Reflections | Did Iran Talks Fail Only Due To Nuke Distrust? | Sunanda K. Datta-Ray

Britain’s Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, claimed to be “fed up” with US President Donald Trump even before the peace talks in Islamabad hosted by Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif collapsed on Sunday morning. He wasn’t the only one. US vice-president J.D. Vance’s announcement from Islamabad made it clear that the United States felt its “best final offer” failed not because of any tangible evidence of Iran still pursuing its nuclear ambitions but because the Americans suspected that Tehran had not given up the idea.

At the same time, Mr Trump is on record as saying that last year’s US strikes “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. Mr Vance was only slightly less specific. Claiming not to know the difference between “severely damaged versus obliterated”, he declared then that American bombing had set Iran’s “nuclear programme back substantially”.

If, nevertheless, the talks foundered, it must have been because of some serious political reason why the Americans no longer saw any gain in trying to arrive at a rapprochement with the Iranians. Since Mr Sharif was widely suspected of being a proxy for China’s President Xi Jinping, could he have received a coded message of some kind from Beijing? It seems unlikely since Beijing is known to be carefully weighing up its options in Taiwan, and Cheng Li-wun, the Kuomintang leader, was recently in Beijing, Taiwan’s first sitting leader to visit China in a decade. Mr Xi has already made it abundantly clear that he will not tolerate any kind of independence for Taiwan.

Israel could be another and more likely source of instruction. As is well known, the Israelis refused to entertain the notion of a ceasefire even when the Iranians and Israelis laid down their arms for two weeks, and the Lebanese were begging for a similar truce. But Israel was relentlessly adamant, and the corpses of their Arab victims — no doubt passed off as Hezbollah terrorists — continued to litter the landscape even when Iranian and Lebanese soldiers were smoking their peace pipes and hoping that the war would not arise again.

Since the start of the conflict on February 28, the US, Israel, Iran and Hezbollah have carried out thousands of strikes within the Gulf region, killing thousands of people. Over 1.2 million people have been displaced in Lebanon alone. Many strikes, including against military objectives, have hit urban areas and infrastructure, producing high casualties, displacement, and environmental hazards. Iranian forces have also attacked or threatened to attack commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The curtailment of shipping, along with Israeli and Iranian attacks on major energy infrastructure, has contributed to significant global cost increases in oil, liquified natural gas, and other energy commodities, impacting not only the region, but globally. India, too, is a victim of this war in whose making it had no hand.

Neither did Britain, and Sir Keir recognises that Britain still has no national interest in pursuing a war in the Persian Gulf that none of the local powers seem to want in the first place and whose only real inspiration comes from an aggressively militant Israel whose Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may have personal as well as political reasons for maintaining complicated hostilities that make Brexit seem like child’s play. For Mr Trump, the British Prime Minister is another timidly optimistic Neville Chamberlain, who signed the 1938 Munich agreement that famously promised “peace in our time” and allowed Hitler to slice off Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. In the current war Sir Keir’s initial refusal to allow American bombers to target Iran from British soil indicated an independent spirit that did not survive for long.

Sadly, apart from the economic cost, the war has generated a quite unnecessary amount of ill-will among the participants except the jubilant Israelis. With a fraying of the “special relationship” which once entitled Brits to speak with affectionate dismissiveness of the Atlantic Ocean separating their islands from North America as “the pond”, Britons blame Mr Trump for their rising cost of living bills. Nor can Asians relish Mr Trump’s contemptuous references to Iran with which he will have “no deal except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” and which he threatens to obliterate, annihilate, or bomb back into the Stone Age.

Obviously, the US President’s humiliating barbs about Sir Keir’s statesmanship (or lack of it), attacks on Nato which, he suggests, should pay for Europe’s defence instead of relying on the US, and digs at the Royal Navy’s “toy” ships are also deeply wounding. Yet, Sir Keir has held fast to his friendship with Washington and even agreed to abrogate the transfer of the Chagos Islands because a realistic awareness of Britain’s reduced global role advises in favour of the old alliance until European security arrangements have been reinforced.

Despite the talks turning out to be an exercise in futility, two realities may have emerged. First, Iran under its obscurantist mullahs is still a regional force to reckon with. Second, whether India likes it or not, it is clear that Pakistan’s good offices enjoy the trust and goodwill of the US, the Muslim Ummah and, with some reservations, even of Israel.

Mr Trump and his party have taken a maximalist position from the start. In fact, regime change in Tehran has been on Washington’s mind for decades. In 1953, the American Central Intelligence Agency helped orchestrate a coup that ousted Iran’s first democratically elected government and reinstated the authoritarian pro-Western monarch, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi. Tehran has been in Washington’s sights ever since the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah and established an anti-American theocracy that the US accuses of nuclear ambitions.

Whether or not Iran is a potential nuclear threat, it suffices for the US that the ruling mullahs oppose Israel and its fervent Zionism. The boundaries of the proposed Jewish homeland (including parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia) are outlined in red in maps of “Greater (Eretz) Israel”. They include surrounding Muslim countries like Turkey, Iran and Yemen and a quotation from Genesis 15:18 KJV in the Old Testament, which reads: “In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying: ‘To your offspring I will give this land’.”

The Biblical quotation emphasiSes the deadly conceit that keeps Israel going. Far more to the point is the Iran foreign ministry’s response after Sunday’s collapse. Asked about the next step, the Iranian spokesperson replied that “diplomacy never comes to an end”. That mundane pragmatism might yet save West Asia.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and an author