The Fog of Diplomacy: Creating a False Picture of the Iran Nuclear Talks

The Fog of Diplomacy: Creating a False Picture of the Iran Nuclear Talks

08/05/14

Gareth Porter

Diplomacy, Nonproliferation, Nuclear Weapons, Security,

"Both sides were making demands going well beyond what they knew they would accept in the end, hoping to make the more moderate demands more acceptable."

The extension of the Iran nuclear negotiations for another four months surprised many in the political elite and the news media. The consensus was that the talks were failing, because as U.S. officials had said repeatedly, Iran was refusing to agree to reduce its enrichment capabilities radically to assure the P5+1 that the nuclear program was solely for peaceful purposes.

That U.S. official line has shaped media coverage of the talks for months. But that picture of the state of the negotiations assumed that public statements about the positions of the two sides reflected the whole reality of the negotiations. What was actually happening was that both sides were making demands going well beyond what they knew they would accept in the end, hoping to make the more moderate demands more acceptable.

The same diplomatic maneuvering is practiced in any series of international negotiations, but in this case, the fog of diplomacy was more dense than usual. One reason is that the Obama administration felt that it had to manage the public discourse about the negotiations in the United States to avoid losing control of public opinion to the pro-Israeli right in Congress.

But the Obama administration had also been using a range of methods to put pressure on Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program since Obama’s first days in office. Obama had given his blessing to the NSA-CIA-Israeli plan for the “Olympic Games” cyberattacks on Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant as a form of pressure on Iran’s policy; the administration had peddled the line that it couldn’t control Israel much longer unless Iran entered into serious negotiations, and it had produced the sanctions regime to deprive Iran of much of its oil export earnings.

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