BLUF: The Art of the Deal

In the smoke-filled back rooms of a nondescript Paris villa in the early 1970s, Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho faced each other across a battered table for what must have felt like the hundredth time. Jet-lagged, exhausted, and operating in total secrecy, Kissinger endured round after round of glacial bargaining—dozens of clandestine meetings over many long months, with no public comments or photo ops. Just two adversaries trying to end a war that had already claimed millions of lives. The talks dragged, stalled, and sometimes collapsed entirely. Yet those hidden sessions proved to be pivotal in ending America’s involvement in the conflict.

Diplomacy very rarely moves at the speed of social media. Trust doesn’t spontaneously appear in these situations; it has to be earned. This often happens in person, one frustrating hour at a time. Kissinger’s effort, for all its flaws and imperfections, proved that even the most intractable conflicts sometimes yield only after the participants have spent enough time in the same room.

History is full of similar marathons that ultimately succeeded. The Good Friday Agreement that ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland emerged only after decades of quiet, back-channel talks between sworn enemies. The arms-control treaties that helped wind down the Cold War required years of painstaking, tedious negotiations to verify compliance and lower the temperature between nuclear superpowers. 

So when observers began to express impatience with the recent twenty-hour sessions focused on ending the conflict with Iran, it made us scratch our heads. Twenty hours is a drop in the ocean compared to the timelines that have produced real breakthroughs in other conflicts. The history between the U.S. and Iran carries decades of profound suspicion, broken agreements, deceit, and proxy conflicts. Building any degree of understanding and trust needed to make progress on such fraught terrain takes a long time in the most favorable of circumstances, which these are most certainly not. Patience is a critical component of serious, unglamorous diplomatic efforts, but in today’s instant gratification societies, patience is in short supply.

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