Diplomacy without illusions: The case for Iran's accountability first

Among advocates of process-first diplomacy, a familiar refrain has been especially common in recent days: diplomacy means talking to everyone, no adversary should be humiliated, and the only alternative to negotiation is war. These are not trivial principles. Engagement with adversaries has produced real results, from the Iran-Iraq ceasefire of 1988 to elements of the Dayton framework. Process can matter. Humiliation can be counterproductive.

However, these principles become something else when they are invoked to grant procedural equivalence to a state that, according to the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has launched nearly 3,000 ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as drones, at civilian infrastructure across multiple sovereign neighbours in recent weeks, while simultaneously blockading one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints. In such circumstances, insisting on diplomatic symmetry is not a sign of balance; it is analytical evasion.

The core problem is straightforward. Diplomacy without leverage, deterrence, and accountability does not produce settlements. It produces intervals. That is the lesson of the current crisis, and it must be stated plainly.

Following a 21-hour first round of negotiations in Islamabad last weekend, and with further rounds widely expected, the contrast in this diplomatic moment could hardly be sharper. In Islamabad, the Iranian delegation was welcomed with flowers and military courtesies. Yet this was a delegation representing a state whose missile and drone attacks have struck Pakistan’s closest Gulf partners, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. Whatever the requirements of host-country protocol, the signal was troubling: aggression appeared to carry little diplomatic cost, and ceremony risked blurring the line between those who launched attacks and those who endured them.

Meanwhile, Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun took a different path, greenlighting a first-ever phone call between his ambassador in Washington and her Israeli counterpart ahead of talks at the State Department that have since taken place. One government is negotiating in response to political necessity. The other arrived at the table as though the preceding weeks had not occurred.

The tradition of engaging all parties without precondition has an honourable lineage. It is rooted in the UN system and in well-established schools of conflict mediation. This approach rests on a genuine insight: durable peace requires buy-in from all sides, including adversaries, and the process itself can foster the minimal trust needed for agreement. However, this insight performs poorly when applied to a party that systematically exploits negotiations while escalating by other means.

The JCPOA is the clearest illustration. It addressed the Iranian nuclear programme but left intact the wider architecture of regional destabilisation: proxy networks, the ballistic missile programme, maritime coercion, and the systematic repression of Iran’s citizens. The result was not lasting stability but a narrower and more fragile form of it. The international community had spent its diplomatic capital on a partial fix and subsequently lacked the leverage to address what it had excluded.

The historical record reinforces the point. Durable diplomatic outcomes have more often depended on a clear asymmetry of leverage and a credible cost of refusal than on procedural symmetry between parties. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 is sometimes cited as a model of inclusive diplomacy. It was, to a point: Talleyrand secured France’s reintegration into the European concert, but only after coalition victory had established the terms within which negotiation would take place. As Kissinger observed in A World Restored, the settlement’s durability rested not on goodwill but on the structure of constraints that made revisionism costly. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 followed a similar logic. Kennedy offered face-saving concessions, but the underlying dynamic was coercive. American naval superiority made the cost of escalation asymmetric and intolerable for Moscow.

More recently, the Abraham Accords did not emerge from the conventional mediation playbook. They emerged because a set of regional actors, led by the UAE, concluded that treating a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian settlement as a precondition for broader normalisation had become a formula for paralysis. Direct engagement based on concrete strategic interests produced outcomes that decades of facilitated process had not. The Accords were criticised for breaking with established diplomatic procedure. The lesson is not that convention is always wrong, but that strategic realism can at times achieve what procedural caution cannot.

The UAE’s posture throughout this crisis has been consistent with that logic. Abu Dhabi has made clear that a ceasefire alone is insufficient. Iran must be held accountable for its attacks and subject to a broader framework covering not only its nuclear ambitions but also its ballistic missiles and proxy networks. As Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba argued in The Wall Street Journal, what is needed is “a conclusive outcome that addresses Iran’s full range of threats”. Dr Anwar Gargash, Advisor to the UAE President, made the same point more directly when he stated that the era of courtesies has passed. This is not a rejection of diplomacy. It is an insistence that diplomacy without accountability is not serious diplomacy.

Iran enters this diplomatic phase in a position of weakness. Its senior command structure has been significantly disrupted, its military infrastructure degraded, its economy under sustained pressure, and the Strait of Hormuz unsettled. Any negotiation that treats this moment as an opportunity to restore the diplomatic status quo will repeat the errors of past settlements that addressed one problem while leaving the wider coercive framework intact. A reset without accountability is not peace; it is deferral. A settlement that ignores missiles, proxies, and maritime coercion is not a framework; it is a pause before the next escalation.

Diplomacy is not synonymous with politeness. It is the means by which power is converted into order. When it forgets this, what remains is process without purpose – and process without purpose does not stop missiles.

Dr Rikard Jalkebro is an Associate Professor at the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, Abu Dhabi