They cite a series of factors that, for now, argue against a conflict. The threat of tighter economic sanctions has prompted the Iranians to try more flexible tactics in their dealings with the United States and other powers, while the revival of direct negotiations has tempered the most inflammatory talk on all sides.  A growing divide in Israel between political leaders and military and intelligence officials over the wisdom of attacking Iran has begun to surface. And the White House appears determined to prevent any confrontation that could disrupt world oil markets in an election year.  “I do think the temperature has cooled,” an Obama administration official said this week.  At the same time, no one is discounting the possibility that the current optimism could fade. “While there isn’t an agreement between the U.S. and Israel on how much time, there is an agreement that there is some time to give diplomacy a chance,” said Dennis B. Ross, who previously handled Iran policy for the Obama administration.  “So I think right now you have a focus on the negotiations,” he added. “It doesn’t mean the threat of using force goes away, but it lies behind the diplomacy.”  The talks two weeks ago in Istanbul between Iran and the United States and other world powers were something of a turning point in the current American thinking about Iran. In the days leading up to the talks, there had been little optimism in Washington, but Iranian negotiators appeared more flexible and open to resolving the crisis than expected, even though no agreement was reached other than to talk again, in Baghdad next month. American officials believe the looming threat of tighter economic sanctions to take effect on July 1 convinced the Iranians to take the negotiations more seriously, and that in turn has reduced the threat of war.  “There is a combination of factors coming on line, including the talks and the sanctions, and so now I think people realize it has to be given time to play out,” one administration official said, who, like the other official, spoke without attribution in order to discuss sensitive matters. “We are in a period now where the combination of diplomacy and pressure is giving us a window.”  In a television appearance on Wednesday, Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, “I have confidence that there is a way forward.”  Senior Iranian leaders have sought to portray the Istanbul round of negotiations as successful, which might be a sign, American officials and outside analysts said, that the Iranian government is preparing the public for a deal with the West that could be portrayed as a win for Iran.  “I see that we are at the beginning of the end of what I call the ‘manufactured Iran file,’ ” the Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said after the talks. “At the Baghdad meeting, I see more progress,” he predicted.  IRNA, the Iranian state-controlled news service, reported last week that a leading Iranian cleric, Ayatollah Kazem Seddiqi, had made positive statements about the negotiations. The news service said that the cleric, in his Friday sermon to thousands of worshipers in Tehran, said that if the United States and other nations negotiating with Iran show “logical behavior in nuclear talks, the outcome will be good for all.”  According to IRNA, Ayatollah Seddiqi said the Istanbul meeting showed “the power and dignity of the Iranian nation and was the outcome of people’s resistance and following the supreme leader’s guidelines.”  At the same time in Israel, the conservative government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been rocked by a series of public comments from current and former Israeli military and intelligence officials questioning the wisdom of attacking Iran.  The latest comments came from Yuval Diskin, the former chief of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, who on Friday said Mr. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak should not be trusted to determine policy on Iran. He said the judgments of both men have been clouded by “messianic feelings.” Mr. Diskin, who was chief of Shin Bet until last year, said an attack against Iran might cause it to speed up its nuclear program.  Just days before, Israel’s army chief of staff suggested in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the Iranian nuclear threat was not quite as imminent as Mr. Netanyahu has portrayed it. In his comments, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz suggested that he agreed with the intelligence assessments of the United States that Iran has not yet decided whether to build a nuclear bomb.  Iran “is going step by step to the place where it will be able to decide whether to manufacture a nuclear bomb. It hasn’t yet decided whether to go the extra mile,” General Gantz told Haaretz. He suggested that the crisis may not come to a head this year. But he said, “Clearly, the more the Iranians progress, the worse the situation is.”  Last month, Meir Dagan, the former chief of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, said he did not advocate a pre-emptive Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear program anytime soon. In an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Mr. Dagan said the Iranian government was “a very rational one,” and that Iranian officials were “considering all the implications of their actions.”  Mr. Netanyahu is dealing with the criticisms at the same time as he faces, for domestic political reasons, the prospect of an election this year, rather than next.  Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Artin Afkhami from Boston.
With the revival of talks â which went unexpectedly well â and domestic differences arising in Israel, the odds of imminent conflict have decreased, experts and American officials say.