How (Not) To Diplomacy

Some thoughts on the US approach to the Iran negotiations

“A real diplomat is one who can cut his neighbour’s throat without having his neighbour notice it.”

Trygve Lie

As I started writing this, I was watching JD Vance announce that, after 21 hours, “ceasefire negotiations” between the US and Iran did not result in an agreement. Was anyone really surprised?

A colleague of mine called what has been happening “a failure of diplomacy”. I agree. A colossal failure on so many levels that it might be useful to examine the matter in more detail, especially for readers who might not know how these things are supposed to work.

The Big Picture: A Lack of Trust and Good Faith

Successful negotiations, and sustainable outcomes, require both political will and utmost good faith. We haven’t seen the 15-point US proposal but based on what has leaked out and given Iran’s published 10-point counter proposal, the parties are far apart both in demands and expectations - but there is no shortage of things to talk about. Certainly more than a single day’s worth. In fact, an Iranian foreign Ministry spokesperson said this:

These negotiations took place after 40 days of the imposed war and were held in an atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion; it is natural that we should not have expected from the beginning to reach an agreement within one meeting. No one expected that either.

Assuming that the war was, as the US claimed at least some of the time, about Iran’s uranium enrichment activities, there should at least be one basis for bilateral negotiations: stop enriching, we stop bombing. Now add to that the involvement of Israel as a belligerent, its attacks on Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Iran’s attacks on US interests across states in the Gulf and Middle East, and Iran’s retaliatory stranglehold on the global economy via the Strait of Hormuz, and a whole host of third-party interests come into the mix that will need to be considered. As I said, lots to talk about.

Against this backdrop, President Trump – like some annoying neighbour blasting acid rock out the open window all day – has continued to undermine the negotiating process by bleating out, alternately, claims of total victory and genocidal threats of total annihilation should Iran fail to give him everything he wants. How do you even begin to negotiate against that backdrop? Since the talks’ failure Trump has, in addition, threatened to block the Strait with US naval vessels. A blockade (against which states, or for what reason or purpose, I’m not sure) is an act of war, of course, a prima facie violation of an already fragile ceasefire, and yet another Trump-forged blow to the world economy. Not a good look, when you’re pretending to want peace.

Then there are the people the US and Iran sent to Islamabad, who can also be expected to be called on again should talks resume. Diplomacy is built on the willingness and ability to trust not just the other party as such, but also your immediate interlocutors.

I don’t know much about the Iranian delegation, but its head, Abbas Araghchi, Foreign Minister since 2024, has decades of diplomatic experience, He was Iran’s chief negotiator for the successful Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) process in 2015; by all measures, he should be a reliable and empowered interlocutor who knows what he’s talking about. Iran, in turn, has made clear that they have no faith in Jared Kushner and Steven Witkoff, who had sat across from them in Geneva pretending there were things left to negotiate, just 48 hours before the bombing started. Vance, in his time in office, has never shown an ability to negotiate anything, nor to influence Trump. What trust can there be when faced with three empty figureheads, whose every concession would be considered a failure by the man behind the curtain, and whose agreement is unlikely to last longer than a tweet or two?

Finally, it is worth noting that Trump’s ongoing threats against Iran aren’t just strategically unhelpful but are eroding any ability to believe in good faith negotiation. They also call into question the validity of any agreement that might be reached. Does a teller who hands over a bag of bills in the shadow of a gun actually consent to part with that money? Of course not.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties unequivocally confirms that

A treaty is void if its conclusion has been procured by the threat or use of force in violation of the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations.

The US and Iran are signatories to the Convention, although neither has ratified it; its provisions are nonetheless considered as reflecting customary international law.

I’ll just leave that last point here, but suffice it to say, ongoing existential threats against one of the parties by the other are not a recipe for successful, sustainable outcomes. None of which is likely to cost Trump any sleep, of course, given that his approach to the “Art of the Deal” has shown him to be unable to differentiate between threats, extortion, and negotiation.

How Many Negotiators Does It Take To Screw Up A Tweet?

The discussions were doomed to failure on the above grounds alone. But based on everything I have seen, they also reflect a complete abandonment of diplomatic tradecraft. Diplomacy is not a series of solipsistic tweets, sent out into a vacuum; it’s a process that seeks to reconcile divergent viewpoints and agendas for the purpose of achieving a mutually acceptable and beneficial outcome. A process that requires quiet moments, during which sensitive concessions can be floated, tested, and prepared for public consumption.

The US and Iranian diplomats I have met and negotiated with throughout my career have all been consummate professionals. Hard to deal with at times, yes, and often eyerollingly inflexible in their own different ways. But – with a few exceptions – none were ever less than respectful of their counterparts and the process; good at their jobs; and able to move matters forward even if immediate results proved elusive. But this time around, despite the incredibly high stakes, only one of the belligerent parties appears to have sent its top professionals to Islamabad – and it certainly wasn’t the United States.

High-level diplomacy requires skill and experience. Some people are born with a knack for forging consensus, but international diplomacy - where parties negotiate on the basis of sovereign equality while differing wildly in historical, cultural, and legal perspectives - is not something you learn overnight, by appointment, or by osmosis.

The US delegation, as noted, consisted of the US Vice President, a short-term Senator and author; the President’s son-in-law, a real estate and venture capital investor; and another real estate developer who, since 2025, has been a spectacularly ineffective special envoy on everything from the Middle East to Ukraine. I don’t know who the remaining two were; they were never named or shown in video footage. Maybe they had some kind of Middle East/Gulf/Iran, international law, armed conflict, negotiation, treaty-making, and/or nuclear issues expertise? I suspect not, though, given the wholesale bloodletting in the US State Department and Department of Energy. Neither Trump nor Vance, moreover, have ever demonstrated any appreciation for professionalism and substantive knowledge, and the delegation claimed that they had “access to expert advice in Washington”. So my guess is that the invisible delegation members were your basic bag carriers.

Expertise matters if you actually want results. If the subject matter under negotiation is highly complex and/or technical, individual negotiators are unlikely to be experts at both the art of making a deal and the issues to be resolved; people who think they can do both are either unicorns, or delusional. As the former senior official responsible for Canada’s non-proliferation/disarmament policy and global WMD threat reduction, I can confirm that the need for outside expertise is never more dire than when it comes to nuclear issues - or the Middle East.

Iran sent a delegation of 60+ to Islamabad. While that number might seem excessive, in important meetings I have rarely seen a US delegation of less than a dozen, selected from across different departments. To the conference in Kampala, where states negotiated the crime of aggression into the Statute for the International Criminal Court, the US sent a team of 24 – and they weren’t even party to that treaty. A delegation of five, in my day, would have sent a very clear signal that the US didn’t much care about what was on the table.

All things considered, Vance et al appear to have been a delegation of what you might call “all chiefs and no Indians”, sent to Islamabad to continue the only kind of diplomacy Trump knows, wherein he shouts unilateral demands and expects the other side to roll over without a squawk. Unsurprisingly, tweets re-enacted by live sock puppets are no more successful than those written in the original caps.

So What Should Real Negotiations Look Like?

Here are some things to look for, should negotiations for a peaceful resolution resume. I’ve already covered the issue of trust; here are some essential mechanics.

(1) You need a big enough team to allow for break-out capacity, side discussions, and redundancy. Plenary sessions where principals speak to cameras are a framing device, not the main show. At the beginning, they are used for grand statements and maximalist positions, playing to domestic audiences and political masters. At other points they are also needed to accept and gavel down points of agreement. Iran came with a 10-point plan - efficient negotiators would break those up into separate issues for parallel negotiations, with periodic returns to plenary sessions for updates and to ensure coherence. The actual hard discussions happen in small rooms, over coffee, or in quiet corners, where you can say things that you would rather not see broadcast, but that will move the process forward. It is there that small teams of experts can hash out pesky technical issues, before bringing the results to principals for review and approval; keeping everyone at the same table to discuss every issue is a duplicative waste and gives no one a brain break. Small, informal sessions allow delegations to gauge each other, analyze positions, float ideas, argue points, iron out differences - and above all, build the trust necessary to conclude a deal.

(2) You need to bring actual experts. Diplomacy is a field with an expertise of its own, not comparable to making New York real estate deals. You need to understand the basics of treaty-making, existing legal frameworks and institutions, as well as have a sense of the other parties’ political, historical, and cultural frame of reference. For anything having to do with nuclear matters, you need someone who understands that field - e.g., the process of enrichment, the difference between peaceful use and weapons-grade enrichment, issues of storage and transport - and the relevant legal and institutional frameworks (proliferation, safeguards, verification, inspections…).

My own expertise is in international law and multilateral diplomacy; I can spot legal traps, inconsistencies with existing agreements, or ineffective/contradictory drafting from miles away. I can also read a room, identify political posturing, have a pretty solid BS detector, and am able to craft language that allows everyone to go home claiming that they got what they needed without having sold the farm. But for discussions on securing highly enriched uranium (HEU) during the Nuclear Security Summit process, or negotiations on implementing a Nuclear Cooperation Agreement with India, I wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving home without technical expertise. It’s also not enough to have such expertise on call at home in case you have questions. The truth is, that unless you are an expert, you just don’t know what you don’t know. You need someone by your side to tell you what questions to ask; to spot issues and traps you’d never see; and to make you sound smart and convincing when you take the floor to hammer an agreement home.

(3) You need the ability to escalate. Diplomacy is a game of levels, where you signal your seriousness by who takes the microphone. Trump may think that by sending his Vice President he shows that the US takes the matter seriously. But the level at the top is only half the game. If you bring the heavy artillery (the head of delegation) out for everything, there is no headroom in case of an impasse. Effective negotiation depends on delegates being able to take an issue they’ve hammered out in the backroom to someone empowered to make decisions, both for validation and a second opinion. This allows for a good-cop-bad-cop dynamic, in which principals can build trust with each other by overriding obstacles together. Having JD Vance on the microphone the entire time leaves only Trump as a second opinion or decision-maker – in his case, via tweet. And we already know how well that has been going.

(4) You need the right parties at the table, or at least a process to link to the interests of third parties. One thing you cannot do in negotiations, and that is assign roles and responsibilities to parties who are not in the room, or to assume their agreement with your assumptions. I have seen no reports that Israel was even present in Islamabad. Given the essential Israeli security interests in play vis à vis Iran (which has made genocidal threats of its own against Israel in the past), and given that cessation of bombings against Lebanon was a key Iranian demand, how could anyone expect an agreement without Israel at the table? Failing that, a clear process to allow for a linkage to the Israel-Lebanon discussions, and Israeli sign-off to a ceasefire with Iran, would be necessary. And who represents the interests of the states that were collateral bombing victims – especially now that Trump threatens to block the Strait of Hormuz on top of what Iran is already doing? You won’t necessarily want all the interested parties at the main tables, where they would clutter things up - but you should allow for a channel through which they can be informed and, if appropriate, provide views and support for possible specific solutions.

(5) You need to ensure long-term sustainability for your outcomes. Negotiations are not one-and-done; implementation is key. This includes taking into account what processes or institutions might be needed to support the negotiated outcomes. There is a reason the JCPOA negotiations included the P5 (US, UK, France, China, and Russia) plus Germany. Broadening the foundation ensures resilience. Who, for example, might assist in removing the HEU from Iran, if that were agreed to, assuming Iran would likely balk at a US military presence on its territory? Where could the HEU go, and how should it be disposed of or safeguarded? What role could the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) play and how could it feed its advice into the negotiations? (Bear in mind that any tasking to the IAEA will need to be agreed by its Board of Governors.) Should any deal be subject to agreement by the Security Council? Who talks to the other members of the P5 to ensure that happens?

(6) You need time. The ceasefire was announced for two weeks. So why on Earth did the US delegation fly home after one day? Did they seriously expect Iran would just roll over, or that they could come up with an agreement in that ridiculous timeframe? The JCPOA took 18 months to negotiate; the Panmunjom Armistice that ended the Korean War was two years in the making. In diplomacy, time is your friend, not your enemy.

A Final Word

Obviously, Trump has the attention span of a gnat and is not the patient type. But setting up an appropriate framework, with an appropriate timeframe, for proper negotiations would actually do him a favour.

First, it would make him look like a Man of Peace – heck, he could even magnanimously allow the Iranian soccer team to play in the World Cup unmolested, earning his FIFA Peace Prize. Benevolence is a far better look than making genocidal threats.

Second, and more importantly, a negotiating delay would essentially punt an unpopular, costly war into the long grass, without a loss of face on the books.

And finally, while all that happens offstage somewhere and oil prices drop, Trump could hope that the American affinity for memory-holing might just help him recover his approval numbers past the mid-terms.