By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Iran’s Roads Not Taken

The 12-day war in June, which saw the United States join Israel in bombing Iran, was the culmination of four decades of mistrust, antipathy, and confrontation. Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic has not wavered in its anti-Americanism, and the United States has unfailingly responded by exerting greater pressure on Iran. The two have come close to outright conflict before. In 1987 and 1988, the United States destroyed offshore oil platforms and Iranian naval vessels and then mistakenly shot down an Iranian passenger plane. Iran interpreted those acts as the opening salvos of an undeclared war. Washington’s attention, however, soon turned to Iraq and the Gulf War. But the hostility between Iran and the United States persisted and has only become more pronounced in the decades that have followed the 9/11 attacks. The 2020 killing of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, after a spate of Iranian provocations in the region, brought the two countries to the precipice. U.S. President Donald Trump pushed hostilities over the edge this year when the United States struck three Iranian nuclear sites with dozens of cruise missiles and 30,000-pound bombs.

Tehran and Washington seem to be implacable foes. The revolutionary regime in Iran has long cast the United States as its archenemy, the Great Satan that undermined the country’s independence by backing a military coup in 1953 and the authoritarian excesses of the monarchy that followed. In 1979, the revolution’s leaders worried that the United States would continue to interfere in Iran and stymie the great transformation underway. To prevent that outcome, the Islamic Republic decided that the United States should be extricated not just from Iran but from the broader Middle East. These assumptions set Tehran’s foreign policy on a collision course with Washington. Iran has supported states and militant groups around the region to threaten the United States and its Israeli and Arab allies. In turn, the United States has pursued a strategy of containment and pressure that has included U.S.-led regional alliances, U.S. military bases, and a tight noose of sanctions suffocating Iran’s econ­omy. Finally, this year, that strategy widened to include overt American strikes on Iranian territory.

Many observers perceive this history as a single, unbroken thread of conflict and hostility stretching from 1979 to the present. And yet today’s hostility was not inevitable. More peaceful paths were possible, and indeed, with the right decisions in Tehran and Washington, Iran and the United States could still find ways to lower tensions and even normalize their relations. On several occasions in the twenty-first century alone, Iran and the United States had the opportunity to climb down from their mutual hostility. At each juncture, however, American or Iranian policymakers chose to foreclose those possible openings. But that history of missed chances does not condemn the two countries to a future of ever-deeper conflict. Instead, it offers a reminder that even today, Iran and the United States may yet be able to reconcile.

The 12-day war has demonstrably weakened Iran. Tehran’s strategy is no longer sustainable in the wake of the battering that it has suffered. In this moment, Washington could continue boxing Iran into a corner and allow Israel to occasionally “mow the grass,” striking Iranian nuclear and military targets to keep punishing the country and block any progress toward building a bomb. Or it could see the aftermath of the 12-day war as an opportunity to engage in that fitful American pastime when it comes to Iran: diplomacy. Now, Washington has the chance to set its relations with Tehran on a different path, to pursue fresh bargains that could change both Iran’s foreign and nuclear policies and the balance of power within Iran’s ruling establishment. The U.S. and Iranian governments have failed to take those turns before, but even now, policymakers should not be fatalistic. The past, no matter how freighted with lost opportunities, need not be prologue.

 

A False Dawn in Afghanistan

For at least a little while after 9/11, it seemed possible that relations between Iran and the United States could improve. Both Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mohammad Khatami condemned the terrorist attacks, and Iranians held candlelit vigils in the streets of major cities and observed moments of silence in soccer stadiums. The strategic interests of Iran and the United States were suddenly aligned. Reeling from the assault, the United States maintained as its most urgent priority the elimination of al-Qaeda. Iran’s Shiite clerical regime viewed the Sunni radicalism of al-Qaeda and its hosts, the Taliban, with deep concern. Only three years earlier, in 1998, the Taliban had killed up to 11 Iranian diplomats and journalists in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, an atrocity that spurred Iran to mobilize troops on its border with Afghanistan. After years of antagonism, Iranian and U.S. officials found that they had some goals in common.

Iran had long backed the Taliban’s principal foes, the Northern Alliance. Only days before the attacks, al-Qaeda operatives posing as journalists killed Ahmad Shah Masoud, the Northern Alliance’s legendary leader, an assassination that signaled an imminent Taliban offensive to wipe out the Northern Alliance once and for all and consolidate control of Afghanistan. Shiite Iran feared the regional ascendance of Sunni radicalism in the form of the puritanical Taliban, an ambitious al-Qaeda, and other militant factions, as well as further instability on its eastern border—Iran was then, and remains now, home to many Afghan refugees. Some estimates in recent years have placed the figure as high as eight million, roughly ten percent of the population.

Through forms of cooperation that seem incredible today, Iran abetted the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps offered intelligence assistance to the United States and provided logistical support, facilitating battlefield coordination with Northern Alliance forces. U.S. diplomats Ryan Crocker and Zalmay Khalilzad attended meetings with Iranian counterparts and top IRGC officers, including senior commanders, possibly even Soleimani. Just over two months after the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban had been chased out of Kabul and other major cities. The Taliban’s so-called emirate in Afghanistan was no more.

Iran had a vested interest in shaping the government that would replace the Taliban. It worked closely with the United States at the Bonn conference in December 2001, which decided the future of Afghanistan. The two countries shared the same goals of crafting a new political order in Afghanistan that would unite and stabilize it through an inclusive de­moc­ratic government. James Dobbins, who led the U.S. efforts at the conference, later credited his Iranian counterpart, the diplomat Javad Zarif, for building the consensus among all Afghan factions over forging a new constitution and holding de­moc­ratic elections to form a new government in Kabul. And Zarif in turn credited Soleimani, the Revolutionary Guards commander, for securing compromises from the Northern Alliance to facilitate agreement in Bonn.

In retrospect, this rare collaboration was an opportunity to improve relations between Iran and the United States. Working together in could have served as a significant confidence-building measure, as well as the impetus for the de-escalation of tensions and then potentially even the gradual normalization of relations. Success in Afghanistan could have placed the relationship on a different course.

That did not come to pass. In January 2002, almost immediately after the Bonn conference, Israel intercepted an Iranian arms shipment to Hamas. For Iran, cooperation with the United States in Afghanistan did not constitute a reorientation of Iranian strategy that would apply to all aspects of Iran’s regional policy. What happened in Afghanistan was just a tentative opening that had yet to fully bear fruit; Tehran would not so quickly reverse its Middle East policy, and it would still build up its proxies. U.S. President George W. Bush signaled outrage and alarm. He then decided against using the opening in Afghanistan to embrace Iran and gently push for change in its regional policy. Instead, he cast Iran as an implacable enemy and dispensed with the goodwill generated by developments in Afghanistan. In his State of the Union address in January 2002, Bush famously included Iran among the members of the “axis of evil.”

Fresh from what seemed a swift and sure victory in Afghanistan, a buoyant Washington devoted its energies to the prosecution of the so-called war on terror. And in that war, Iran could only be a target, not an ally; its cooperation in Afghanistan no longer counted for much. After all, as many U.S. officials believed, Islamist ideology became a global phenomenon because of the success of Iran’s revolution in 1979 (never mind that the Iranian regime’s resolute Shiism separated it from the Sunni militancy of groups such as al-Qaeda). Islamism, according to this view, would not be defeated until the Islamic Republic had been toppled. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, many Iranians feared that it was only a matter of time before American forces came for them. In the words of Hassan Kazemi Qomi, Iran’s first ambassador to Baghdad following the U.S. invasion and the fall of Iraq’s ruler Saddam Hussein, “After Iraq was Iran’s turn.” So Iran tried to placate the United States. In May 2003, Khatami, the country’s reformist president, sent Washington a proposal for talks and a road map to resolve “all outstanding issues between the two countries,” including, notably, Iran’s nascent nuclear program and its broader policy in the Middle East. The White House did not even acknowledge receiving the offer.

People protesting the U.S attack on Iranian nuclear sites in Tehran, June 2025 

The rebuff led the Islamic Republic to harden its positions and prepare itself for conflict. In stark contrast to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. invasion of Iraq produced no opening with Iran, but rather placed the two countries at odds. With good reason, given the number of Bush administration officials who viewed Tehran as a grave threat, Iran believed it had to protect itself. In the chaos that followed the fall of Saddam, Iran possibly partnered with Syria to deepen the quagmire that the United States now faced in Iraq. The Sunni insurgency, supported by Syria, and the Shiite militias, supported by Iran, battled U.S. forces. As violence consumed Iraq, the American project there was doomed to failure.

Iranian leaders thus averted what they feared most: a triumphant U.S. military in Iraq continuing its campaign east into Iran. But American views of Iran only grew darker. Iran, for its part, concluded that it could best manage the American threat by bogging down U.S. resources in various theaters around the Middle East. Exhausted by protracted conflict, the United States would grow weary of the region and not seek war with Iran. Washington’s decision to pull forces out of Iraq in 2011 seemed to vindicate this line of Iranian thinking. The more U.S. officials talked of leaving the region, the more Iran saw wisdom in its strategy.

This strategy also had the effect of transforming the balance of power within Iran. The security forces at the forefront of the fight against Washington gained control of Iran’s foreign policy. In the crucible of Iraq, the Quds Force, the expeditionary division of the IRGC that oversees unconventional military and intelligence operations, grew from one of its smallest units into an expansive regional force that would dominate Iran’s foreign policy decision-making. The Quds Force commanders, Soleimani and his deputy Esmail Qaani, had worked with U.S. counterparts in Afghanistan in 2001. During the Iraq war, they would turn the force into a military network to battle the United States across the Middle East.

 

Breakout or Breakthrough?

The false dawn in relations with the United States after the 9/11 attacks convinced Iranian leaders that Washington would never be willing to accommodate revolutionary Iran. Tehran understood U.S. policies, including the building of military bases in Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, and Central Asia, and the strengthening of sanctions on the Iranian econ­omy, as all aimed at engineering regime change in Tehran. In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war, Iran’s rulers surmised that they had to resist and deter the United States through enacting aggressive regional policies, building a nuclear program, and strengthening Iran’s drone and missile capabilities. The country’s economy, state institutions, and politics had to be organized in the service of that resistance.

Another revelation had further poisoned the well: Iran’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons. Its nuclear program had come to light as the United States was preparing for the Iraq war. At the time, after the inclusion of Iran in the “axis of evil,” U.S.-Iranian relations were already on a downward slope. The discovery of a clandestine nuclear program only increased the prospect of conflict. Iran assumed that the United States would make this nuclear program a casus belli, as it had in its justification of the invasion of Iraq. Washington, for its part, did not want a member of the “axis of evil” to acquire nuclear capabilities. But by the end of the Bush administration in 2009, U.S. officials had grown disinterested in military solutions to their Iran problem as the United States continued to founder in Iraq. Diplomacy, not war, would have to contain Iranian nuclear ambitions. And so opened another opportunity for Iran and the United States to edge away from conflict toward a more peaceful relationship.

The United States could have taken this path sooner. In 2003, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom negotiated a deal with Iran that would have halted the growth of its still small nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. The Bush administration forced the deal to collapse in 2004, insisting that Iran give up the entirety of its nuclear program and offering no concessions in return.

In hindsight, the veto proved a mistake. Unconstrained, Iran’s nuclear program continued to expand as the anti-American bombast and Holocaust denial of the new Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made diplomacy much more difficult. Tehran also grew further convinced that Washington was not interested in meaningful diplomatic engagement, even on the nuclear issue. Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in 2003, Hassan Rouhani, would try his hand at nuclear diplomacy when he became president in 2013, after he succeeded Ahmadinejad. But in 2004, he and other Iranian leaders concluded that the United States had so swiftly dismissed the European-negotiated deal because Iran’s program was too small to be worthy of American diplomacy and concessions. Iran would need a much bigger program to compel the United States to the negotiating table. That presumption undergirded Iranian activities during the Obama, first Trump, and Biden administrations. And at each turn, failure to forge a lasting nuclear deal would only encourage Iran to expand its program even more.

Had Washington supported the European effort, Iran’s nuclear program would likely have remained small, and the deal itself might have had transformative consequences. It could have led Tehran to fear Washington less, and as a result, Iran would then have behaved differently in Iraq and not so readily courted American enmity. Instead, the U.S. veto further convinced Tehran that its reading of American intentions was correct. Washington would be impressed only by might. To deter the United States, Iran had to both build a larger nuclear program and widen its asymmetric warfare in Iraq and beyond.

Iran was right to assume that a larger nuclear program would change Washington’s calculations. By 2011, Iran’s program had grown significantly, and although estimates vary, it was still not close to the breakout stage. That failed to reassure Israel. Spooked by the pace of Iran’s progress, Israel threatened to attack Iran to prevent it from getting any closer to a bomb. But the last thing the Obama administration wanted was entanglement in another Middle Eastern war. It was determined that the only way to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power was through diplomacy.

President Barack Obama paved the way for negotiations by first increasing economic sanctions on Iran in 2010 but then adopting a different tone, making it clear to Tehran that Washington was not seeking regime change. Obama understood that sweeping ultimatums and coercion would not get Iran to dispense with its nuclear program. The United States thus agreed to negotiate limits on Iran’s program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Khamenei at a mourning ceremony after Iran's war with Israel, in Tehran, July 2025

For their part, Iran’s rulers were conflicted about Obama’s offer. The IRGC and its political allies were skeptical that the Obama administration would differ much from its predecessor. They thought diplomacy would not yield meaningful results but would signal weakness and divert attention from the threat that the United States posed to Iran. But a moderate faction, led by Rouhani, who became president in 2013, argued that successful diplomacy with the United States would lower tensions, ease pressure on Iran’s econ­omy, and reset relations between the two countries. This faction hoped that diplomacy would yield the positive outcomes that had eluded Iran in its prior attempts at rapprochement with the United States: its cooperation in Afghanistan in 2001, its offer of talks in 2003, and the nuclear deal signed with Europe in 2003 but scotched after Washington refused to go along with it.

Two years of intense talks followed among Iran, China, Russia, the United States, and the three European powers that had negotiated the prior deal. They culminated in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. In exchange for sanctions relief, the JCPOA placed strict limits on the scope of Iran’s nuclear activities for at least a dec­ade and subjected those activities to stringent international inspections. There has been much debate since on whether the deal effectively curbed Iran’s nuclear ambitions and whether the United States could have made sterner demands on Iran at the negotiating table—a doubt echoed in Tehran by the deal’s detractors there who believed that Iran had given too much away in exchange for too little. But the deal did roll back Iran’s program, and in 11 separate reports, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, attested to Iran’s compliance with the terms of the JCPOA. The JCPOA was significant in another important way: it represented a breakthrough in U.S.-Iranian relations. After decades of hostility, the United States and Iran had finally concluded a deal and, at least as far as Iran was concerned, successfully implemented it.

The JCPOA was a major accomplishment in trust building. Had it lasted, the deal could have served as the basis for subsequent agreements on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and its regional policies. The relaxation of sanctions on the Iranian economy could have changed political dynamics within Tehran by strengthening the hand of moderate factions reliant on middle-class votes and weakening the influence of conservatives and hard-liners in foreign policy decisions. In time, relations between Iran and the United States could have moved toward greater normalization.

And yet the deal did not deliver the widening thaw that some of its proponents hoped for. Agreeing to the JCPOA did not immediately change Iran’s broader strategy. The IRGC and its political allies in the parliament and in powerful parastatal economic and political institutions thought that despite the diplomatic breakthrough, there was no evidence of fundamental change in U.S.-Iranian relations. The United States still posed an urgent threat and had made no effort to change that perception. Hard-liners in Tehran pointed to the furious domestic opposition to the JCPOA in the United States as proof that U.S. policy toward Iran would remain unchanged. In the months following the signing of the deal, Washington dragged its feet in lifting sanctions on Tehran, and that steadily soured the mood in Iran. Iranian hard-liners argued that it had all been a ruse to strip Iran of its nuclear assets, making it vulnerable to U.S.-backed regime change. Iran should therefore continue with those regional policies—such as its commitment to supporting the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, the Houthi rebellion in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and various militias in Iraq—that since 2003 had been indispensable in deterring American aggression.

The convulsions of the Arab Spring further complicated Iran’s calculus. Tehran saw the popular unrest that swept across the Arab world as a new opportunity to expand its regional footprint. That opportunity came with new dangers. The fall of Assad in Syria, an Iranian ally, would have been a significant strategic loss. It would have isolated and weakened Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah. A resurgent Sunni government in Syria backed by Western powers and other Arab powers could have rolled back Iran’s gains in Iraq, too. Iran sensed that the United States was trying to hack off the tentacles of the octopus—before chopping off its head in Tehran. Iran’s rulers, particularly the IRGC and its political allies, concluded that the real aim of American efforts to topple Assad was the end of the Islamic Republic. The IRGC would resist that outcome at all costs. As its commander in charge in Syria put it, “What we lose in losing Syria exceeds what we have at stake in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.” Iran thus forcefully intervened in Syria to save Assad starting in 2011, and in the same year also threw its full support behind Houthi forces in Yemen that had gained the upper hand in civil war there.

Tehran, in effect, chose a precarious balancing act: it shrank its nuclear program but protected and expanded its regional footprint in confrontation with the United States and its Arab allies, notably Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Those allies saw little benefit in the nuclear deal but had much to fear from Iran’s regional power play. They wanted the United States to focus on containing Iran’s regional influence rather than just the country’s nuclear program. They joined hands with Israel, which also opposed U.S. diplomacy with Iran, to lobby against the JCPOA in Washington almost as soon as the deal was signed in 2015. These efforts were rewarded when Trump formally removed the United States from the JCPOA in 2018.

Iran’s foreign policy between 2014 and 2018 was deeply conflicted. In the words of Zarif, the foreign minister during that period, Iran was paralyzed by a struggle between diplomacy and the battlefield—the latter being his euphemism for the IRGC and its regional strategy—and it suffered for “favoring the battlefield over diplomacy.” For its part, U.S. policy fixated on the actions of the Revolutionary Guards rather than on what nuclear diplomacy had just achieved. Washington did not consider the possibility of using success at the negotiating table as the basis for influencing Tehran’s regional posture. It succumbed to the idea that the JCPOA was insufficient because it had not encompassed Iran’s regional policies. Rather than abandon diplomacy to punish Iran for its regional behavior, the United States could have held on to its diplomatic gains even as it pushed back against Iran’s regional policies. In other words, it could have stayed in the JCP.

 

A Fateful Withdrawal

The disintegration of the JCPOA drastically escalated tensions between Tehran and Washington. After scrapping the deal, Trump imposed intense sanctions on Iran as part of a campaign of “maximum pressure.” The stated aim of that campaign was to force Iran back to the negotiating table. But Iran perceived Trump’s ploy as nothing short of a bid to bring about regime change by strangling the country’s econ­omy and degrading its state institutions to encourage popular rebellion. Iran responded by vigorously resuming nuclear activity, enriching uranium beyond levels allowed by the JCPOA. It also took more aggressive actions across the Middle East in 2019, starting with an attack on oil tankers in the waters of the United Arab Emirates in May, then the downing of a U.S. drone in June, and then an attack on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia in September. This escalation of violence spurred a seismic event: Trump ordered the killing of Soleimani, the Quds Force commander, in January 2020, while the general was in Iraq. His death outraged Iranians. The Islamic Republic retaliated by striking a military base in Iraq that housed American troops. Iran and the United States then stood on the brink of war. In under five years, the hope of a new opening in relations had given way to open conflict.

The election of Joe Biden as president in 2020 and the return of a Dem­o­cratic administration in 2021 could have halted the spiraling tensions. During the campaign, Dem­ocratic candidates, including Biden, had signaled their willingness to revive the JCPOA. Once in office, however, Biden demurred. Rather than revert to the Obama-era policy, he embraced Trump’s position of maximum pressure. The administration insisted that Iran had to first fulfill all its obligations under the JCPOA, and only then would the United States consider returning to the deal. In the meantime, maximum pressure sanctions would remain in place. The early months of the Biden administration coincided with the tail end of Rouhani’s presidency. Rouhani and his team had been architects of the JCPOA and wanted to see it restored. But they did not find a willing partner in Biden. What Tehran saw was continuity; Biden, like his predecessor, wanted regime change in Iran.

The United States did agree to talks with Iran in Vienna in April 2021. But by then, Iran had concluded that there would be no real change in U.S. policy. Iranian leaders announced that the country would start enriching uranium to 60 percent purity. The escalation was alarming because it would bring Iran much closer to breakout. In the face of this threat, the Biden administration changed course to put greater emphasis on talks with Iran, discussing concrete steps that would bring the United States back into the JCPOA and remove sanctions on Iran in exchange for its full compliance with its obligations under the deal. By then, however, the Rouhani presidency was at its end. He was soon to be replaced by a hard-line opponent of the JCPOA, Ebrahim Raisi.

It was in this context that Iran decided to back Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022. Iran had developed close intelligence and military ties with Russia during the Syrian civil war (Russia also took the side of Assad), but it now saw its strategic partnership with Moscow as vital to surviving determined American efforts to isolate and crush the Islamic Republic. This support for Russia, in turn, alienated Europe and gave Washington even more reason to pressure Tehran. U.S.-Iranian relations thus became entangled with the United States’ and Europe’s clash with an expansionist Russia. Had the Biden administration concluded a deal with Iran before Russia attacked Ukraine, Tehran would have seen too much at stake in its relations with Europe to contemplate helping Russia in Ukraine. But since Biden was not willing to break with Trump’s policy to restore the deal agreed to by Obama, Iran decided it needed to strengthen its ties with Russia, and that in turn made the job of diplomacy all the more difficult. Both Iran and the United States trusted the other even less than before, and Washington had to contend with a more intractable Tehran. Indirect talks between Iran, the United States, and other JCPOA signatories could not produce a breakthrough. The Biden administration would not guarantee that a deal would last, since any agreement could be undone after a change of government, and the hard-liners at the helm in Tehran were unwilling to risk another U.S. withdrawal from a negotiated deal.

 

From the Rubble

In the subsequent years, Iran’s regional position has unraveled significantly. After the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023, Israel has systematically pummeled Iranian proxies in the region, doing serious damage to Hamas in Gaza and defanging Hezbollah in Lebanon. The collapse of Assad’s regime, in December 2024, left Iran without one of its most useful regional allies and raised the prospect of the emergence of an anti-Iranian, Sunni-led Syria. In 2024 and 2025, Israeli forces struck deep into Iranian territory, exposing huge intelligence vulnerabilities in Iran’s security establishment as well as the Islamic Republic’s relative inability to hurt Israel with its arsenal of missiles and drones. And yet even after the devastation unleashed on Iran’s nuclear sites by Trump, much remains unknown about the state of the Iranian nuclear program and the possibility that Iranian leaders, bludgeoned into a corner, could still scramble to develop a bomb.

If Trump does not want Iran to follow the example of North Korea and become a nuclear state—and does not want to continue to go to war with Iran to prevent that outcome—then his administration must look for a diplomatic solution. Iran, likewise, does not want war with the United States, and it cannot quickly or easily build an arsenal of nuclear weapons to deter Israeli and U.S. attacks. Tehran has little choice but to take diplomacy seriously. Iran and the United States have been at similar junctures before, picking between confrontation and compromise. The two countries should embrace diplomacy not only to conclude an urgent deal on Iran’s nuclear capabilities but also to build trust and chart a new course for their relations. Nuclear diplomacy should be just the beginning—the floor, not the ceiling, of the relationship.

The Trump administration believes that the 12-day war has inflicted enough punishment on Iran to force true soul-searching among Iranian leaders. But if Tehran is to arrive at the right conclusions—and feel able to relinquish its nuclear ambitions and its aggressive regional policy—then it must see diplomacy as a credible path to realizing gains that have thus far eluded it. As unlikely as it may seem, Trump’s bombing campaign could lead to a breakthrough, but only if both countries can put their history of missteps behind them and approach diplomacy with vision and patience.

 

 

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