Doha, the glittering pearl of the Gulf, a city where air conditioning is measured in megatons and diplomacy is served with extra mint tea. Into this diplomatic humidor waltzed a brace of US envoys, their trouser presses set to ‘stern’, their facial expressions calibrated to ‘we mean business, but we’d also like a mezze platter’. The mission: talk about talking about talking. The result: they sat in one room, the Iranians sat in another, and the ghost of John Kerry wept softly into a gin and tonic.
Yes, dear reader, the circus has rolled into Qatar. American officials, no doubt chosen for their ability to maintain a perfectly impassive face while being told that ‘proportional response’ means launching a drone strike on a wedding, have gathered to hold talks with European intermediaries. The Iranians, those masters of the long game and the even longer beard, are also present, presumably in a room decorated with portraits of Ayatollahs looking like they’ve just smelt a bad kebab.
The official line from Foggy Bottom is that the United States is ‘prepared to engage with Iran through third parties’. A translation: we will not deign to sit at the same table as those who shout ‘Death to America’ over breakfast, but we’ll happily chat with a man from the EU who will then shout at a Persian rug seller who will then whisper to a man in a turban. It’s diplomatic Chinese whispers, and the prize is the survival of the JCPOA, that fragile vase of an accord that everyone keeps pushing off the shelf.
Meanwhile, the Iranians, who have spent forty years perfecting the art of negotiating while enriching uranium, have issued a statement that translates roughly as: ‘We will consider your rejection of direct talks as a sign of weakness, and we will continue to spin centrifuges until our mullahs see a sign in their yoghurt.’ The subtext is as subtle as a brick through a window.
We must pause here to appreciate the sheer theatre of it all. The envoys will sit in airless rooms, their smiles as brittle as a Saudi social media influencer’s veneers. They will talk about ‘confidence-building measures’, which actually means ‘we will stop doing things we shouldn’t have been doing in the first place, and you must do the same, but please start first’. They will talk about ‘transparency’, which means ‘show us your secret underground facilities, but we’ll keep our own hidden in the Nevada desert, no hard feelings’.
And what of the great white whale of this saga, the nuclear deal? The deal that the last US president compared to a box of chocolates and then threw into a woodchipper. The current president wants to rewrap the box, but he will not touch the chocolates directly. No, he will have a Swiss chocolatier examine them, who will then report to a French diplomat, who will then tell an American that the chocolates are probably fine, maybe a bit pistachio-scented.
The real tragedy, as ever, is the great, gasping public. The people of Iran, who risk tear gas and worse to demand their own freedom, are treated to this pantomime. The people of America, too busy arguing about whether to wear masks in supermarkets, do not care. The people of Qatar, who already have everything, watch from their air-conditioned SUVs and wonder if the diplomats would like another five-star hotel, perhaps with a private beach?
In the end, Doha will be just another footnote in the long, sad book of non-engagement. The envoys will return to Washington, their blazers unrumpled, their lies unchallenged. The Iranians will go back to their propaganda machine, which will produce a new poster showing a suit-clad American shaking hands with a scorpion. And somewhere, in a pub in Westminster, a man will raise a glass and mutter: ‘They should have just bought a round and argued over the bill.’
