama's immediate approach to the Middle East represent a return to the past 30 years of US strategy.

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