Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

Reasons for Optimism in Iran

While Iran is perilously close to crossing the nuclear threshold, the interim agreement could make the world a provisionally safer place.Â

December 5, 2013 at 11:31 PM UTC

By Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

Here, as promised, are my reasons to feel positive about the (still unimplemented) interim nuclear deal between the Great Powers and Iran:

Just kidding. Sort of. While I believe that Iran has so far generally outsmarted, and outplayed, the West (and I include Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel as one of those countries that has been outplayed), and while I think that Iran is perilously close to crossing the nuclear threshold, I also think that the interim agreement could make the world a provisionally safer place. To do so, it will have to serve as a path to a final agreement that includes dismantling key elements of the nuclear program, a rollback that would put the country years -- rather than weeks or months -- away from producing the bomb, should its leaders decide that they definitively want one.