Between July 11 and 25, 2000, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators hashed out what President Bill Clinton hoped would be the cap of his career. Seven years after Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed to the Oslo Accords, the two sides aimed to finalize an agreement on outstanding hot-button issues like the status of Jerusalem, borders, and a right to return.
[What] U.S. diplomats learned was that negotiations absent a guarantee that negotiators’ words mean anything are a waste of time.
American diplomats on Clinton’s varsity peace team worked around the clock to cajole and cudgel to bring the Israelis and Palestinians into agreement, but they succeeded. Palestinian negotiators agreed and the birth of the world’s first Palestinian state appeared imminent; all that remained was the signing ceremony. Bill Clinton traveled to Camp David as Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak also flew in. Presidents do not involve themselves in technical talks; they come to dot the i’s, cross the t’s, and revel in the signing ceremony. Arafat, however, shocked Clinton by refusing to accept the deal to which his own negotiators had agreed. Clinton was always diplomatic and, at least publicly, unflappable. His press conference when Camp David II collapsed, however, showed real anger.
The chief lesson U.S. diplomats learned was that negotiations absent a guarantee that negotiators’ words mean anything are a waste of time.
It was for this reason that, when Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi reached out to Western officials about extraditing Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi and coming in from the cold, it took British intelligence more than three years to confirm that Qadhafi would uphold the deals his supposed interlocutors offered. President George W. Bush did not want to risk having Qadhafi embarrass him with a last-minute bait-and-switch as Arafat had done with Clinton.
As Vice President JD Vance heads to Pakistan to negotiate with an Iranian delegation led by Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the lessons of Clinton’s Camp David II failure appear lost. First, there is the question of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. It is unclear whether Mojtaba is alive or dead. If the former, Ghalibaf would not have the final say, and if the latter, it is not clear he is in charge. Former Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi, for example, is not represented in the delegation but holds significant power inside the regime. The Iranian regime also might use division between Ghalibaf and Vahidi to play good cop/bad cop with the United States. Ghalibaf might make nominal concessions and demand likewise from Vance. After the U.S. compromises, Vahidi might balk, returning talks to the beginning—but with Iran pocketing the earlier concessions.
The Iranian regime also might use division between Ghalibaf and Vahidi to play good cop/bad cop with the United States.
Even if Ghalibaf is sincere, he simply may not have the power. The scenario is not theoretical, but rather, repeats the pattern of 2003, when Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, who died April 9, 2026, from injuries suffered in a bombing, and Iran’s United Nations Envoy Mohammad Javad Zarif promised U.S. and British diplomats that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would not enter Iraq when the war to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein began. The Qods Force and the Revolutionary Guard-trained militias ignored the deal struck. There are two possibilities: Either Kharrazi and Zarif lied, or they were sincere but without power. Either way, their falsehoods led to the deaths of hundreds of Americans.
The composition of the Iranian delegation suggests Tehran’s goal is to thumb its nose at Washington; hence, the inclusion of Reza Amiri Moghadam, wanted in the murder of former FBI Agent Robert “Bob” Levinson, the man Secretary of State John Kerry left behind.
Too often, politicians and pundits treat diplomacy as a cost-free strategy. It is not. Poorly crafted and rushed diplomacy plays into adversaries’ hands. President Donald Trump may believe himself master of the “art of the deal” but as a real estate developer, he would never bargain for a property over which those across the table did not have title. That is essentially what Trump has authorized Vance to do, though. Any agreement will be meaningless, a fraud based on shifting sand.
