Behind the scenes at Iran talks (New Yorker)

[MBS]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/tehrans-promise

. . .Iran’s public clearly wants reëntry. A recent poll found that fifty-seven per cent favored a nuclear deal. Only fifteen per cent opposed one. Three-quarters also supported more talks between Tehran and Washington, more educational and cultural exchanges with the United States, and much more trade.
. ..

The Iran deal, announced on July 14th, capped a dozen years of secret overtures, false starts, clandestine meetings, and unpublished correspondence between Washington and Tehran. Despite an eventual rapport between U.S. and Iranian envoys, the talks nearly collapsed at least five times in the final nine months. There were many quarrelsome late-night sessions.
“The Americans are much better carpet merchants than any Iranian could dream of!” the Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, told me, during a troubled period in the final weeks.
The Iranians, a senior State Department official at the negotiations said, “are quite good at trying to get you to pay for what you got—twice.”

Years earlier, Secretary of State John Kerry and Zarif had both played pivotal roles in getting the process started, through back channels: in 2003, as Iran’s U.N. Ambassador, Zarif orchestrated a secret overture, nicknamed “the grand bargain.” It went nowhere, but the initiative marked him in Washington as a potential interlocutor. In late 2011, Kerry, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made an unannounced trip to explore an offer by the Sultan of Oman to host covert diplomacy. That led to five secret rounds of lower-level U.S.-Iran talks, in Muscat, in 2013.


The most serious diplomacy since Washington severed relations with Tehran, in 1980, began shortly after Kerry and Zarif were appointed as their nations’ top diplomats. Their first meeting, in September, 2013, was supposed to be a handshake and an exchange of pleasantries in a United Nations hallway. The idea was to “get out without causing any incidents and build from there,” a Kerry aide recounted. But, at the last minute, Kerry decided to pull Zarif into an empty office, near the Security Council chamber, for a substantive conversation. “Kerry’s whole approach to diplomacy writ large is premised on the belief that personal relationships matter, because they enable you to get things done, even in very difficult situations,” the aide said. “It was Kerry’s belief that this was going to be a relationship that would really matter.” Zarif was willing. The two men talked, alone, for almost thirty minutes. . . .

[NCarolinawoman]

1. Bravo!

Wonderful to read this. Very interesting.

[MBS]

2. I'm glad you liked this!

It's one of the most informative articles on this topic I've seen so far. .