The resumption of military strikes between the United States and Iran has brought the spectre of conflict back to the region and laid bare the hollow nature of the Memorandum of Understanding reached in Switzerland in mid-June.
A major weakness of the MoU was that Iranian and American officials did not even appear to share a common interpretation of the document they had negotiated and signed. Subsequent actions, on both sides, have merely added new layers of mutual distrust and acrimony to an already combustible situation and make the task of resuming dialogue all the more challenging.
For agreements in politically sensitive settings to succeed, they require all participants to trust that the parties are negotiating with at least a baseline degree of good faith, accepting that in any dialogue there may be spoilers on both sides who want the talks to falter. It is for this reason that successful agreements often take months, if not years, of painstaking preparation, usually far away for the glare of publicity, that enables officials to take the measure of each other and build up relationships of trust. A relevant example is the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland in April 1998 which was preceded by years of quiet outreach between British officials and the Irish Republican Army, followed by weeks of intense meetings which eventually produced a deal which has endured to this day.
The Northern Ireland example is illustrative of several factors which are essential to diplomatic success. Decades of IRA attacks in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland, and acts of violent reprisal by British security forces, meant that few people expected a diplomatic breakthrough as the 1990s began. Bitterness and hostility characterised both sides and had built up over many years. The IRA had blown up the hotel in Brighton where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and most of her cabinet, were staying in 1984, in an audacious attempt to eliminate the British government, and had fired mortar rounds on Downing Street in 1991 during a cabinet meeting chaired by Thatcher’s successor, John Major, forcing them to seek emergency shelter under the cabinet table.
And yet, while Tony Blair took the credit for the eventual passage of the Good Friday Agreement, it was John Major’s decision to respond to an initial ‘feeler’ from the IRA and begin a discreet dialogue which laid the groundwork for the talks which followed. This took political courage on the part of both sides, from the IRA to reach out in the beginning and for the British to engage, especially as there was no guarantee of success at the outset. A calculation that there was more to be gained by political means than violence was critical in creating the space for talks and for outflanking more hardline elements on both sides.
The initial backchannel took place in secret, and survived setbacks such as major bombings in London in 1992 and 1993 and also of a shopping centre in Manchester in 1996, which broke a ceasefire agreed in 1994. Once the agreement was signed, the trust that had built up during the process meant that the deal was robust enough to survive the Omagh bombing in July 1998 by a splinter group opposed to the agreement, an attack on a busy shopping street on a Saturday afternoon which caused one of the highest losses of life in the entire history of the Troubles. Widespread revulsion at the Omagh attack helped to drain residual support for a return to violence and cement the peace process in Northern Ireland.
Jonathan Powell was one of the key members of Tony Blair’s negotiating team in 1998 as the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff (his brother, Charles Powell, had been Margaret Thatcher’s most trusted foreign policy aide in the 1980s). After leaving Downing Street, along with Blair, in 2007, Powell set up a mediation practice and engaged in hotspots such as Columbia before returning to government as Keir Starmer’s National Security Advisor in 2024. Media reports in the United Kingdom have suggested that Powell was tangentially involved in the Omani-led attempts earlier this year to secure a US-Iranian agreement over Teheran’s nuclear program that would avert the war which began on February 28.
It will take far more than individuals of Powell’s calibre to restart the US-Iran talks and begin to rebuild confidence that has repeatedly been shattered and is now non-existent. Verbal jousting has taken place on both sides amid accusations that each party has used the period of the fragile ceasefire to take stock and plan for the next phase of conflict. Both in Iran and in the US policy hawks have taken succour from the failure of the memorandum of understanding to argue that it should have never been made. The hollowing out of the moderate middle ground has been years in the making, arguably stemming from the first Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018 and the Iranian regime’s ramping up on enrichment thereafter.
The P5+1 negotiations with Iran that culminated in the JCPOA lasted for more than eighteen months and were themselves preceded by eight rounds of secret talks between senior US and Iranian officials in Oman. These took place in 2012 and 2013 and one of the U.S. officials involved, Bill Burns (who later became Director of the CIA in the Biden administration), recalled in his memoir (aptly entitled The Back Channel: American Diplomacy in a Disordered World) how the Iranian delegation, led by Abbas Araghchi, the current foreign minister, ‘would sometimes confide that they had a Supreme Leader who was just waiting to say “I told you so” and prove that the Americans could not be trusted’.
Those words were written in 2019 and reflected a conversation held years earlier. So much has happened since to add fuel to the flames of accusations of bad faith on all sides. How to pull back from the brink is both an immediate and urgent challenge for the region and the world.
- The writer is a leading scholar specialising in Gulf politics and international political economy, and a fellow at the Baker Institute and co-director of the Middle East Energy Roundtable.