U.S. Vice President JD Vance at the Lake Lucerne Summit in Switzerland, June 21.Urs Flueeler/The Canadian Press
Move over, Clausewitz. We are in Rashomon territory.
Carl von Clausewitz was a 19th-century Prussian political theorist known for his aphorism that war is diplomacy by other means. That was basically the American-Israeli thinking behind the Iran war: engage in hostilities to win concessions that could not be gained by diplomacy.
The Clausewitz period of the Iran imbroglio is over, at least tentatively. With negotiations continuing in Switzerland, the situation has moved into its Rashomon phase. That’s the term, derived from a classic 1950 Japanese film, for the clashing perspectives of different parties to the same event.
And that is what is going on now, as U.S. leaders claim that substantial progress has been made to curb and perhaps even eliminate the Iranian nuclear-weapon project while the other side is saying no such agreements have been made, suggesting that none will be.
As a result, the guideline to this affair might come from Chico Marx, who in the 1933 film Duck Soup uttered a phrase that has been corrupted into “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”
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This is a case of both sides saying what they want to believe − or at least what they want their own people to believe. To an American audience, that the war designed to bring an end to the Iranian nuclear threat has been redeemed by a fierce barrage of aerial attacks and has won dramatic concessions from Tehran. To an Iranian audience, that its theocratic leadership, which has led the country to a draw or perhaps even a victory over a superpower, has not abandoned the drive to the ultimate weapon.
There is little common ground in the colliding accounts.
After discussions in Switzerland with his Iranian counterpart, the chief U.S. negotiator, Vice-President JD Vance, claimed “a major milestone for the American people and the first step in permanently ending a nuclear weapons program in Iran.” Iranian officials countered that they had agreed to no such thing. President Donald Trump then escalated the American claim by writing on Truth Social Tuesday that Iran had agreed to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct inspections of Iranian nuclear sites.
“If they did not agree to this, there would be no further negotiations,” he wrote. “Based on this and other major concessions being made by Iran, I have agreed to allow the Hormuz Strait to remain OPEN, with no further Naval Blockade.”
The two sides can’t both be right, but they can both say they are right.
And when this episode is over, there surely will be disagreements over just whose interpretation of the agreement is accurate. Even if they come to an agreement on what they have agreed upon, that won’t mean that the provisions of the accord will be honoured or that either side will tell the truth about it.
Iran has repeatedly reneged on earlier agreements to suspend or end its nuclear ambitions. Mr. Trump last year claimed the destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapon laboratories, only to mount a war eight months later to eliminate what he said had been obliterated.
Perhaps the two sides are moving to a circumstance that mirrors the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué about the status of Taiwan, signed during Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China. In that statement, each side interpreted the intentionally vague language of the document differently.
The result was that the Americans believed they had not undermined the independence of Taiwan, while the Chinese believed they had asserted their sovereignty over the island.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance (R) looks on next to U.S. President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, as Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi (L) shakes hands with Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, before the start of a quadrilateral meeting between the U.S., Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar at the Lake Lucerne Summit.Pool/Getty Images
“All this reminds me of a kind of literary criticism,” said Henry Hart, an English professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and the poet laureate emeritus of Virginia. “Readers interpret and, in a way, ‘create’ a text according to their ideas and feelings. People regularly put their own spin on words. Every national leader does the same thing. Even doctors interpret the same test results differently.”
Iran has flourished in ambiguity, and if both sides eventually leave these negotiations with fundamentally different views about whether Iran will set out to build a nuclear weapon, then the entire enterprise − the war, then the negotiations − may have been for naught. Mr. Trump has repeatedly insisted that he will not permit Iran to possess such a weapon.
Hours after the emergence of the conflicting perceptions of the nuclear issue, the U.S. Senate, by a 50-48 vote, approved a nonbinding resolution opposing further U.S. military operations against Iran − another indication of domestic opposition to Mr. Trump’s vow to order new strikes if the issue isn’t resolved. Four Republicans voted for the measure.
The lesson from this episode may come from an unusual source, the 19th-century English writer Lewis Carroll, whose well-loved Through the Looking-Glass provides 21st-century guidance in this exchange:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean − neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master − that’s all.”
That remains the question in Iran, thus far unanswered.