A war that has lasted six weeks and was 47 years in the making was never going to be ended with anything like a comprehensive sustainable settlement over a weekend, and in fact what turned out to be only 21 hours of intense talks. No one seriously expected it would, but the chances of an early breakthrough were made infinitely worse by Donald Trump’s decision to despatch to the talks with Iran two proven failures in such exercises – Steve Witkoff, an over-optimistic real-estate guy, and Jared Kushner, whose sole qualification is that he happens to be the president’s son-in-law.
Not for the first time, the US state department and secretary of state Marco Rubio have been marginalised in their core role of running America’s foreign policy – and to no great advantage. To have the US delegation headed by the vice-president JD Vance instead was also a serious misjudgement. Mr Vance could, in principle, as a possible future president, and with his own “base”, have added some considerable political authority to the discussions with the Iranians in Islamabad; but he has no personal vested interest in helping Mr Trump out of a mess of his own making, and one that Mr Vance warned him was going to happen. Even though the vice-presidency of the United States is a famously light-duties role, it would hardly have been practical for Mr Vance to spend weeks in Pakistan trying to broker peace.
It may also have occurred to him that Mr Trump might have been lining him up to take the blame for the near-inevitable failure of the talks. That may be reading too much into recent developments, but there is no doubt that domestic political pressures and bitter machinations within the Republican party and the Maga movement have complicated the situation. Sooner or later, a sceptical Congress will have to decide whether to grant Mr Trump “war powers” to press on with the conflict, and some potentially disastrous elections in November are looming large. This is discombobulating an already chaotic administration.
The putative two-week ceasefire may not now even last that long, with dreadful consequences for the civilians in the region and for the world economy. As it is, the Israelis are doing their best to blow up any peace efforts.
In any case, seemingly without much effort at compromise, Mr Vance has summarily declared the talks over and gone home.
More fundamentally, the motivation on the part of the Americans to seek a peace deal is weak because their negotiating position is weak. Agreement means compromise and concessions, and Mr Trump and his proud colleagues cannot bring themselves to admit what looks very much like defeat.
As Mr Trump might put it, if he were being candid for a change, Tehran now has most of the cards in this game, and that is because Washington has played its own hand badly. After all, before Mr Trump was persuaded by Benjamin Netanyahu and some reckless Republican sycophants in Congress to launch this war, the Strait of Hormuz was free to international maritime traffic, the Gulf states were dedicating themselves to peace, prosperity and the pursuit of happiness, and Lebanon was not under virtual Israeli occupation, creating another intractable problem for another set of negotiators over in Washington. More to the point, the Islamic Republic of Iran has survived, and still has somewhere a well-hidden stockpile of partially enriched uranium from which to develop a nuclear weapon. That qualifies as victory.
Mr Trump says of the talks that “regardless what happens we win…Let’s see what happens – maybe they make a deal maybe they don’t. It doesn’t matter. From the standpoint of America, we win.” That is precisely and diametrically wrong. Whatever happens now, America has lost this war, whether it ends with some kind of deal or whether Mr Trump decides to escalate the military effort. In an asymmetric conflict such as this, with Iran holding the global economy hostage and able to terrorise its neighbours, America cannot “win” on any conceivable basis, even if – especially if – it deploys ground forces or, as Mr Trump signalled late yesterday, it attempts to force the heavily mined Strait of Hormuz open.
For much the same reasons, it will sooner or later have to agree to rather humbling conditions laid down by Tehran, or else just withdraw all the forces and leave the problems behind for the rest of the word – Europe, China, the Gulf rulers – to try to settle. It would be at least as great a humiliation for America as the evacuation of Saigon in 1975 or the retreat from Kabul in 2021, albeit more orderly.
One of the many great tragedies in all of this is that America under President Trump has unilaterally abandoned two peaceful, diplomatic agreements that would have achieved most, if not all, of the American strategic objectives that are now out of reach. The original Iran Nuclear Deal of a decade ago, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, to which the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany were also signatories, severely restricted Iran’s nuclear programme and subjected it to close and regular international supervision. During its time Iran did not develop a nuclear missile. Mr Trump, predictably, tore that up during his first term in a fit of envy because it had been negotiated by “Barack Hussein Obama”. A more recent agreement between Iran and the US, in which Iran agreed not to build nuclear stockpiles, had been brokered by the Omanis and was ready to be signed just when Mr Trump decided in late February that force was a better option. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now. It is time for Mr Trump to recall the famous words of his hero Sir Winston Churchill that “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”.
