What’s the worst that could happen in the remaining years of the Obama presidency?

My bet is: the fall of Baghdad. If Islamic State troops succeed in storming the Iraqi capital — and despite some bombing from the air they are still only fifty minutes drive away — the United States will surely suffer a humiliating blow. Forget the snubs handed out by President Xi to his baffled, almost perpetually wrong-footed US counterpart, or the smug defiance of Vladimir Putin. The nadir of Barack Obama’s power would surely be the sacking of the City of Peace.

Standing between the jihadists and Baghdad is the ragamuffin Iraqi army, distinguished so far by high-speed desertion — and Iran. More precisely, Iranian-trained Shia militias and Qassem Suleimani, the strategic brain of Iran’s foreign expeditionary force, the al-Quds brigade. America needs Iran like never before. US-led air power can slow the advance of Isis but it cannot save a city as large and as complex as Baghdad.

Hence the unseemly rush to make common cause with the likes of Suleimani, hailed by one cleric as the man who most terrifies the Great Satan. President Obama has written to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (spiritual leader and author of a recent tweet which described Israel as a “barbaric, wolflike and infanticidal regime”) pointing out their joint interests in the region. Despite having sworn it would never link nuclear talks with Iran to co-operation on other matters, the White House is doing just that: striking a deal in return for Iranian help in defeating Isis. The nuclear talks have now been re-cast as the Obama equivalent of the 1986 agreement between Reagan and his ideological opponent Gorbachev to scrap intermediate-range nuclear weapons.

The US president wants to go down in history not just as a man who ended wars (and dodged them) but also as someone who made the world a fundamentally safer place. In his rush to do so he is engaging the services of a murderous regime. So far Tehran has failed to convince western negotiators that it is serious about not wanting to build a bomb. Every offer from Iran contains loopholes that could later benefit a military programme. No matter; there is a full head of steam behind the Obama team’s determination to enter a grand bargain, if not by the approaching deadline in 12 days’ time, then after a further six month extension.

Read the article in full at The Times.