There will not be a negotiated settlement to the Iran war. It will have to be fought out to a conclusion, whatever that might be. Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world” Photo: Screen Grab
I’ve written on several occasions in the past about negotiations, especially in the context of Ukraine , and I have tried to explain what they actually are , what the rather loose vocabulary of “talks”, “meetings,” “discussions,” “negotiations” and the like actually amounts to in practical terms, and tried also to discourage people from thinking that either negotiations, or some document that comes out of them, are a sort of of magic which will resolve all problems . Whatever minimal influence I may enjoy doesn’t seem to have had any effect in clarifying things, and writers with much larger readerships and more status don’t seem interested in the subject. So let’s have another go, at the risk of perhaps repeating myself a little. (For the above reasons I’ll keep this a little shorter than usual.)
Negotiations, then, happen when there is a problem that two or more sides want to resolve, or an objective that they share, at least partly. Negotiations are a structured process of refining that shared objective, narrowing or preferably eliminating differences, and if possible producing an agreement, followed by a text that both sides are happy with. Negotiations often take place in rounds, where the partners discuss a problem or an objective and progressively approach a solution. There will be bargaining, lots of informal work in what diplomats call the “margins,” possibly some histrionics and threats to the outcome of the negotiations, and, with luck, a final agreement which may be in the form of an actual treaty, or a politically binding accord, or just a communiqué. As I have explained, documents produced in this way are not magic: they are simply texts that apply until they don’t. In turn, this is because the texts themselves have to concretise an underlying level of agreement between the parties. If that agreement no longer exists, then the text becomes useless operationally. By contrast, informal arrangements that are never written down may persist for a long time, because they suit the interests of the parties involved.
But you wouldn’t think this from the media and pundit coverage of the two rounds of discussions (not “negotiations,” please) in Islamabad, and a possible third round being discussed as I write. We’ve seen headlines like NEW WAR FEARS AS PEACE TALKS FAIL or PEACE HOPES DASHED AS US WALKS OUT, or even LAST CHANCE FOR PEACE AS NEW TALKS PROPOSED. Now its a commonplace of journalism that headlines are written by sub-editors, not the authors of the story themselves, and in this kind of case it’s clear that the different sets of interns haven’t been communicating with each other vey well. But let’s just take a moment to set out what the objectives of the parties in this crisis actually are, and then see how they relate to this discourse of alleged desperate attempts to avoid a resumption of hostilities.
The US (present) and Israel (present by proxy) want to damage and if possible destroy Iran as a functioning state. For the US this is revenge for nearly fifty years of humiliation, dating from the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran and the disastrous failure of the subsequent rescue mission, as well as Iranian attempts to frustrate US policies in the Levant. For Israel the objective is to destroy the only country standing between them and their domination of the region. (The US also represents this objective vicariously.) The Iranians obviously want to prevent all this, but they also want an end to sanctions and isolation, and they want to establish themselves as the unquestioned dominant local power, through the eviction of the US from the region. (Yes, I know it’s more complicated than that, but it will do for now.)
Now by any standards, the two (or three) countries have positions that are about as distant from each other as you can imagine. If you were the Pakistanis, skilful diplomats as they are, how would you even begin to construct an agenda, or organise proximity talks, to somehow accommodate these differences? In reality, all that can be discussed is short-term, limited measures that might temporarily suit the US and Iran, and might possibly be acceptable to Israel. In reality, though, the problem is worse than that, because the two/three sides are not even approaching these “negotiations,” with any common view of what they are, or should be. The fundamental distinction is that Iran does not need to negotiate but is content to do so because time is on its side. The US desperately needs a way out, and negotiations would be the normal mechanism for this. But negotiations in the traditional sense would lead effectively to a US surrender and neither the US Senate nor Israel would tolerate that. Therefore all that the US can do is pretend to negotiate, posing demands it knows to be unrealistic in the hope of gaining time. Thus the announcement by the US of an indefinite cease-fire as we go to press. What the US would do with such time gained is not clear, but at least it delays the inevitable.
It follows that negotiations, or for that matter a ceasefire, are not a trick or a trap while the US prepares a new attack, because a new attack cannot improve their situation. In reality, their military capability is now substantially less than it was a couple of months ago and a new attack would achieve no more than previous ones did, as well as risking further damage to US interests in the region. Moreover, the US is running out of weapons and thus every attack makes it weaker in the short to medium term, but by the same token, US domestic politics make an abandonment of the military campaign effectively impossible. As a number of people have pointed out, declaring victory and walking away is simply not an option, because Iran can make is own declarations too, not to mention closing Hormuz any time it feels like it. And Israel seems to have an effective veto over any US attempts to stop the fighting; believing, apparently, that it can coerce Washington into destroying Iran on its behalf. The result is a strategic situation which is effectively blocked, but where delay works against the interests of the US, and probably Israel, whilst it strengthens Iran. But the balance of political forces precludes the US from doing anything sensible to get out of this mess.
All of which gives a decidedly odd twist to the concept of “negotiations.” How do we even understand what is actually happening? The first point to register is that these are not “negotiations” in any normal sense, and should never have been called that. There is no agreed agenda, no agreed objective, no common view even about what sort of outcome can be anticipated, and of the three parties involved, one is not even present. Moreover, unless all the parties change their objectives fundamentally, there is no chance of an agreed outcome anyway. Diplomats are good at producing “results” in terms of positive-sounding communiqués, agreements on small points of detail and assurances that “we’re still talking.” That’s their job. But it’s striking that so far, there has not even been the most basic agreement on what the talks are supposed to be about , still less what they are expected to achieve, and little effort to produce results on either.
So what is this all about? It isn’t even really talks about talks, because there is no sign of interest in really talking. The US and Iran have tabled allegedly non-negotiable demands which, if accepted, would entail the effective surrender of the other. Israel seems uninterested in negotiations at all. The process simply amounts to a ritual recital of prepared positions, with offers that the other side will under no circumstances accept anyway. Put simply, without radical changes in the political picture, which at the moment we can’t foresee, negotiations serve no practical purpose.
In theory of course, the situation could be rescued. It’s normal for states to hold publicly to maximalist conditions, so that they have something to trade when negotiations actually start. (Sometimes called “negotiating fat” by diplomats.) The problem is that the two sets of demands —albeit the Iranian ones have circulated in several versions—are not just far apart: in most cases there is no point of contact between them at all. In theory, each side could drop a number of its demands, but the remainder would still be just as unacceptable, and of course the ultimate objectives of the two (or three) sides would remain irreconcilable.
If the will existed, you could probably contrive some kind of short, agreed text with a few anodyne measures in, splitting the difference on some issues. This could then be represented as “progress.” But the will doesn’t exist, because what we have here is not a problem to be solved, or an agreed objective to be reached, but two (and a half) sides each seeking the total defeat of the other. Indeed, if there were to be such a limited text, it would arguably just delay the final resolution of the crisis on the ground.
Let’s remind ourselves again that documents of all kinds in international relations are only of value insofar as they set out what the parties have decided, or what they will accept, in language all parties can live with. They do not create agreement, but they rather demonstrate that agreement already exists. Even full-dress treaties designed to be signed by Heads of State and ratified by parliaments, generally allow—if only through silence—for parties to withdraw from them, and many treaties contain explicit withdrawal procedures. Which is why I said that treaties apply until they don’t. Lower forms of diplomatic life, such as exchanges of letters and joint statements, still have political weight, and denouncing them carries a cost, but a state may well decide the cost is a reasonable sacrifice.
Likewise, in politically-charged situations, it’s normal for states to accuse each other of negotiating in bad faith, and subsequently violating agreements: among other things, the complexity of major agreements these days is such that a determined signatory can always find some misdeed to accuse another signatory of, as we have seen regularly since the days of the Cold War. If the will to make an agreement work exists, then the problems will be smoothed over. If it doesn’t exist, then the agreement will simply fall at the first obstacle. By the same token, unspoken or unofficial agreements can hold for considerable periods of time if that suits the partners.
In any event, consider the mechanics of negotiating and ratifying a theoretically binding agreement. First, there’s the politics. One common development as wars go on is that positions tend to harden, and power moves increasingly into the hands of those with more extreme views. This is normal: it’s a variant of the sunk-costs argument: as the amount of sacrifice increases, so more has to be demanded from the other side to make that sacrifice seem as though it was worth it. Thus, a feature of both World Wars was that public opinion in the West became more and more hawkish and intolerant, and more radical voices in governments increased their influence. By 1943, for example, there was little practical alternative to a policy of unconditional surrender: negotiating with Hitler was simply out of the question, and even the opposition in Germany, like the July 1944 plotters, wanted things that no western government could give.
Whilst the Iran War has only lasted weeks, not years, so far, the intensity of operations and the pace of developments, as well as the tidal wave of media and Internet comment that has been disgorged, have enormously accelerated the timescale. Moreover not only is the US running out of weapons, the number of key targets remaining for the Iranians to hit in the Gulf States and Israel is also relatively limited. In turn, this reflects the precision of modern weapons and the ability to saturate targets with low-cost offensive weapons: the British tried for years to damage German war production with night bombing: they could have accomplished far more in a week if technology with today’s range and accuracy had existed in those days.
So we are probably quite close to the end of the kinetic phase of the conflict, or at least the phase where kinetics dominates. It’s clear that, in spite of all the bluster, there will be no “land war,” and aerial bombardment cannot achieve anything better than the very limited results to date. So the real question is not “stopping the war,” since it is in its terminal phase, nor “finding a peaceful solution,” since, as I have indicated, that is ruled out by the political situation itself. It is therefore probable that we will soon move into a phase where the political process comes to dominate, and where the concentration is on the future shape of the region and future relations between the parties. The War will be over, but, as is often the case, that will be the easy bit.
It’s not obvious to me that any formal agreement between the parties is actually possible on these issues. (Whether such an agreement is legally “binding” or not is not the point, as I hope I’ve explained.) As I’ve suggested, conflict tends to strengthen the hands of more hardline groups, and if those who follow Iran are to be believed, power to decide events is moving increasingly into the hands of the IRGC. This would be typical: an obvious analogue would be the increasing dominance of the military in Prussia as World War 1 approached its end. Moreover (and unlike in the Prussian example) the IRGC can reasonably claim to have won the War, or at least prevented the US from doing so, so its political influence will necessarily be increased. What this will mean in practical terms is anyone’s guess, but two things are fairly obvious. One is that Iranian policy will have a more military and less diplomatic character, and is likely to prefer creation of facts on the ground to agreements of any kind. The other is that any kind of agreement, even implicit and unspoken, will be more difficult than it would have been, say, a couple of months ago.
Of course, it is theoretically possible that the US will undergo a transformation and realise that its interests are best served by unilaterally withdrawing from the region and ending its hostile attitude to Iran. But here we have to look not only at the half-century of anger and hatred directed against that country, which has now inflicted a defeat on the US, but on the very structure of politics within the US itself, and how that relates to the structure of politics in Iran in turn. There are situations—like this one, I suspect—where the very mechanics of the political system do not allow for any real resolution, or even any facing up to reality. Now it is normal towards the end of a crisis like this to have a spectrum of opinions, even in the most rigidly-disciplined government. Even a tacit agreement without anything signed will still require an essential consensus among all those with influence. But there will always be a group of irreconcilables, often divided among themselves in turn, who cannot accept anything less than victory, and will stick it out to the bitter end. (Ireland since 1916 is good example from the Anglo-Saxon world.) Such people may be in government, but they may also be influential in other ways. This situation inevitably happens, and the only questions are (1) how big is this constituency and (2) how much trouble can it cause? In many cases, the bitter-enders, and the no-surrender lobby are sufficiently small that they can be neutered in some way. In certain situations a level of disruption and violence will have to be accepted for a while as the price of a solution: a good example is the terrorist attacks by the OAS after the French agreed to Algerian independence, and the related attempts to assassinate De Gaulle. This kind of situation can’t really be avoided, but it’s very much a question of the extent to which it’s containable, and how it plays out in Washington and Tehran.
In the case of Iran, there are clearly going to be divisions over the question of how far the US can be pushed. I don’t know enough about internal Iranian politics to be sure, but it would be typical if the IRGC, which after all has suffered casualties and done the lion’s share of the fighting, were to hold out for more concessions than are feasible. I say “feasible” not just in the sense of what can be technically negotiated, but more what the US political system will actually be able to deliver. History suggests that trying to force your opponent to give you things that are not within their power to give is seldom a good idea. At the best it’s a waste of time and at worst it can lead to disaster. If war, as Clausewitz said, is an act of force to get our enemy to do what we want, then it is wise to be sure that our enemy actually can do what we want before we make demands. We can easily imagine, for example, a situation where the US would refuse to sign a non-aggression pact because of political opposition, but would nonetheless abide by the terms of an informal understanding which would not necessarily be made explicit, even in Washington. After all, the US is not going to be anxious to attack Iran again under currently imaginable circumstances. It would be wise for the Iranians to understand and accept such a situation.
In the case of the US, the situation is more complicated, because of the number and variety of players inside and outside Washington who will have an influence. Whilst it’s always easy for Washington to announce something, seasoned observers realise that the carrying-through of any given initiative can never be relied upon. Washington, after all, is a place where it’s difficult to get things done, but easy to stop them happening, simply because of the size and complexity of the labyrinthine bureaucracy, and the number of people and institutions who can stop or delay things they don’t like. This is why the US often finds it difficult to translate its size and potential power into actual hard achievements, and indeed even to formulate an agreed position on some issues. It’s not uncommon for US negotiators to plead that they can’t accept such-and-such a proposition, no matter how reasonable, because Congress won’t like it. Often, this amounts in practice to the opposition of a couple of influential Senators, who are thus able to cripple the US position. (“They should just ask Congress to come and bloody negotiate then,” muttered a disillusioned diplomatic colleague after one such aria.)
The reality, therefore, is that there will be somebody, or a number of somebodies, capable of stopping virtually any formal agreement between the US and Iran on any security-related issue. That said, it’s not clear how far the Iranians, and in particular the IRGC, themselves actually understand all these complex dynamics: after all, many people in the West don’t. Nearly half-a-century of isolation from Washington is likely to have bred not just suspicion and distrust, but a model of how things work in Washington, and in US policy, which is wildly at odds with reality. How, after all, could it be otherwise? The risk is that the harder-liners in Tehran will be asking for things that the fractured and divided US system is simply incapable of delivering. And of course, with or without Mr Trump sitting in the front seat of the bus, no US politician will actually be able to acknowledge in public the weakness and disorganisation of the US government and its military.
So as things stand, it seems unlikely that there will be any formal agreements as such. On the other hand, we can imagine, for example, that the US government decides privately not to try to re-open bases in the region, the Gulf States quietly decide not to ask the US to return, and the Iranians make it clear to both sides informally that only a token US presence will be tolerated. Many things will be generally understood, but nothing will be written down.
But there are a couple of subjects that can’t be fudged as easily. One is the “nuclear” issue, which is not only complex politically, but enormously complex technically, and one where different people have quite different understandings even of what the question is. Briefly, there are important distinctions between a nuclear enrichment programme, a nuclear weapons programme, a theoretically usable warhead of some kind, a warhead that has been tested, a delivery system for the warhead, an integration of the missile and the payload, a reliable guidance system, and a test of the whole system itself. Any of those stages could be called a “nuclear capability,” by some standards. Mr Trump, who is clearly no expert in these matters, has several times said that “Iran will not have nuclear weapons,” which could clearly cover some but not all of these possibilities.
But nobody really knows how advanced the Iranian nuclear “programme” is: some believe that it effectively doesn’t exist as a discrete entity. The problem is that countries with advanced technologies and access to nuclear materials can have not so much a nuclear “programme,” as a nuclear “option,” with the ability to move quickly if the situation makes that necessary. (Countries such as Germany, Japan and South Korea are often cited in this context.) Iran may already be in this category: a bit like having the construction kit but waiting for political approval to start putting it together. So to some extent it’s a question of definitions, and also a question of what might be technically feasible. I’m not going to venture into an area where experts differ and where almost no hard information is available. I would just note here that this war has still left us with an insoluble political problem. Iran has the technical capability to develop nuclear weapons if it wants to, and, after this war, important parts of the political system may feel that it has no option but to do so. There is no practicable method of preventing this, and even an intrusive inspection regime would not necessarily discover an “option,” as opposed to a “capability.” That is a problem the world is going to just have to live with.
Another is Lebanon. Now here Iranian interests—as they have made quite clear—essentially involve Hezbollah. They no doubt feel some responsibility for the Shiite community there, but their main priorities are to use Hezbollah as a force multiplier against Israel, and as a way of reacquiring a dominant position in the country. Iran does not wish to destroy Lebanon, but rather to ensure the state is sufficiently weak that Hezbollah, and through them Iran, has a major influence in the country. Until the end of 2024, that was effectively the situation: it was the hammering that Hezbollah took in 2024, combined with the loss of the friendly Assad regime, that eventually obliged Hezbollah to drop its opposition to the formation of a government and the election of a President. So when the Iranians talk of a ceasefire in “Lebanon” they have made clear that they refer to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. This is a separate issue from Israeli territorial ambitions in Lebanon, so understandably, Hezbollah (and Iran) are opposed to direct talks between Lebanon and Israel, since these would get in the way. I haven’t even attempted to add Israeli objectives into all this, because I simply don’t know the country well enough to say anything sensible, or indeed if there is anything sensible one can say about Israel at the moment.
It should be clear by now that much of the media, and a large percentage of the punditocracy, is not so much mistaken about the fighting in Iran as it is a prisoner of an outdated way of thinking. In the abstract, only the seriously disturbed would actually prefer an outcome of war to one of peace (yes, there are some of those around.) But we have become so used to the Liberal internationalist way of thinking, where all problems have a reasonable solution and compromise is only a negotiation away, that we cannot recognise and understand a situation where a negotiated solution cannot actually address the fundamental issues that divide parties from each other. But that is the case here. The obsession of the US and Israel with the destruction of Iran, and the Iranian desire to preserve itself and to come to dominate the region, can simply never be reconciled, even by the most brilliant negotiators in history. This one, I’m afraid, will have to be fought out to a conclusion, whatever that might be.
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