The 
Guardian reports that a deal to restart Mideast peace talks is close at hand. President Obama has promised to push for expanded sanctions on Iran, including its oil and gas industry:
In return, the Israeli government will be expected to agree to a partial freeze on the construction of settlements in the Middle East. In the words of one official close to the negotiations: “The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not.”
….Obama has pencilled in the announcement of his breakthrough for either a meeting of world leaders at the UN general assembly in New York in the week beginning 23 September or the G20 summit in Pittsburgh on 24-25 September.
The president, who plans to make his announcement flanked by Netanyahu and the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas — plus the leaders of as many Arab states as he can muster — hopes that a final peace agreement can be negotiated within two years, a timetable viewed as unrealistic by Middle East analysts.
….Israel is offering a nine- to 12-month moratorium on settlement building that would exclude East Jerusalem and most of the 2,400 homes that Israel says work has already begun on.
I’m not a Mideast wonk, so I don’t really know how to judge this. But my initial reaction is that substantively there’s not an awful lot here: the expanded sanctions depend on agreement from both China and Russia in the Security Council, which seems unlikely, and Israel’s settlement moratorium is pretty anemic. If it’s enough to get everyone talking, that’s great, but it’s not much of a sign that either side is ready to make much in the way of serious concessions yet.
Still: getting talks restarted on almost any terms is better than doing nothing, and there’s not much downside. Iran is pretty obviously in no mood to talk with the U.S. right now, so pushing for sanctions probably won’t do a lot of harm. And the settlement semi-freeze is at least a minor step in the right direction. I wonder if Bruce Bueno de Mesquita thinks it has any chance of working?
