The interim agreement reached in Geneva between the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany (the P5-plus-one) and Iran is probably the best deal to curtail Iran's nuclear program that could be reached, given current circumstances.

The United States and its Western allies were unwilling to risk a military option, and not concluding a deal would have allowed Iran to proceed unimpeded toward acquiring nuclear weapons.

In an ideal world, Iran should have been forced to scrap its nuclear program altogether and hand over all of its enriched uranium to an outside power; but realistically that was unattainable. So the outcome of the Geneva talks is that Iran has secured some international legitimacy as a nuclear-threshold power, which deeply worries its regional neighbors, from Saudi Arabia and Israel to Turkey, Egypt, and the small and vulnerable Persian Gulf states.