On the return to negotiation with Iran

The Hill reports that President Trump, having pursued waves of military strikes without producing a durable settlement, is now turning back toward diplomacy with Iran — though, the outlet notes, Iran has shown its own reluctance to resume on the terms the administration has proposed. I will not pretend to know the precise military or technical details of what passed between the parties. But the shape of this moment is one I recognize entirely.

Force, wielded without a legal framework to contain it, rarely produces the peace its authors imagine. I learned this in the long, exhausting negotiations that ended the Revolutionary War, and I learned it again in the years I spent in London working out what history has been pleased to call the Jay Treaty with Britain — a document I never regarded as perfect, but one that bought time, preserved commerce, and kept two nations from a conflict neither could afford. The lesson is not that force is never warranted. The lesson is that force must be calibrated to a diplomatic end, and that end must be named before the first shot is fired.

What concerns me here — reasoning, I must be plain, from the lead alone, as inference rather than recollection — is the sequence. When a party returns to the negotiating table after military action has failed to compel agreement, it returns in a weakened posture. The other side knows that the coercive instrument has been tried and has not achieved its object. The question then becomes what consideration, in the legal sense — what mutual exchange of obligations — can form the basis of a durable compact. A treaty entered under pressure, on either side, without clear and verifiable terms, is not a settlement; it is a postponement.

The treaty power, as I argued in Federalist No. 64, requires that those who exercise it bring to the work a deliberateness that the passions of the moment will always resist. The Senate's role in ratification is not a procedural nuisance; it is the mechanism by which the public faith is engaged with sufficient solemnity that a successor administration cannot simply dissolve what was promised. Any framework reached with Iran — whether called a deal, an agreement, or an understanding — will only hold if it is structured as a binding international obligation, with verification mechanisms that do not depend on the good faith of a single administration on either side.

I have no opinion on the internal politics of Iran, which I could not have known and would not pretend to analyze. But I will say this: when the lead of a news report tells us that Iran "has other ideas," the statesman's task is not to treat that as an affront, but as information — information about what the other party requires before it will accept an obligation it will actually keep. Diplomatic vanity, the insistence that the other side simply yield, has never produced a treaty worth the parchment it was written on.

What should be done is plain in principle, however difficult in execution. The parties should define, with precision, what each undertakes — not in the broad language of intent, but in the narrow language of obligation. Those terms should be submitted to whatever review process each constitutional order requires. And the result should be measured not by the warmth of the announcement, but by whether, five years hence, both parties are still bound by what they signed. That is the only test a treaty has ever passed or failed.