Deal, deal, deal with Iran

WASHINGTON - The assumption that the United States should exploit its military dominance to exert pressure on adversaries has long dominated the thinking of the US national security and political elite. But this central tenet of conventional security doctrine was sharply rejected last week by a senior practitioner of crisis diplomacy at the debut of a major new centrist foreign policy think-tank.

At the first conference of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), ambassador James Dobbins, who was former president Bill Clinton special envoy for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo and the George W Bush administration's first special envoy to Afghanistan, sharply rejected the well-established concept of coercive diplomacy.