Middle East crisis live: Witkoff and Kushner head to Pakistan for Iran negotiations

Diary Entry

The report from the East arrives: the Iranian minister lands in Islamabad, but declares he will not speak to the American envoy. Meanwhile, the Kushner and Witkoff party travels to Pakistan. I see the old play performed with new actors. This is not negotiation; it is the positioning of forces before fortune’s wind changes. The Iranian declares he will not negotiate directly - a public show of strength for his domestic audience, the posture of the lion. But he is in the same city. The channels will exist. The fox’s work begins.

Consider the effectual truth: The United States, through private citizens with the ear of a former prince, seeks to arrange matters. These are not official diplomats; they are something between an emissary and a mercenary. Their power derives entirely from their connection to a man out of office. They fight not for the republic’s cause, but for their own influence and perhaps for a deal. Mercenaries can be useful for opening a gate, but they cannot hold the fortress. If an agreement is reached, who will enforce it? The regular army of the state, or these hired hands?

Fortune in that region is a flooding river. The Israeli strikes continue, the ground trembles. Any settlement attempted now must account for that violence, which is the current of fortune. Do these private envoys have the virtù to channel it, or are they building their levee of words in one place while the storm breaks in another? A prince - or a republic - must wield both the lion’s force and the fox’s cunning simultaneously. To negotiate while war rages elsewhere is to be only the fox, believing clever words can disarm the wolf. It cannot.

I see the shadow of Cesare Borgia in the Marche. He used intermediaries to lull his enemies, then struck with his own troops. Here, the intermediaries are present, but where are the troops? Where is the consistent, actionable power? This is a performance, a hope that fortune will remain calm long enough for a deal to be struck. But fortune does not wait on the drafts of private men. The republic, were it functioning, would integrate its arms and its laws, its public resolve and its private cunning, into a single, formidable will. This piecemeal approach - the private fox sent ahead while the public lion roars elsewhere - is the strategy of a divided house. And divided houses fall.

Diary Entry - June 12th, 1852

The papers speak of negotiations in Islamabad - men crossing borders with briefcases full of words, while the guns still speak their own language. I have seen this dance before: the solemn declarations of diplomacy, the careful distances maintained between envoys, all while the machinery of war grinds on uninterrupted.

What does it mean to negotiate when one party refuses to sit at the same table? The Iranian minister lands in Islamabad, yet his ministry declares - before the ink is dry on the announcement - that no direct talks with the Americans will occur. This is not negotiation; it is theater. And theater, as I have observed, is damaging precisely because it pretends to be something it is not.

I think of the weavers in Manchester, whose livelihoods depend on the cotton trade - cotton that moves through ports now choked with uncertainty. The men in Islamabad speak of peace, but the IDF strikes continue. The weavers do not read diplomatic dispatches; they read the price of raw cotton, and they read the empty chairs at their supper tables when the mills slow.

If war is the absence of commerce, then peace cannot be the absence of war - it must be the presence of something better. These envoys move like chess pieces, but the game is not won by posturing. It is won when the loom runs, when the bread is bought, when the ledger balances.

Until then, the words are just words - and the guns are still talking.

The dispatches from the Middle East speak of negotiations, of envoys dispatched and borders crossed. Witkoff and Kushner, names that echo with a certain kind of power, are sent to broker peace, or perhaps, to impose it. They are the architects, designing a new arrangement, a new structure for nations to inhabit. But I find myself asking, as always, about the materials they use, and what life these materials possess once assembled.

They speak of Iran, of Israel, of the IDF’s strikes. These are not mere abstractions; these are entities, nations, peoples, each with their own pulse, their own history, their own deeply felt grievances and aspirations. When one constructs a peace, or even a cessation of hostilities, what becomes of the living components? Do they fit neatly into the blueprint, or do they chafe against the new lines drawn for them?

The designers of these diplomatic frameworks, these grand bargains, often see only the lines on the map, the agreements on paper. They declare their work complete, a solution “deployed.” But the nations, the communities, the individuals who must live within these new strictures - their experience is the true test. What is “peace” to the statesman in a distant capital is often a new form of constraint, a different kind of burden, for those on the ground. The unintended consequences, they call them. But for those who live under the shadow of these agreements, these are not unintended; they are simply the next chapter of their existence, written by hands that will not bear the weight of the words. The creator walks away, but the creation endures, and often, it suffers.