This is one of the limitations its Iranian detente may soon run into, potentially threatening the cohesiveness of the anti-Isis coalition.
Terrified by the knowledge that their nuclear armed missiles could destroy life on either side of the divide, Moscow and Washington sought detente rather than outright war.
The current detente resulted from the election of a reformist leader, Hassan Rouhani, opposing the domestic chaos of his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
For them, detente would be anathema.Hossein Shariatmadari, the influential editor of Keyhan, a conservative newspaper, contrasts the government's unwillingness to disclose details of nuclear negotiations with American loquacity on the subject.
The small minority of Iranians who dream of American intervention are the most apathetic of the lot.Since he was elected, Mr Bush has resisted detente in favour of co-operation on specific issues.
The Social Democrats had been so deeply attached to the Ostpolitik (German detente with the east) of Chancellor Willy Brandt that they have, since 1990, been slow to adapt to the consequences of communism's collapse.
Indeed, it is on Iran's borders that efforts at detente may start.Signals count for much.
He will seek to avoid the conspicuous bipartisan chuckles that laid his predecessor low, and may postpone devolved policing, the next test of detente.
It is possible that the same mischief-makers, or people who think like them, had a hand in the sea-borne cache of arms, apparently bound for Palestine, that Israel seized last month.It all makes great propaganda for Iran's enemies, in America and Israel, whose expressions of outrage give local hardliners a pretext to bash Mr Khatami's policies of detente.
In 1978, when China feared Japan might pursue detente with the Soviet Union, a flotilla of armed Chinese fishing vessels surrounded the islands.
JUDGING by the overwhelming vote in June for the more emollient-sounding Hassan Rohani as president and also by a mass of anecdotal evidence, most Iranians yearn for detente with the West, if only to get the economic sanctions that are impoverishing so many of them lifted.
