The only kind of deal worth anything is one that decisively de-nukes Iran

Jonathan Tobin at Commentary says he doesn't know exactly what French foreign minister Laurent Fabius to so adamantly stand his ground against Secretary Global Test, but he says it has had an effect on any possible future installments of this round of patty cake:

whatever Fabius’s motives might have been, what he has done is to draw attention to the fact that Kerry and Co. were rushing to make a deal without nailing down the details about what the Iranians are expected to do.

Kerry has defended this process and pretended that what he was about to sign was a good deal. He believes that by taking halfway measures he is advancing the cause of stopping the Iranians. He thinks talking to the Iranians has a value in itself and worth the price of chipping away at sanctions. Those who support this process claim that those who call for a complete shutdown of the Iranian nuclear program are unrealistic. But the real lack of realism stems from those who ignore the Iranian history of cheating on the nuclear issue and who think this time will finally be different.

The point here is that contrary to Kerry’s rhetoric, this is not a labor negotiation in which both sides must be allowed to walk away with something and a solution always lies in splitting the difference between the two sides. Any Iranian deal that doesn’t definitively end their chance of building a weapon, whether via uranium or plutonium, is a scam, not a diplomatic triumph. Insistence on this point doesn’t make the deal’s critics warmongers. It makes them realists.

It can only be hoped that the pause between this weekend and the next P5+1 meeting will stiffen the spines of the Western negotiators rather than making them more eager to give away the store. For that opportunity, we should be grateful to Fabius.

It will be interesting to see if Global Test will now want to maneuver to the right of Fabius, now that the pass-it-to-know-what's-in-it approach as applied to Iran would lead to an incinerated Western city of some sort within the next few years.  Then again, he and his boss, the MEC, are both pretty ate up with decline and appeasement, to the point where it clouds there ability to sense real danger - danger even to their own delusional a--es.