A meeting between Iran’s foreign minister and senior European diplomats has yielded hopes of further talks but no indication of any immediate concrete breakthrough, a week after the crisis centered on the Iranian nuclear program erupted into war between Israel and Tehran.

Iran’s foreign minister will meet in Geneva on Friday with counterparts from Germany, France and the United Kingdom

While President Donald Trump weighs whether to join Israel’s assault on Iran, foreign policy veterans and analysts argue that a negotiated settlement, not bombs nor commandos, is the only way to eliminate the threat of Tehran gaining a nuclear weapon.

Hidden away in a mountainside south of Tehran is an enrichment plant that is vital to Iran’s nuclear ambitions - and Israel’s attempts to dismantle them.

When President Trump said this week that Iran “cannot have a nuclear weapon” but was perhaps “a few weeks away from having one,” he was in effect introducing a familiar feature to the public debate over America’s involvement in the Israel-Iran war: an element of urgency unsupported by any publicly available facts.