On: Middle East crisis live: Witkoff and Kushner head to Pakistan for Iran negotiati
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.