Nuclear talks fail; hot summer ahead. What’s missing is courage.

Even the New York Times is now reporting that what we’ve got with Iran is a “drift toward war.” The nuclear talks in Moscow ended yesterday, the NYT wrote, with “little visible progress toward a compromise that would stop the drift toward war.” The “little visible progress” was an agreement to at least give the appearance of keeping the talks alive by scheduling a much more limited, lower-level exchange between the Iranians and the world powers on July 3 in Istanbul. If you like the current Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, you’ll love the current Iran nuclear negotiations.

“Drift toward war” refers to a couple of possibilities – either that Israel will attack Iran and things will deteriorate from there, or the severe U.S./European oil and banking sanctions going into effect by July 1 will lead Iran to take countermeasures, and things will deteriorate from there. Here is Time.com’s incisive Tony Karon to explain:

Iranian escalation [in response to coming sanctions] could take the form of saber rattling over the Strait of Hormuz to send oil prices soaring, or moving to install the full centrifuge capacity at Fordow, knowing this is an Israeli redline. Tehran doesn’t appear to take the threat of Israeli military action that seriously, but if they were feeling especially reckless, the Iranians might even push up against Washington’s redlines by moving to enrich uranium at levels equivalent to bomb grade, either on the grounds that such material is used in some medical applications or, as one Iranian military official suggested last week, to power a new generation of submarines.

Between the sanctions, the Iranian response, Republican war-mongering in an election season, the Obama response to that, and the itchy trigger fingers in Jerusalem, this summer promises to be a hot one. Netanyahu may wait and see if Iran’s response to the sanctions causes Obama to send in the fleet and get things rolling, but if that doesn’t happen, I don’t think Bibi will take the chance of Obama getting re-elected on Nov. 2 and staying his hand against Iran; the freedom he enjoys in the months before a presidential election, especially with the GOP completely on his side, is something he’s not prepared to let pass, certainly not when he believes – and he does – that Israel’s survival is at stake.

There is a way to stop the drift toward war, and that’s for Obama and the Europeans to stop drifting – to stop this brinkmanship that they’ve backed themselves into, forget the sanctions and let Iran build nukes if it wants to – because if deterrence worked against Stalin, Mao and everyone else, it’ll work against Khameini, too. The other thing Obama and the Europeans have to do is tell Netanyahu that if he bombs Iran, they will break off relations with Israel. Then there would be no more drift and no more war.

But of course that’s not going to happen. Obama and the Europeans are too afraid that if they turn away from an insane war, they will look like cowards. And that’s the most dangerous form of cowardice known to man.