Iran demanded compensation for the US\/Israeli war on it; recognition of its sovereignty over the critical waterway; a region-wide ceasefire that would include Lebanon; and the removal of all US and EU sanctions that have locked down its economy for fourteen years. The positions were far apart, and five books on negotiation that have shaped my approach to negotiations over the years explain why such gaps are inevitable.<\/p>\n
Power Is an Act, Not an Asset<\/h3>\n
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One of the most serious errors in the failed Islamabad negotiations was the American perception that their massive military and economic superiority over Iran would automatically guarantee Iranian cooperation. I. William Zartman and Jeffrey Z. Rubin<\/strong> stress in their book on Power and Negotiation that power must be exercised to be relevant<\/em>. Power is not a commodity that can be stockpiled or deployed solely on the basis of overwhelming military superiority. For the two parties to a conflict, “power is a behavior aimed at inducing the other party to do something he or she would not do otherwise.<\/em>” In this sense, economic power or military power or threats to deploy naval forces can be compelling to the other side only to the extent that the other party feels pressured and chooses to accede to the other’s demands. Zartman and Rubin make the subtle yet critical distinction between resources and power: resources are plentiful; power is elusive.<\/em><\/p>\n It was precisely this maximalist posture, backed by real military power, that fractured the coalition of support Islamabad once enjoyed in the region. The previous day two of the United States Navy\u2019s mightiest warships, destroyers, had passed through the vital Strait of Hormuz en route to Saudi Arabia, where they would back up the terms for a sustainable truce in Yemen that Ambassador Vance brought with him to Islamabad. Trump, speaking from the Oval Office, had threatened a naval blockade of that oil-rich country if talks failed.<\/p>\n But Iran did not interpret all of this as pressure to conform and accept the terms Vance carried north. Instead, Iranians saw, and were told by hardline domestic factions, that they were being asked to surrender when they negotiated with the United States. Until Zartman and Rubin help us better understand how power is exercised in diplomacy, events such as these demonstrate that such might is exercised in precisely the wrong way. Instead of influencing Iran\u2019s leaders to accept their terms, Vance\u2019s military might caused them to calculate that the costs of accepting the terms in Islamabad exceeded the costs of continued conflict<\/em>.<\/p>\n As an apology for realpolitik, hardball diplomacy, maximum leverage, minimum sentiment, Kissinger\u2019s Diplomacy has become something of a Holy Scripture in the foreign ministries of the West. But that is because most readers have missed the deeper point of the book, which is that statesmen are constantly trying to reconcile strategy with political survival<\/em>. Frequently, the two are in conflict, and the statesman who can reconcile them is the one who is able to achieve lasting agreements.<\/p>\n In the negotiations over the Iran war, both the US and Pakistan side of the table in Islamabad suffered from severe domestic political constraints<\/em> which forced them to pursue only marginal degrees of flexibility. In particular, on the US side, the nominal leader of the US negotiating team, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, was not Secretary of State Marco Rubio because Vance was seen by the Iranians as more credible as a negotiator, and because he had enough personal reservations about US policy in the war to have some room for concessions that his more hawkish cabinet colleagues did not. However, Vance was still operating under severe domestic political constraints, because his boss Donald Trump had declared publicly several key objectives for the war, including the destruction of Iran\u2019s military and the transformation of its government.<\/p>\n Offering Iran recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, one of their principal demands, would have been domestically politically suicidal<\/em>. Trump\u2019s announcement of a naval blockade of Iran late in the scheduled 72-hour window, presumably planned in advance as a last ditch pressure tactic when everything else failed, underscored the paucity of political capital available to the US team.<\/p>\n Compared to the more complex web of interests on the opposite side of the table, the Iranian camp seemed almost hamstrung. Their supreme leadership had been struck down and with it, a considerable amount of direction and guidance seemingly vanished into thin air. The Revolutionary Guards had, in the meantime, emerged as one of the main power centers, with an institutional vested interest in the resistance economy that was, in no small measure, sustained by the very sanctions that Mr Rouhani so desperately wanted to lift. Iran was also represented by Ghalibaf, the head of the parliament\u2019s security and foreign affairs committee \u2013 not the foreign minister. The foreign policy establishment that had grown so accustomed to speaking on behalf of a far more isolationist and often inaccessible leadership seemed, in this case, to have been somewhat side-lined.<\/p>\n The 10-point counter-proposal by his delegation, which required war reparations, a local ceasefire including Lebanon, and the sovereign control of the Strait was not meant to be taken. It was built in such a way that it was domestically defensible. This can be read through the prism of Kissinger: the Islamabad negotiations gave way not due to lack of skill among the negotiators, but due to the fact that both parties had not worked out the domestic equation of politics that a lasting settlement demands<\/em>. In his historical interpretation, the agreements that are binding are the ones that are of interest to major constituencies in either of the states to defend. Islamabad made no such constituency on either side.<\/p>\n William Burns<\/strong>, the architect of the secret Omani back-channel which enabled the 2015 JCPOA to be achieved, and later a CIA Director, writes in The Back Channel<\/em> about the circumstances in which high-stakes diplomacy can actually work. The key to them all is the back channel, a venue of frank privy talk, exposed to no domestic audience, where negotiators can explore the possibility space without making any open statements that might later have to be discarded.<\/p>\n The process of Islamabad was, however, almost all public. The stakes were worldly in sight even prior to the landing of the delegations. The chief negotiator of Iran had pre-conditioned his presence: no negotiations would take place without Lebanese progress, no progress could be made without unfrozen resources, positions were hardening before even a single word could be spoken in the room. The American authorities were quick to explain that Vance was correcting the Iranian misperceptions on the US stance, which was a formulation that suggested dominance as opposed to collaborating. Each action was executed in front of the crowd that gave credit to hardness and discredited the elasticity.<\/p>\n There is yet another thing that Burns records that Islamabad never possessed: the relational capital<\/em> that builds up among individual diplomats that diminishes the transaction cost of all the challenging exchanges. Both the United States and Iran do not have embassies between their countries. Their officials do not have routine professional contact. Each encounter begins with a state of almost complete relational distrust, that is, every indeterminate signal, every slowness of reaction, every oblique formulation is viewed through the prism of the greatest distrust. Even as negotiations were going on, the assassination of Ali Larijani, a senior Iranian official and a figure who had been engaged in previous, negotiations, during ongoing diplomatic contact was, according to Al Jazeera, cited by Iranian officials as evidence of American bad faith.<\/p>\n Regardless of the objective reality, the impact on the relational substrate that Burns deems essential was disastrous. How Ghalibaf said that his delegation did not trust the opposing side was not the diplomacy of pretending to have no trust. It was a first-person manifestation of what occurs when the back-channel infrastructure of trust has not merely been missing, but violently so.<\/p>\n The concept of issue salience is presented in the International Negotiation in a Complex World by Brigid Starkey, Mark Boyer and Jonathan Wilkenfeld<\/strong> as the reason why seemingly technically feasible agreements never come to fruition. They argue that various parties attach radically different values to the same issues, and that a negotiated solution necessitates not only positional compromise, but cutting across these dissimilar salience hierarchies. The Islamabad negotiations was a classic example.<\/p>\n In the case of the United States, the nuclear problem was, according to Trump, 99 percent of it. All the rest, the Strait, reparations, and Lebanon, was negotiable only with Iran giving a positive commitment on nuclear weapons. To Iran, it was impossible to discuss nuclear issue without the issue of sovereignty: the right to enrich uranium to be used commercially was not just the issue of technical nature but the issue of national dignity and independence, particularly, after six weeks of war which had claimed the life of its supreme leader. A correspondent of Al Jazeera in Islamabad remarked that what the US is actually asking Iran now is that they renounce their right to any nuclear program, even as a way of medicine, and this formulation was experienced by Iran as unconditional surrender, not negotiation.<\/p>\n This is made complicated by the multilateral complexities. Starkey and colleagues point out that contemporary negotiations are seldom bilateral, and they have multiple parties with conflicting interests that complicate the fundamental dynamic. The fact that Israel continued attacking Lebanon in the ceasefire period was a direct blow to Iran and its capacity to agree with any agreement. Tehran had publicly given a condition of regional ceasefire, which would include Lebanon, as a precondition; Israel had declined, and the US had supported the Israeli decline.<\/p>\n This implied that despite American and Iranian negotiators possibly striking a compromise over the nuclear issue; the Lebanese front would have derailed the package. The first announcement of ceasefire by Pakistan had covered Lebanon; both the US and Israel had denied this. Since then the negotiating team of Iran was working under the circumstances that any yes was politically unsustainable back home.<\/p>\n The game theory approach of International Negotiation: Process and Strategies<\/em> by Ho-Won Jeong<\/strong> sheds some light on the issue that is often overlooked by the purely political analysis: states can be reasonable at each decision point and still be in disastrously poor joint outcomes<\/em>. What Jeong describes as strategic interaction with incomplete information, where both parties make moves based on their beliefs about the other party will accept results in spirals neither party wants<\/em>. It is this dynamic that is present in the Islamabad failure.<\/p>\n The US had come in with what Vance termed as a final and best offer, a maximalist opening which was a closing position. It is a dice throw that succeeds when the other player is desperate enough to accept conditions that he would otherwise refuse. Delegation of Iran already had reached Islamabad with a rejected 45-day ceasefire structure and a 10-point counter-proposal which contained war reparations and sovereignty over the Strait. These two introductory positions did not go together. They did not fit structurally and the two parties were aware of the fact.<\/p>\n The outcome was what Jeong calls a typical failure mode<\/em>: each party behaves in a way that can only be best in response to the other party, and no party can single-handedly move without incurring domestic political costs that are larger than the perceived value of a deal. Iran simply cannot tolerate zero nuclear enrichment, it amounts to giving in to a domestic audience that has only recently emerged out of a war that it would have framed as a battle against imperial aggression. The United States cannot tolerate Iranian rights to enrichment or Strait sovereignty – it is an indication that six weeks of war have not yielded anything lasting. Jeong also recognizes the timing of negotiations, what he term ripeness<\/em>, the state where each is suffering so badly that it is better to compromise than to keep on fighting.<\/p>\n The structure of Islamabad might have been premature. The enrichment capability that Iran had reestablished following the collapse of the JCPOA enabled it to gain leverage, which it was not yet ready to trade. The United States was still not clear about what victory would mean, even though it had accomplished a lot in terms of military objectives but failed to change the regime. Neither party in the terms of Jeong had gone far enough that the pain of the status quo was more than the cost of compromise was seen. A ripe moment was not yet at hand<\/em>.<\/p>\n The Islamabad Talks were not entirely unsuccessful. They resulted in the greatest direct interaction between the United States and Iran ever since 1979 revolution. They did not take away the mediation role of Pakistan; Trump and Iranian officials complimented Sharif and Asim Munir and this is an indication that the channel is still open. It was reported that the two factions had gone as far as a memorandum of understanding, more than either government officially acknowledged, with one official writing of when just inches away an Islamabad MoU we faced maximalism, goalposts, and blockade. A second round of talks was being discussed before the week was out.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, the five frames reviewed in this paper all lead to a chilling conclusion. The use of power that is not strategic but coercive will only result in Iranian resistance as opposed to Iranian concessions.<\/p>\n Political restrictions on both sides within the country are not going to be solved and will not be solved after one round of negotiations. The relations infrastructure of relational trust, which had never been robust between Washington and Tehran was further destroyed by the assassinations and violations of ceasefire preceding Islamabad.<\/p>\n The salience gap between the nuclear issue and Strait is not a misperception to be explained; it is a manifestation of incompatible core interests which are truly incompatible. And both groups of people are, as Jeong would put it, too young to bear the home price of true compromise.<\/p>\n The ceasefire is not the foundation but the floor. Whether it will be built on or not, will be determined by the ability of both sides to ultimately shift their actions of doing strength before their domestic audiences to acting to address issues in their strategic best interests. Islamabad showed which one they chose. The issue is whether there will be a second or third round, different, or whether the structural conditions which have created this failure will merely recreate themselves in another hotel lobby.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" US-Iran Negotiations: Five of the most thorough studies of international negotiation suggest that this debacle was inevitable and that Islamabad may yet be where future rounds of negotiations are doomed. What are those Five Lenses of Negotiations ?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":10473,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[176,170],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-geopolitics-articles","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedialectics.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedialectics.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedialectics.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedialectics.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedialectics.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10017"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thedialectics.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12368,"href":"https:\/\/thedialectics.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10017\/revisions\/12368"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedialectics.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedialectics.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedialectics.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedialectics.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Kissinger’s Warning: Agreements That Cannot Survive Their Own Politics<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nBurns and the Back Channel that can Never be Forgotten<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thedialectics.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Burns-300x164.png\")
<\/p>\nThe Salience Trap: When Both Parties are Correct about a variety of things<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thedialectics.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Brigid-Starkey-300x164.jpg\")
<\/p>\nRationality Trap: How both sides got locked in by Jeong<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nWhat is Islamabad Doing in Reality and What is Next?<\/h3>\n