“I could draw you a scenario in which this new combination of players leads to the first real talks with Iran in three decades,” one of the key players on the issue for President Obama said last week, declining to speak on the record because the new administration has not even named its team, much less its strategy. “And I could draw you one in which the first big foreign crisis of the Obama presidency is a really nasty confrontation, either because the Israelis strike or because we won’t let them.”In public, Mr. Obama is talking only about the first scenario. On Monday evening, he talked about “looking for areas where we can have constructive dialogue, where we can engage directly with them,” and said he was looking for “diplomatic overtures.” But he cautioned that “there’s been a lot of mistrust built up over the years,” and that after thirty years of a deep freeze, openings are “not going to happen overnight.”
