Middle East & Africa | The final countdown

A new crisis between America and Iran looms

Talks to restore a nuclear deal are going badly. The alternatives are grim

|WASHINGTON, DC

A FORMER FRENCH president, Nicolas Sarkozy, summed it up best: tough nuclear diplomacy with Iran, he said in 2007, was the best way to avoid the catastrophic choice between “an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran”. To escape this dilemma President Joe Biden has been trying to revive the nuclear agreement with Iran that Barack Obama negotiated in 2015 and Donald Trump tore up three years later.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “The final countdown”

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