…I led the team of American diplomats representing the United States.  During the talks, my Iranian counterparts would occasionally ask how they could be assured that any deal we struck would be durable…I would answer by asking them a similar question: “What if hard-liners opposed to the deal regained power in Iran?”  It usually ended the discussion, as I thought it should: after all, I always expected that the greatest challenge to the deal’s success would be violations by Iran, not the political machinations of the president [sic] of the United States.

How We Got the Iran Deal And Why We’ll Miss It, Wendy R. Sherman, essay adapted from Not for the Faint of Heart: Lessons in Courage, Power and Persistence (PublicAffairs, 2018). Copyright 2018 by Wendy R. Sherman. Reprinted by permission of PublicAffairs.

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