The measured presence of Joe Biden in the White House, vacated gracelessly by the geopolitical arsonist Donald Trump, may be having a mildly calming effect on the Middle East, the most reliably combustible region in the world and perennial provider of what the US has come to think of as “forever wars”.
A US delegation, headed by Robert Malley, the special envoy for Iran, is trying to resurrect the 2015 nuclear accord that Iran signed with Barack Obama’s administration and five other world powers, but from which Trump unilaterally withdrew in 2018. Indirect talks in Vienna — where other signatories to the accord shuttle between Americans and Iranians — have sparked hope of at least an interim deal.
Meanwhile, as the Financial Times revealed last weekend, Iran and Saudi Arabia, arch-rivals for hegemony in the Gulf and the region, have been holding talks in Baghdad to try to patch up what is also a Sunni-Shia schism poisoning the Muslim world. These talks may be exploratory. But they reach across a sectarian divide between rival theocracies that lie on opposite sides of a chain of ruinous proxy wars: the Wahhabi fundamentalist Sunni kingdom of the Saudis, and the Shia supremacist Islamic Republic of Iran.
Taken together, this dancing with detente by the US, Saudi Arabia and Iran would be almost balletic — except it is not clear there is a master choreographer.
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