Now that Barack Obama has sealed his nuclear deal with Iran, he faces two major — and contradictory — goals in the Middle East.

One is to use U.S. power to reassure allies and signal to Iran that a nuclear deal doesn’t equal a free pass for troublemaking. The other is to test opportunities for further cooperation with a country where chants of “Death to America!” are still common.


How he proceeds will be determined in part by an internal debate split between what insiders describe as Iran optimists and Iran skeptics within Obama’s team. The optimists, led by Secretary of State John Kerry and Obama himself, believe the nuclear deal can be the first step to a healthier relationship with Iran that begins to stabilize the anarchic region. The skeptics, dominated by senior military, intelligence and counter-terrorism officials, deeply distrust Iran and imagine knives hidden behind the back of Iran’s smiling diplomats.

To some degree, a tougher line on Iran in some areas — like interdicting Iranian vessels carrying arms to its proxies — is the price Obama will have to pay for seeking a better relationship with Tehran, if he is to prevent allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia from growing even more angry about his historic diplomacy.

Managing the balance between open hand and fist will be a defining challenge in the final 18 months of Obama’s presidency, say sources familiar with U.S. policymaking in the region.

“There’s a real potential benefit when American and Iranian diplomats have been talking so much and so intensively over the last 20 months,” says Matthew Spence, who until recently served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy. “We can try to leverage those diplomatic contacts to see if there are any possibilities that would arise from common interests in the region.”

“At the same time, the U.S. needs to signal that it’s not naive about Iran’s intentions and behavior in the region beyond the nuclear issue,” Spence added.

The duality was in evidence in the hours after the nuclear deal’s announcement, as Obama sent twin signals about the future of America’s relationship with Iran.

During his remarks on Tuesday morning, Obama raised the possibility of new beginnings with a foe of more than 35 years.

“Time and again, I have made clear to the Iranian people that we will always be open to engagement on the basis of mutual interests and mutual respect,” Obama said. “Our differences are real, and the difficult history between our nations cannot be ignored. But it is possible to change.”

“This deal offers an opportunity to move in a new direction,” Obama added. “We should seize it.”

At the same time, the administration sent a flurry of signals designed to assuage widespread fears in Israel and Saudi Arabia about a possible U.S. partnership with a Shiite regime that both countries consider a mortal enemy.

The Pentagon announced Tuesday that Defense Secretary Ash Carter will travel next week to Israel, for what a White House statement called “close consultation on security issues with Israeli counterparts as we remain vigilant in countering the Iranian regime’s destabilizing activities in the region.” Those activities include support for Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and the Houthi rebels of Yemen.

Obama also called top Sunni Arab monarchs, including the king of Saudi Arabia and the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, reassuring them that the U.S. is committed to their security.

When asked on Tuesday whether Obama might visit Iran before leaving office, a senior administration official quickly dismissed the idea. “Even as this deal holds out the prospects of the possibility for Iran to take a different path, we continue to have very serious differences with Iran with respect to its support for terrorism, its threat towards Israel and its neighbors, its support for various proxies across the region that are destabilizing,” the official said.

“So, no, we are not considering travel,” he added.

That sentiment will be appreciated by military officials who hold Iran responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Iraq during the past decade, and who plan constantly for the possibility of future conflict with the highly anti-American Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

But Obama administration officials are keenly aware of Iran’s potential, at least in theory, for helping to solve a slew of devilish problems in a region Obama sees as a strategic sand trap at a time when China and its neighbors demand more U.S. attention.

Many administration officials are mindful of recent history in Afghanistan, sources said, where Iranian offers to help stabilize the country in 2001 and 2002 were spurned by the administration of George W. Bush.

James Dobbins, who helped to stand up Afghanistan’s post-Taliban government in 2002 and served as Obama’s special representative to the country in 2013 and 2014, said the two countries could cooperate in at least five countries across the Muslim world.

Foremost among them is Afghanistan, where neighboring Iran has an interest in stability and opposes the Sunni fundamentalist Taliban. Dobbins said the U.S. “has been quietly cooperating for years” in the country, and that Iran could help to stabilize the shaky government in Kabul. He said the U.S. and Iran could work together in Iraq, where they share a common enemy in the Islamic State.

Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif appeared to refer to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, in a July 3 video message that described a “common threat” shared by Iran and the U.S. “embodied by the hooded men who are ravaging the cradle of civilization.”

“To deal with this new challenge, new approaches are badly needed,” Zarif said.

Dobbins said that collaboration “is absolutely essential” to ending the savage civil war in Syria, which has claimed more than 200,000 lives — though it will be difficult to achieve given that Iran strongly supports Assad, whom Obama insists must step down.

And in just one sign of the complex calculus at work, the nuclear deal itself could make some problems harder to resolve. Shortly after the accord was announced, Assad publicly congratulated Iran’s supreme leader and expressed confidence that Iran can now support “with greater drive” what he called “just causes of nations” — presumably including his own embattled regime.

With his Syria strategy faltering — a once-heralded program to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels has graduated just 60 of them — a key decision for Obama will be how much to keep challenging Iran’s client in Damascus.

“The core debate is, will it be engagement first with some push back — or push back with some engagement?” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama Pentagon and State Department official who recently authored a paper on America’s post-deal strategy for the Center for a New American Security.

Goldenberg argued that the U.S. should step up the pressure in Syria, as part of a larger strategy to “send our partners a signal that we’re not pivoting strategically to Iran.”

Spence cautioned that any results from possible cooperation would not come overnight.

“Dealing with the nuclear issue alone has been hard enough,” he said.