Iran nuclear deal could be key to healing the wounds of the wider Middle East

Long awaited, finally ended and inevitable, the nuclear talks have concluded in agreement. President Barack Obama is the one credited for lining up Iran and instrumental in assuring the negotiations reached the desired conclusion.

Every revolution has its own setbacks; sometimes only a sensible conclusion can prevail after the loss of a generation. Potentially, Iranian youth were feeling suffocated for being closed off from the rest of the world and they felt deprived and left behind by communication technology.

Iranian youth are now celebrating as if they have been liberated from their own regime and are consequently among the happiest group of people to emerge from the successful negotiations.

They were watching the ebbs and flows of the talks with great expectations and should their heightened expectations have been dashed by failure, that would certainly have been disastrous.

Time has gone when banging shoes on tables was seen as part of the apparatus of negotiations. We have to offer much credit to the US for showing extensive patience and constant persistence in being able to keeping all the nations of the world on one single platform.

It is always thus that whenever one step is taken forward, others feel it is one step back. The United States' allies Saudi Arabia and Israel particularly, as well as its own Republican Party, responded with resentment to the deal.

But time will show everyone that it is in the interest of everyone, including those who are currently exhibiting dissent.

Revolutionary Iran today is much different from Revolutionary Iran of 1979. The governing elite understandd it was a mistake for the country to go head-to-head with US when America wanted Iran to move forward in a successful manner. Hence, the US did not allow Shah of Iran to come to US once its revolutionary government ejected him.

Today, a page turns in world affairs and a new chapter begins. This is not just an arrangement for curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions but an opportunity to work with the country on the vexed questions that bedevil Middle Eastern politics The Palestinian question, Shia and Sunni antagonisms and the dark spectre of Islamic State (Isis).

Yet, perhaps the most important aspect of the deal is the commercial potential it taps. Iranians are much more advanced than rest of the populated Muslim world. They now have a much more open society.

This will create enormous new avenues of trade, commerce and tourism between Iran and the Western world. It will catch up in the world markets and Europe and US in particular will reap the commercial and financial benefits.

Although it is early days, perhaps some of the enmity between Iran and the US has finally been removed. And, who knows, the US may even, in time, offer Iran favoured nation status.

MB Abbasi is the former Pakistani ambassador to Iran and Iraq.