The most difficult party to control in the Iran negotiations is not Iran | US-Israel War on Iran

One spring, at the height of the most difficult negotiations in Washington in the Middle East in a generation, American officials did something that US-Israeli relations have not done: they quietly asked other governments to warn Iran about an attack that Israel could make to kill two Tehran officials.

This is the content of a New York Times report published earlier this month; Two US officials confirmed the warnings to CNN, while Israel dismissed the report as a hoax. Washington feared that Israel wanted to kill Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the men leading the Iranian side of the talks. Unable to order his friend to stand down, Washington warned his opponent about his friend. Whether there was a conspiracy or not, the truth is this: Washington felt the danger was enough to act, and he did.

In this phase, Washington’s most difficult task is not only to put Iran on the table; it is preventing its closest friend from removing the table altogether. The most difficult party to control is not the one Washington spent two decades looking like an impenetrable enemy. It is the one that carries weapons.

An example, not a fantasy

According to the Times, the Israeli strike at the beginning of the war killed Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, and Kamal Kharazi, a former foreign minister and foreign policy adviser to the supreme leader – both participants in the negotiations and people with whom Washington hoped to negotiate. The route today passes through Araghchi and Ghalibaf in part because the men who might have led them have died.

Ghalibaf himself is said to have survived two Israeli wars, one in the 12-day war of June 2025 and the other this year, when Israel struck a building where senior officials meet.

The spoiler playbook fails when the spoiler is a friend

Conflict resolution studies call actors who see the peace process as a threat and take steps to destroy it “spoilers”. Political analyst Stephen Stedman noted that out-of-policy investors are the most dangerous type, not losing money when negotiations are over and getting what they want when they do. The script is also about timing: spoilers strike when a process is close to achieving reality, or when a symbolic moment can turn an event into an explosive one.

According to that standard, the period of burial caused the destruction of books. The U.S.-Iran strategy had only recently reached an interim agreement to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, Iran had days of mourning for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the war, and demonstrations that coincided with US Independence Day. Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that Iran’s new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, had been assassinated, while Araghchi promised a strong response and ordered Washington to stop his ally. The danger was so dire that Mojtaba Khamenei stayed away from his own father’s funeral. The diplomatic process that is about to take place has collided with a well-known political and symbolic moment: exactly the kind of opening of the damning book warns.

Everything that the literature describes to manage predators, including motivation, interaction and coercion, is designed for predators. None of that fits with the different and unreviewable setup that Washington is facing, with the alleged destroyer as an agent at the center of its regional strategy. Pressure on Israel is a political no-brainer in Washington. Control is not necessary; it already receives the whole package. Dealing with a strategy that its officials see as a major disaster because it predicts regime change and drains money from Tehran is controversial.

Israeli reports explain why. An investigation recently published by the Israeli news site Ynet documented how the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed his intelligence agencies to confirm a large-scale analysis of what happened during the war, over the objections of officers and scientists; The study described the agreement as a very bad one for Israel. If the declarations of war exceed the reality, a lasting covenant is not unacceptable to Israel; it is dangerous, because every month the process survives with the evaluation of the victory that Israel was told that it had won.

Israel is not the only destroyer pursuing this project; The Iranian system has developed internal. A few days after the document was signed, strikes on Gulf targets continued, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) threatened to withdraw from the talks, although the signatory government defended the talks. Peace experts in the region, notably political scientist Wendy Pearlman, have pointed out that violence is often the work of groups that oppose their leadership. The method is compressed from two sides: a joint destroyer outside of one teacher, and group destroyers inside the other. Any working definition of sustainability must cover both.

The idea of ​​the Alliance has the name of the problem of Washington. Ever since political scientist Glenn Snyder first wrote about the problem of contract security, scholars have called it deadlock: the agent is being dragged by the client into an outcome they don’t want. In the standard version, an assistant drags you into battle. The Iran file presents a case of a crooked, client who is working to drag him into peace. Snyder’s plan also explains why: the partner who has enough leverage in the domestic politics of the agent to avoid being forced, facing an agent who cannot afford to let it go to waste, has the negotiating power in proportion to his trust.

When the spoiler becomes a partner, spoiler management falls into partnership management, and it doesn’t go well. After Israeli ministers attacked the memorial, US Vice President JD Vance told reporters that if he were to remain in Israel’s cabinet, he would be “attacking the only strong ally” he has left. The sequence reads like a ladder: a secret plea for Israel to stop, then warnings issued through intermediaries, then a public rebuke from the vice president, then leaks to the media. Each group is more populous than the last, which means that Washington didn’t think about what was below enough. Through Snyder’s lens, the ladder is not only rational but inevitable: the only path open to an agent who cannot force or give up. The next group may rise on its own: US President Donald Trump and Netanyahu agreed on a call on July 3 to meet soon in the US. The higher power reduced to this admits that it does not control the other. That acceptance is the main point of this discussion. It points to the need for a fourth tool that the destructive literature has not yet mentioned, stability through third parties, to protect the process until the critical moment has passed.

Measure this part and what is not happening

US officials admitted that when the main negotiations began, Araghchi and Ghalibaf’s calculations were reversed: killing them would kill the negotiations. Mr Trump made it clear: The leaders of Iran were gathered in one place, but a strike would leave him with “no one to talk to”.

The gaps between rounds are where peace paths die: the table punishes and the days between rounds do not. Funerals and the Fourth of July pushed home talk to a new high as the trail revealed.

In such a field, progress is the wrong goal; the right thing is to be calm: to cool the situation, with interest and through mediators if necessary, until the symbolic moment passes. A weekly break in the issues that both sides agreed to at the funeral illustrates this clear point. However, it did not settle the main debate. The US strikes resumed on July 7, before the funeral, and Iran responded by attacking US offices in the region.

The fourth weapon is not just fiction; The Times shows it works. Fearing that its delegation would be attacked on its way to Islamabad, Iran sought assurances through Pakistani and Qatari mediators that the negotiators would not be targeted. Pakistani fighter jets escorted the planes back to negotiate. But a threat arose, forcing the delegation’s plane to make an emergency landing, the team drove for eight hours home and then continued to negotiate in Doha and Switzerland. Some people are taking risks that the authorities cannot bear: proving what the ally cannot prove, saying to Tehran what Washington will not say out loud. Agreements often die on the table; They die in the middle of the show, when the damn moment meets the player who wants to die, and no one has designed the machine to be able to beat it.

The memorandum will ultimately be judged on Hormuz, centrifuges and penal aid. So far, the success has been limited: despite the renewed US-Iran war, the dangerous Israeli occupation has not happened, the negotiators have remained alive, and the diplomatic channel has remained open. That was a victory of a small kind, hard-earned: not by controlling an enemy, but by controlling a friend.