Beinart focuses on it:
One day, I suspect, the people obsessing about the details of an Iranian nuclear deal will look a bit like the people who obsessed about the details of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in 1987. In retrospect, what mattered wasn’t the number of ballistic and cruise missiles each side dismantled. What mattered was ending the cold war. …
In December 2001, before the Bush administration called Tehran part of the “axis of evil,” Iran proved a crucial partner in the Bonn Conference that forged a post-Taliban government in Afghanistan. “This experience,” suggests Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who ran the Foreign Relation Committee of Iran’s National Security Council from 1997 to 2005, “can serve as a blueprint for a new collaboration on Syria.”
Let’s hope so, because although America’s leaders sometimes romanticize our half-century-long standoff with Moscow, cold wars are brutal, ugly things. Ending America’s cold war with Iran would deny Iran’s regime a key pretext it uses to repress domestic dissent. And it would increase the chances of ending a war in Syria that should shame the world. That’s what’s really at stake in the nuclear negotiations America and Iran will pursue in 2014.
The Dish 