by Patrick Appel
Rogin and Lake see it as a possibility:
Nobody knows if and how Russia will follow through on its threats to sacrifice the Iran talks to try rob Obama of the main diplomatic accomplishment of his second term as president. Russia could pull out of the so-called “P5+1” group—the world powers currently negotiating with Iran. Or Moscow could stop cooperating on international sanctions on Iran, easing pressure on Tehran and helping Russian businesses.
Roger Cohen casts doubt on the idea that Russia would cease working on the Iranian nuclear deal, noting that “Russia has its own interest in stopping nuclear proliferation, and even the Cold War did not preclude cooperation in some areas.” Larison isn’t so sure:
Moscow has been much less alarmed by Iran’s nuclear program than Western governments are. Russia may not want Iran to have nuclear weapons, but it seems much less worried that Iran is likely to acquire them. The other argument is that Russia doesn’t want to sabotage diplomacy with Iran because that would make U.S. military action more likely, but it’s not so obvious that it would greatly harm Russian interests if the U.S. and Iran couldn’t resolve the nuclear issue peacefully. Russia benefits in some ways from ongoing U.S.-Iranian hostility, and it is not harmed if the U.S. ends up waging yet another war in the Near East.
Walter Russell Mead makes related points:
[I]f Russia did manage to stop the talks dead, the result wouldn’t automatically be an Iranian bomb. The first result would be to put Obama into the horrible, no-win situation he has spent his whole presidency working hard to avoid: where his only two choices are military action against Iran and accepting an Iranian nuclear weapon. If (as the White House has continually insisted that he would) he goes for force, the United States gets involved in another Middle Eastern war, and Russia enjoys a huge financial windfall as oil prices skyrocket and a propaganda windfall as the United States (without a UN mandate, which Russia would take care to block) takes on yet another preventative war in a Middle Eastern country.
Or, alternatively, the United States endures its most humiliating and devastating foreign policy defeat in decades, leaving its prestige in tatters and its global alliance system fundamentally weakened as yet another of President Obama’s red lines, this one much brighter and deeper than the one in Syria, gets crossed—with impunity.
The Dish 