Iran and the six world powers seeking to negotiate with it took a step back from confrontation Saturday when they reopened talks after an almost-year-and-a-half break. The discussions in Istanbul went well, both sides said, as they focused on the disputed Iranian nuclear program. The two sides agreed to meet again—in Baghdad on May 23.

This may be a sign that the U.S.-led sanctions designed to reduce Iran’s oil exports, the lifeblood of its economy, are having the desired effect of pushing Tehran back to the negotiating table. A diplomat close to the Iranians told me they “are interested in sanctions relief.” In any case, the meeting was clearly a turning point at a time of increasing tensions with Iran over its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. This is true even though there was no agreement on measures to take, and neither side made proposals. EU foreign-policy chief Catherine Ashton, who speaks for the so-called P5 plus 1 negotiating team of Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, called the discussion “constructive and useful.” The word “constructive” was significant. The test of the talks had been to see if Iran, which claims its program is a drive to use the atom peacefully, would talk seriously about nuclear matters.

The idea was to get started on negotiations that would have a chance of succeeding. Ashton was careful in a final statement read to a packed press conference to give the Iranians the one essential thing they needed for their constituency at home, to show that they were not surrendering in negotiations. She said Iran’s right “to the peaceful use of nuclear energy” under the NPT must be respected. This was tempered by a clause the P5 plus 1 needed, when Ashton said Iran had to meet its “obligations under the NPT” not to seek nuclear weapons.

“We want now to move to a sustained process of serious dialogue, where we can take urgent practical steps to build confidence and lead on to compliance by Iran with all its international obligations” Ashton said. This “step-by-step approach” with“reciprocity” of rewards for compliance is designed to “lead to concrete steps towards a comprehensive negotiated solution which restores international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of the Iranian nuclear program,”Ashton said, speaking after an intense 10 hours of talks, during which Iran rejected a request for a bilateral meeting with US representative Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman. Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili did meet separately with the Russian envoy Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov as Russia is Iran's best advocate within the P5 plus 1.

Almost a decade ago, Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian human-rights lawyer, became the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But the government in Tehran has never taken kindly to her criticism of the regime, especially in regard to women’s rights. In the aftermath of the Islamic Republic’s highly contested 2009 presidential elections, as Tehran continued its brutal crackdown against protesters, Ebadi was forced to live in exile in the U.K. Her assets were frozen and her Nobel Peace Prize was allegedly confiscated.

Your most recent book, The Golden Cage, is about three brothers whose rigid ideologies lead them astray. Is this what’s going on with Israel, the United States, and Iran?

“Phew!” Obama must be saying to himself right now. “He’s gone!” Bibi Netanyahu was just in Washington, and if there’s a world leader the president winces at the prospect of meeting, it’s the Israeli bruiser, in so many ways the opposite of Obama. Bibi’s stocky, Obama’s a stick; Bibi wants to bomb Iran, Obama isn’t sure this is a cool idea. Bibi’s critics think he’s a bully, Obama’s think he’s a wimp.

Speaking of the special relationship between Israel and America at their meeting, Netanyahu said to Obama: “We are you, and you are us. We are together.” Had there been any other recent American president sitting across from him—Clinton or Bush—Bibi’s words would have been received like a delicious kiss. But Obama, we all know, wasn’t offering any tongue. He is the first American president—maybe the only one—for whom Israel is more notional than visceral. It drives Netanyahu nuts that Obama approaches Israel as he would a theorem—or as just another country. As the provocative Peter Beinart argues in this issue, Obama’s mindset on Israel was shaped by Palestinian sympathizers in Chicago—the liberal “civil-rights Jews” of the kind who would, in all certainty, find Netanyahu unbearable. So the president bites his tongue and chokes back his instincts when dealing with Israel.

In the parade of visiting prime ministers, next up is one who describes Churchill as his role model. This week David Cameron will drop in on Obama (role model: FDR), and the president is likely to have a much jollier time of it all than he did with Netanyahu. Cameron is even younger than Obama and, like the president, carries with him the baggage of his birth. In Obama’s case, it is his race; in Cameron’s, his social class—so very upper that he is a fifth cousin of Queen Elizabeth. His father-in-law is a baronet. (Obama’s was a pump worker at a Chicago water plant.)

This week Israel's prime minister came very close to saying he intended to bomb Iran's nuclear infrastructure, but that’s not something he can decide alone. To order such an attack, Benjamin Netanyahu would need to persuade an informal “security cabinet” that represents the leaders of his political coalition.

The security cabinet is made up of eight senior government ministers including the prime minister. Its membership reflects the composition of the Knesset’s ruling majority, and Israeli leaders often use the body, now called the octet, to build consensus for the Jewish state’s most important decisions.

“A decision like this would rarely be brought to the full cabinet because it is a huge forum, and you can’t get 30 people to agree on anything,” says Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national-security adviser to two Israeli prime ministers. “Israel has a real problem with leaks. That is why the real strategic thinking is done in the octet and other, even smaller meetings.”

I’m not supposed to tell you this. I’m violating the code. I’m giving away the deepest, darkest secret of the foreign policy clan: even though we sound like we know everything, we know very little, especially about the intentions of bad guys and the consequences of war. But since the media keeps treating us like sages and keeps ignoring our horrendous mistakes, we carry on with our game, and do a lot of damage. Let me give you of few of the more recent examples of how ignorant and dangerous we are, and why you should be wary of any flat out “truths” and certainties uttered by my clanspeople.

Take Iran. Those who can’t wait to start a war with Iran tell us that Tehran is within three seconds, three months, or a year of developing a nuclear weapon. I promise you they don’t know this for anything near a fact. They’re trying to push Israel and the United States into a military attack against Iran.

Here’s all we do know for sure: Iran is enriching uranium and has the capacity to enrich enough of it to a level of purity sufficient to make nukes—maybe, perhaps, in a year or two or more. Iran may have or may be developing related capacities to place this uranium into explosive form in a bomb or missile warhead. We have suspicions about the latter based on various kinds of imaging and listening intelligence.

We are going to war with Iran. Maybe not by November, maybe not even under this president. But just because I added that last phrase, don’t dismiss this lightly. The central fact of this past week, which seems to have escaped everyone’s attention (which itself boggles my mind), is that Barack Obama, in his speech to AIPAC Sunday, as in his interview with Jeff Goldberg before it, all but made war someday inevitable. How? By saying that containment of a nuclear Iran was not an option. Americans need to be clear on the full implications of this statement.            

The coverage of the speech proves the old dictum—well, it’s my old dictum, anyway—that what is “news” isn’t necessarily what is important. The newsy takeaway, at least according to The New York Times and the many outlets that take their cue from the Times, is that Obama warned against bluster and “too much loose talk” of war with Iran.           

That was interesting, and, to the extent that it illustrates tension between Obama and the war caucus, I can see how it’s “news.” But the important part of the speech, the sentences that historians might be ruing and Americans regretting 15 years from now, was this: “Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”