DC Edit | Despite Collapse, US & Iran Must Continue Peace Efforts
Talks fail after 21 hours, leaving the fragile ceasefire hanging by a thread
The collapse of the peace talks after a marathon 21 hours spent including in trilateral meets in which the Americans and the Iranians came face to face for the first time in decades, is not good news. It leaves the two-week ceasefire agreed upon between the US, Israel and Iran in limbo, and the world wary of the situation slipping into war again.
The Americans aver that Iran chose not to accept US President Donald Trump’s “flexible” offer, but Iran may have found certain conditions excessive — giving up the 430 kg of near weapons-grade uranium and reopening the Strait of Hormuz that it has closed as a way of hitting back at the aggression of its enemies.
Iran’s demand for the release of around $27 billion of frozen revenue may have been a third condition that was found to be insurmountable as US vice-president J.D. Vance and his negotiating team and the Iranian delegation headed by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and foreign minister Abbas Araghchi left Islamabad on Sunday.
It would be difficult to resolve the fundamental point of dispute about Iran’s ambition to possess a nuclear bomb. Can any country impose its will on another seeking to possess a nuclear weapon for deterrence? Consider the plight of Iran whose uranium enrichment facilities have been bombed twice in two years and whose nation has faced indiscriminate bombing that has killed at least 1,700 civilians including 250 schoolchildren.
Where Iran loses some of the positives it earned in the war as a victim standing up to American imperialism and Israeli expansionism is in using as leverage the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial maritime passage for at least a fifth of the world’s oil and gas besides other goods and materials. It is not the US or Israel that suffer so much from the closing of the Strait as much as the rest of the world which is bearing the brunt of the choking of the passage of oil and the consequent rise in prices.
As unacceptable as the US bullying of Iran is regarding nukes, Iran’s blocking of an international waterway over which the world has the right of passage is deplorable. Unless the US and Iran give up rigidity on core demands, the path to peace will be littered with failures. Reining in Israel regarding the Hezbollah in Lebanon might even be possible if the US and Iran find a way to keep talking and arrive at a basic understanding that will at least keep the ceasefire alive.
There is no knowing if the war will resume or Mr Trump, who desperately needed an off ramp after his Iranian misadventure at the behest of Israel sputtered regarding the achieving of war objectives, will begin carrying out some of his foul-mouthed threats to erase the Iranian civilisation. And Israel, which used the ceasefire interim to consolidate territorial intrusion into Lebanon, would be standing by with its finger on the trigger if action were to begin against Iran again.
To resume the talks would be in everyone’s interest including, most of all, the Gulf Arab states that have suffered heavy collateral damage because Iran cannot reach the US in any retaliatory launching of missiles and drones. It would be in Iran’s interest too to stave off what more damage bombing can do after having taken 11,000 targeted hits since February 28 and the ceasefire that kicked in on April 7.
