Whatever minimal influence I may enjoy doesn’t seem to have had any effect in clarifying things, and writers with much larger readerships and more status don’t seem interested in the subject. So let’s have another go, at the risk of perhaps repeating myself a little. (For the above reasons I’ll keep this a little shorter than usual.) Negotiations, then, happen when there is a problem that two or more sides want to resolve, or an objective that they share, at least partly. Negotiations are a structured process of refining that shared objective, narrowing or preferably eliminating differences, and if possible producing an agreement, followed by a text that both sides are happy with.

Negotiations often take place in rounds, where the partners discuss a problem or an objective and progressively approach a solution. There will be bargaining, lots of informal work in what diplomats call the “margins,” possibly some histrionics and threats to the outcome of the negotiations, and, with luck, a final agreement which may be in the form of an actual treaty, or a politically binding accord, or just a communiqué. As I have explained, documents produced in this way are not magic: they are simply texts that apply until they don’t.

In turn, this is because the texts themselves have to concretise an underlying level of agreement between the parties. If that agreement no longer exists, then the text becomes useless operationally. By contrast, informal arrangements that are never written down may persist for a long time, because they suit the interests of the parties involved.

But you wouldn’t think this from the media and pundit coverage of the two rounds of discussions (not “negotiations,” please) in Islamabad, and a possible third round being discussed as I write. We’ve seen headlines like NEW WAR FEARS AS PEACE TALKS FAIL or PEACE HOPES DASHED AS US WALKS OUT, or even LAST CHANCE FOR PEACE AS NEW TALKS PROPOSED. Now its a commonplace of journalism that headlines are written by sub-editors, not the authors of the story themselves, and in this kind of case it’s clear that the different sets of interns haven’t been communicating with each other vey well.

But let’s just take a moment to set out what the objectives of the parties in this crisis actually are, and then see how they relate to this discourse of alleged desperate attempts to avoid a resumption of hostilities. The US (present) and Israel (present by proxy) want to damage and if possible destroy Iran as a functioning state. For the US this is revenge for nearly fifty years of humiliation, dating from the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran and the disastrous failure of the subsequent rescue mission, as well as Iranian attempts to frustrate US policies in the Levant.

For Israel the objective is to destroy the only country standing between them and their domination of the region. (The US also represents this objective vicariously.) The Iranians obviously want to prevent all this, but they also want an end to sanctions and isolation, and they want to establish themselves as the unquestioned dominant local power, through the eviction of the US from the region. (Yes, I know it’s more complicated than that, but it will do for now.) Now by any standards, the two (or three) countries have positions that are about as distant from each other as you can imagine. If you were the Pakistanis, skilful diplomats as they are, how would you even begin to construct an agenda, or organise proximity talks, to somehow accommodate these differences?

In reality, all that can be discussed is short-term, limited measures that might temporarily suit the US and Iran, and might possibly be acceptable to Israel. In reality, though, the problem is worse than that, because the two/three sides are not even approaching these “negotiations,” with any common view of what they are, or should be. The fundamental distinction is that Iran does not need to negotiate but is content to do so because time is on its side.

The US desperately needs a way out, and negotiations would be the normal mechanism for this. But negotiations in the traditional sense would lead effectively to a US surrender and neither the US Senate nor Israel would tolerate that. Therefore all that the US can do is pretend to negotiate, posing demands it knows to