Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

Obama Weapons Expert: No Chance of Success With Iran

I sat down with Gary Samore at his office at Harvard University to discuss the next round of Iran nuclear negotiations.

February 18, 2014 at 12:33 PM EST

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

Iran nuclear talks restarted today at the United Nations in Vienna. Photographer: Dieter Nagl/AFP/Getty Images

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Until recently, Gary Samore was the Barack Obama administration's top expert on weapons of mass destruction and the go-to White House official on the complexities and challenges of the Iranian nuclear program. So I pay attention when he says that the Iran nuclear talks -- restarting today -- have an almost zero chance of success.

One of the many reasons for this, he believes, is that the West has given the Iranian regime insufficient cause to feel as if it must give up its nuclear dreams. The negotiations might drag on for two or three years. And then? "And then the Iranians could decide they're strong enough to walk away," he says.

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