What if Iranians, Americans and Arabs made uranium together?

President Donald Trump, still touring the Middle East, keeps saying how "very happy" he'd be if he could make a deal with Iran. Iran, meanwhile, needs such a deal to avoid being bombed by Israel and strangled economically by the resumption of United Nations sanctions later this year. If reports out of Tehran are correct, those pressures may have motivated Iranian leaders to come up with an unconventional idea that deserves a hearing: They want to work with their enemies, not against them, to build Iran's nuclear program.

Their brainstorm envisions a kind of joint venture among Iranians, Saudis and Emiratis, as well as private investors including US companies. This new consortium would enrich uranium, a fissile material that can be used to generate electricity or make medical isotopes — and to build nuclear bombs. Because Iranians, Arabs, Americans and others would be working together, it would be easy to verify that this atomic program remains civilian rather than military.

At first blush, the idea seems outlandish. How could mortal enemies (Tehran's theocracy is based in large part on wishing death to America as well as Israel) collaborate around the very material that has brought them to the brink of war? At second glance, though, the notion's sheer audacity — let's call it chutzpah — may be exactly what these nuclear negotiations need to get unstuck.

In a way, the Iranian proposal reminds me of the European Coal and Steel Community, set up in 1951 by six founding nations and led by France and Germany, who had fought three bitter wars in one lifetime and struggled to imagine each other as anything other than enemies. To prevent a fourth war, French statesmen such as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman proposed joint custody over the raw materials of warfare — at the time, coal and steel. And German leaders such as Konrad Adenauer, eager to reconcile with their neighbors, agreed. Against all odds, this ECSC would blossom into what is today the European Union.

What coal and steel were then, uranium and plutonium are today. These elements are of course vastly more dangerous than coal and steel. And nobody is suggesting that the Middle East could ever become a new EU. In the 1950s the Germans, French and other Europeans genuinely wanted peace. As Karim Sadjadpour at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, the Iranian theocrats may instead believe that the survival of their regime depends on forever treating the US and its allies as foes.

And yet there is an elegance to the idea. For one, this arrangement would last indefinitely. By contrast, the the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed a decade ago by Iran and six parties including the US, would have phased out restraints on Iran by 2030.

For another, it would remove or circumvent the biggest obstacles in negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. The Iranians have long insisted on their right to peacefully enrich uranium, an activity that is explicitly allowed by both the international Non-Proliferation Treaty and the JCPOA. As part of the consortium, they would still be doing that. But now their joint-venture partners and outside monitors would be able to verify that the uranium would be enriched only to a low grade, unsuitable for warheads.

The Saudis and Emiratis too would find much to like. They also want to get into the market for nuclear energy, and will need uranium. They could start enriching on their own (as countries such as Brazil and Japan do), but that would also enable them to build their own nukes in a hurry if they ever felt threatened by Iran or anybody else, which would in turn accelerate nuclear proliferation globally. In the proposed scenario, they'd instead take their shares from the consortium.

And Trump? He wants to prove (especially to the committee in Oslo that hands out the Nobel Peace Prize) that he's a "peacemaker," and of course that he's a consummate dealmaker. The permanence of the new deal would allow him to claim that he negotiated something better than the JCPOA he canceled in his first term. And by having US business in on the consortium, he could point to all the money they'll soon be raking in.

It's easy, of course, to see the prospects of such a consortium as implausible, and to view the Middle East, with its ancient hatreds and deadly weapons, as due for a major war. But that was said about Europe in 1951 too. Trump must stay ready to use force if needed; but first he should study this Iranian overture.

Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.