With undefined objectives, a defiant Iran, and JD Vance leading the delegation, the diplomatic table may already be set for failure — and the price is more war.
To the extent that Donald Trump launched the preemptive war with Iran without understandable strategic goals, the ceasefire negotiations open today with the poorly defined strategic aims other than re-opening the Strait of Hormuz.
The world is grateful that Iran and the U.S. are talking rather than bombing each other. But who thinks that negotiations towards an overall, lasting peace can prove successful without goals?
These countries can’t even confirm what they supposedly agreed to talk about this week.
Variously, the U.S. said it wants to permanently erase any Iranian nuclear weapons development, eliminate Iranian missile and drone attacks on Israel or others, arrange for regime change, and liberate the Iranian people to rise against their own government. Instead, we got widespread military damage and a defiant Iran that was able to replace its newly dead ayatollah quickly, hit back at Israel and Gulf nations, hold onto its 900 pounds of enriched uranium fuel and strangle shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
And Israel took advantage to bomb the Iran-backed Hezbollah proxy army in Lebanon, even threatening to annex the southern third of that country, though it now wants to talk with Lebanon, not Iran.
Iran has a list that spelled out the opposite positions on each key point and yesterday added in the conditional unfreezing of any international holds on Iranian assets through sanctions.
Square One
So, we enter these negotiations mostly with the same issues that were on the table when Iran was talking with Trump friend Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner before the air attacks began – but from a worse starting position. The prime tactical question now concerns reopening the Strait to global shipping, a question not previously on the table.
We are sending JD Vance, not an experienced diplomat, to lead the U.S. delegation knowing that Iran has taken America’s best punch and survived to fight another day. And that Iran is mightily angered, aware that it has friends in Russia and China who will help in retributive efforts and that the U.S. has no patience for extended war, particularly with ground troops.
Trump is simultaneously talking about partnering with a new “more intelligent” Iranian leadership made up of the same people who were there all along, and restarting bombing that, as we all know now, might aim to destroy 6,000 years of Iranian and Persian civilization. In all of his boasting, one must wonder whether Trump has even a hint of self-doubt about having bullied his way into a corner.
It’s certainly not the map for a new chapter in any re-issued Art of the Deal. The price of failure at the diplomatic table is more war.
Good luck to all of us.
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