Iran Is Not Denying Negotiations. It Is Designing Them

On 26 March, the most revealing development in this war was not another missile barrage. It was the report that Pakistan had urged Washington to restrain Israel from killing Abbas Araqchi and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf because, as a Pakistani source put it, “there is no one else to talk to” if they are gone. If that account is even broadly right, then the meaning of the moment is hard to miss. This is no longer a war with diplomacy running beside it. The struggle over how to end the war is already shaping how the war itself is being fought. That is the frame much of the commentary still misses. Too much analysis remains stuck on a stale question: are […]