Why Did Diplomacy Fail Between the US and Iran?

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - "Significant progress" had been made during talks in Geneva, Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi said on Friday. His country mediated negotiations between the United States and Iran, with the latter offering assurances that it would not seek to acquire nuclear material for the production of an atomic bomb. This commitment was a "very important breakthrough" that had "never been achieved any time before," al-Busaidi told US broadcaster CBS News, in addition to making a similar statement on X.

The day before, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had also highlighted "progress" and "mutual understanding" in a post on X.

But early on Saturday morning, the US and Israel attacked Iran. US President Donald Trump justified the airstrikes by citing "threats" from Tehran. The US military has commenced "major combat operations" in Iran, Trump said. "Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime," Trump said in a video message.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a similar argument. "This murderous terrorist regime must not be allowed to arm itself with nuclear weapons that would enable it to threaten all of humanity," he said, also in a video message.

A Misunderstanding?

Against this backdrop, there are now questions about whether there were fundamental misunderstandings in the analysis of talks, and how plausible the official reasons for the attack might be.

But Marcus Schneider, head of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's Beirut-based Regional Peace and Security Project in the Middle East, considers this kind of confusion unlikely. "I don't think it was a misunderstanding," he said. Instead, it was "a last-ditch attempt by the Omanis to prevent this war, which is now beginning, from happening." The Americans had expressed "significantly less enthusiasm" about the negotiations, he added.

Diba Mirzaei, an Iran expert at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg, also doubts that there were fundamentally different perceptions of the talks. "I don't think these negotiations have been interpreted differently," she said. Instead, the Omani foreign minister speaking so strongly about potentially reaching a better agreement than in 2015 showed "what is actually at stake here."

'Extremely Different' Positions

Schneider pointed out that each country's position varied greatly from the outset. "Fundamentally, the negotiations could never have been successful because the positions were so extremely different," he said. What Washington demanded was "tantamount to complete surrender" — something Iran was not prepared to do.

What's more, Oman's chief diplomat would be unlikely to go public without solid evidence, Mirzaei said. "I believe he went to the press to make it clear once again what an opportunity the US would be missing if it attacked Iran," she added.

Nevertheless, Mirzaei was not surprised by the attack. Given that the US had been deploying large numbers of warships and military equipment to the region for weeks, it was "implausible" that this was merely a show of force, she said.

Misjudgment by the US?

Schneider said that the US may have gone into the talks with a false assessment. "It seems to me that there was also a misjudgment regarding the nature and character of this regime," he said. Washington apparently expected Tehran to give up in response to the massive military build-up. "But such an ideologically driven regime is not prepared to do such a thing," he said.

But Schneider also rejected Trump's claim that Iran poses an immediate threat to the US. "It seems to me that the truth of this statement is not particularly high," he said, calling a plan to attack the US by Iran "implausible." If a full-scale war were to break out, it would be a "so-called war of choice," he said. That is, a war undertaken by the US "because it wants to wage it."

Strategy of Escalation?

"These were serious talks with the aim of negotiating a new agreement — or, in Trump's words, a 'better deal,'" Mirzaei said. But experience has shown that the US president relies on a strategy of escalation, increasing pressure to encourage concessions. It remains to be seen whether this logic will lead to a viable agreement in the current circumstances, she added.

Schneider considers Israel's initial attack, followed by that of the US shortly thereafter, to be a tactical choice, and one that is difficult to separate politically. Such a scenario had been discussed in Washington with a view toward the skeptical MAGA base. But the attack appears to have been coordinated. "Basically, one can assume that both sides attacked at almost the same time," with the Israelis striking just about "two seconds earlier," he said.

Mirzaei predicted that a difficult situation will unfold as a result. "The problem is that Iran is not Venezuela. Iran is also not the Iraq of 2003," she said. Trump has maneuvered the US and the region "into a situation where an agreement can only be reached with the greatest difficulty."

Read: Iran Names Interim Leadership After Khamenei Killed

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