Diplomacytoday view on the Iran nuclear deal: a triumph of diplomacy

The deal with Iran over its nuclear programme finalised in Vienna today is a victory for patient diplomacy. For the past 13 years, the standoff between Iran and the US, backed by its European allies, has threatened to escalate into war. In his 2002 state of the union address George W Bush lumped Iran in with North Korea and Iraq as part of the “axis of evil”, and he later heightened tensions further by increasing naval deployments to the Gulf. For more than a decade, Israel, with its own undeclared nuclear arsenal, has regularly warned that it was prepared to mount a pre-emptive air attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.