"The best way to constrain Iran’s potential movement towards nuclear capability is to have peace in the Middle East, peace between the Israeli and the Palestinians," former President Jimmy Carter [2] tells Ploughshares Fund board member Reza Aslan [3] in a far-ranging interview about prospects for peace in the Middle East. "To end the official war that still exists between Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon. I think that would remove, to a substantial degree, the threat that Iranians feel if they need to defend themselves, and that would lessen the inclination to move to a military weapon... So the end of the Iraq war and peace in the Middle East would be the two things that would put Iran back into a place of less negative influence to potential terrorism, and less of a feeling that they would need to have nuclear weapons to defend themselves."
Links
[1] https://ploughshares.org/file/223
[2] http://www.cartercenter.org/news/experts/jimmy_carter.html
[3] http://ploughshares.org/about-us/reza-aslan
[4] http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-29/carter-on-iran/