U.S.-Iran negotiations in Islamabad fail to bring war to a decisive end

Open this photo in gallery:

The American Civil War ended in a grocer’s parlour in the quiet Virginia hamlet of Appomattox Court House, where, in soiled battle fatigues, the victorious General Ulysses S. Grant permitted the defeated Confederate soldiers to keep their sidearms for protection on their way home and their horses for spring planting once they got there.

The First World War ended in a railroad dining car in the French Forest of Compiègne – the same luxury carriage that Adolf Hitler insisted on using 22 years later to formalize the defeat of France in the early phase of the Second World War.

There was no such decisive ending to the Iran war in the negotiations in the Islamabad Serena Hotel, which U.S. Vice-President JD Vance, an avowed opponent of the conflict from the start, departed en route to a hesitant thumbs-up on the outdoor boarding stairs of the Boeing C-32 that sped him home, no writ of agreement in hand, to Washington.

Analysis: U.S., Iran’s historic peace talks a promising step despite failure to agree on terms

That glimpse of an American vice-president, disheartened but defiant, at the doors of the iconic robin’s-egg blue-and-white Air Force Two jetliner at Nur Khan airbase symbolized the hard and harsh reality of the talks meant to bring a conclusive end to the Iran war – which in a way is continuing with the blockade, generally considered an act of war, that Donald Trump announced Sunday of the Strait of Hormuz.

There was no final agreement because neither side was sufficiently dominant that it could dictate a peace.

That verdict may be at odds with the White House and Pentagon, where a torrent of statistics have been mobilized: 80 per cent of air-defence systems destroyed, 150 ships sunk, Iran’s air force “wiped out,” in the characterization of Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. That deluge of data permitted Mr. Trump to declare “total and complete victory.”

Iran’s leaders and perhaps its populace are sufficiently convinced that survival in a facedown with the world’s most powerful military is a moral victory at the very least, a real one when it came to the ability of its Islamabad negotiators to refuse to concede the elements that would comprise an indisputable American triumph. Those would include the elimination of Iran’s nuclear-weapons effort, extraction of its uranium, an end to its proxy wars, and – this wasn’t contemplated before the war but now has emerged as another factor – free maritime passage in the vital strait, the waterway for a fifth of the world’s energy.

“Winning on the ground or destroying one’s enemies doesn’t mean you’ve won the war,” Margaret MacMillan, the former provost of Trinity College, Toronto, and a University of Toronto historian considered the leading authority on war and postwar negotiations, said in an interview. “It depends on whether your adversaries are willing to give up, and Iran doesn’t seem to be ready to do that. And it’s unrealistic to think something as complicated as ending a war can be accomplished in two days between people who don’t know the brief.”

Open this photo in gallery:

Even the fact that the non-negotiables were negotiated suggests the relentless barrage of American bombs and missiles didn’t produce the unalloyed victory that Mr. Trump courted with his “little excursion.”

The rhetoric that emerged from the negotiations underlined the failure of the American bombardment to pound Iran into submission.

The United States had been “unable to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation in this round of talks,” said Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Speaker of Iran’s Parliament. “Now it is time for it to decide whether it can earn our trust or not.”

The defeated Germans at Compiègne weren’t in a position to demand the Allies earn their trust. Nor was that conceivable when Hitler supervised the formalization of the French capitulation while sitting in the chair occupied two decades earlier by the triumphant Marshal Ferdinand Foch.

The fact that, in these negotiations, the non-negotiables remained non-starters for the side that seemed vanquished added to the debate.

Opinion: We need to embrace the art of diplomacy, not the art of the deal

Such questions over why wars – whether real or metaphorical – were lost or became stalemates can have important implications, seldom good.

The debate over whether Imperial Germany was the victim of a “stab-in-the-back” at the Versailles negotiations contributed to the rise of Nazism, with tragic consequences. A similar debate in the 1950s over “Who Lost China?” after the ascendancy of Mao Zedong poisoned American domestic politics for a generation.

In this case, the danger to Mr. Trump and the Republicans is that the Iran war, already controversial in conservative circles, leads to splits in the MAGA movement or in the wider GOP.

An ominous accompaniment to the failure of negotiations in Islamabad came from Jerusalem, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated the obvious: “The battle is not yet over.”

What form that battle takes – in the broader front that includes Lebanon as well as in and over Iran – is the great unknown growing out of the great unresolved after 21 hours of talks in Islamabad.

Trump says Strait of Hormuz blockade to begin ‘immediately’ after talks end without agreement

Mr. Vance said upon departing that Iran had “chosen not to accept our terms.” The statement of the Iranian Foreign Ministry may be just as important an indicator of the impasse. “The heavy loss of our great elders, dear ones, and fellow countrymen,” it said, “has made our response to pursue the Iranian nation’s interests and rights firmer than ever before.”

Whether in Farsi, Urdu or English, these statements make clear that these negotiations did not lead to capitulation, of either side.