"The Iranian nuclear program is not really what opponents and proponents of the recent deal are arguing about," Jeremy Shapiro, of Brookings, wrote nearly a year ago, and it's still true. It's never been about nukes or boats or prisoners but rather whether America should deal with Iran at all. Is this, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher's famous quote about Mikhail Gorbachev, a country that we can do business with? And that question itself hits on divisions in US foreign policy that go way beyond this one county and are much older than this one issue.
Iran has become the subject of America's most heated and divisive foreign policy debate in perhaps a decade. But the vitriol is driven not just by competing readings of Iran, or even by partisanship, but by a confluence of deep and long-running disagreements over fundamental questions of America's place in the world.
'via Blog this'