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On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be in Washington, trying to spur Congress to cut short what he considers a feeble and dangerous deal in the works over Irans nuclear program.

Simultaneously, as if on a split screen, Secretary of State John F. Kerry will be in Montreaux, Switzerland, trying to nail down a historic accord that could give the world a year to react if Iran were to stockpile nuclear materials for a bomb and that could wean Iran away from international pariah status.

The tension between those two competing worldviews on Iran one judging the risks too great to take and the other finding a greater risk in walking away from a deal has persisted for years. But it has reached an apex for a simple reason: Iran and the United States, plus its five negotiating partners, appear closer to a deal than at any time in more than a decade of talks.

The achievements to date are so huge, unprecedented really, that it is very, very, very difficult for both parties to leave the negotiating table and go backward, said Hossein Mousavian, an Iranian diplomat who once was spokesman for his countrys nuclear negotiating team and is a visiting scholar at Princeton University.

In his speech to a joint session of Congress, Netanyahu will elaborate on the alarm he has raised frequently Iran cannot be trusted to keep its word and the still-incomplete deal poses an existential threat to Israel and the world at large.

The ramifications of no deal, however, are also perilous. Congress would all but certainly impose more sanctions on an Iranian economy that has already been buffeted by harsh financial measures. Other countries could ignore the call to continue isolating Iran economically, unraveling a united diplomatic front that the Obama administration has worked strenuously to maintain.

Iran would likely ramp up uranium enrichment, bringing it closer to the bombmaking capability that world powers have worked for so long to deny it. The United States would consider launching a military strike to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

One question that I hope both Republicans and Democrats ask Netanyahu while hes here is to be clear about what alternative is available to us, said Gary Sick, who served on the National Security Council under both Republican and Democratic administrations and is a scholar at Columbia University's Middle East Institute. Its one thing to say wed like to have an agreement in which Iran has no capability of building a nuclear weapon, under any circumstances, at any time in the future. But that is by definition impossible.

The talks with Iran have been grinding on since President George W. Bushs first term. The West wants to monitor and curtail Irans nuclear program, which began under the shah with help from the United States under an Eisenhower-era program called Atoms for Peace.

Iran insists that it uses its nuclear technology only for peaceful purposes, such as medical testing and energy, but many in the West fear that the authoritarian government aims to stockpile high-level nuclear material and eventually produce nuclear weapons.

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Nuclear deal with Iran gets closer as Netanyahu comes to Washington