It is time that Barack Obama behaved as if he were President of the United States rather than King of Narnia.

The idea that reaching out to President Rowhani of Iran could qualify as a historical turning point, the equivalent of Richard Nixon’s ground-breaking trip to China, is little more than a fairytale — an exercise in Traumpolitik rather than Realpolitik.

Imagine this, the White House team seem to be saying: de-claw Syria and Tehran by taking away their nerve agents and nuclear capacity, and thus make Israel secure enough to clinch a lasting deal with the Palestinians. Imagine a happy ending that turns war on its head; a Nobel prize.

One day soon the Administration will wake up and realise that it is still dealing with the gritty, treacherous Middle East, and sadly that it has not slipped through C. S. Lewis’s magical wardrobe. That it is, in fact, being hoodwinked by Iran.

The first signs emerged yesterday that even making small talk with Iran would not be straightforward. Mr Rowhani found himself under attack from the Republican Guards for taking Mr Obama’s phone call (they talked about the DC traffic). And Mr Obama was upbraided by Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minster, who warned him against being taken in by Iran’s “onslaught of smiles”.

The Administration’s Middle East advisers are hard-headed professionals. Yet they are being swallowed up by the hope-over-experience notion that after 30 months of policy paralysis induced by the Arab Spring, of being wrongfooted and consistently making dud calls, they have found a way to restore US influence in the region.

Read the article in full at The Times