Iran's foreign minister Araghchi is traveling to Russia for diplomatic talks amid the war against his country, after planned talks with the US in Pakistan were canceled.
There is a gate across this road. The modern man says, “I see no reason for it; let us remove it.” The wiser man says, “If you see no reason for it, I will not let you remove it. Go away and think. When you can tell me why it is here, I may let you destroy it.”
We find ourselves currently observing a most peculiar demolition of a gate in the high politics of the East. The gate in question is the diplomatic buffer - that delicate, often tedious, and frequently invisible arrangement of neutral ground and cancelled appointments that prevents the various powers of the world from colliding with the suddenness of two locomotives on a single track. We are told that the planned talks in Pakistan, intended to serve as a sort of diplomatic airlock between the United States and Iran, have been cancelled. The gate has been unhinged. And in its place, we see the sudden, heavy movement of a new, much more solid structure: the deepening alignment between Tehran and Moscow.
The modern political analyst, with his charts and his theories of “great-power positioning,” looks at this and sees a simple shift in the wind. He sees a vacuum being filled. He sees the failure of one dialogue as the inevitable precursor to the success of another. But he fails to see that the “failure” of the American-Iranian dialogue is not merely a lack of conversation; it is the collapse of a specific kind of fence. Diplomacy is often nothing more than the art of maintaining a fence that keeps the enemies from touching, even if they are still shouting insults over it. When the talks in Pakistan were cancelled, the fence was not merely moved; it was trampled.
The tragedy of the modern intellectual is that he believes that if a fence is not producing a signed treaty, it is not doing anything at all. He looks at the cancelled talks in Pakistan and sees a void. He does not realise that the very purpose of such a failed or stalled meeting is often to maintain the idea of a boundary. To cancel the meeting is to remove the boundary of the “possible.” Once the boundary of the possible is removed, the only thing left is the boundary of the inevitable.
And what is the inevitable in this case? It is the sight of the Iranian Foreign Minister, Mr. Araghchi, travelling not to a neutral, perhaps even slightly boring, middle ground in Pakistan, but to the robust and unmistakable embrace of Russia. This is not a mere change of scenery; it is a change of architecture. We are moving from the architecture of the “negotiable” to the architecture of the “aligned.”
The clever people in Washington will tell us that this is a strategic setback, a movement of pieces on a board. They will speak of “implications for regional security” as if security were something one could manufacture in a laboratory through the correct arrangement of alliances. They do not see that by allowing the diplomatic fences of the middle ground to decay, they have inadvertently encouraged the building of much more formidable and much less negotiable walls.
The paradox is this: in the attempt to avoid the “unproductive” friction of stalled diplomacy, the world is moving toward a much more “productive” and much more dangerous friction of direct alignment. We are trading the annoying, stuttering, and often inconclusive fence of the diplomat for the heavy, iron-clad, and utterly unyielding gate of the military bloc.
The common sense of the matter is that when you stop trying to talk to your neighbour across a fence, you eventually find yourself building a wall to keep him out. The tragedy is that once the wall is built, you will find that you have also locked yourself in. The diplomats in Pakistan may have failed to find a way to talk, but in their failure, they have removed the only thing that was keeping the collision from being a certainty. We are now watching the heavy machinery of history move into the gap, and the most terrifying thing about it is that no one seems to have noticed that the gate was there to begin with.