CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

A Success Story Negotiating With Iran

Photo by Alireza Heydarifard

Bilateral negotiations are rarely simple, as the late-February negotiations between Iranians and Americans have recently shown. As an American-Swiss citizen, I can recount a story of successful negotiations I had with the Iranian government several years ago in a very different environment, fully aware of the tension between the United States and Iran and the positive role Switzerland’s “good offices” played between the two countries.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Swiss government established a program to help newly independent countries train their young diplomats. At the time, I brought young diplomats to Geneva – to the Graduate Institute where I worked – and toured Switzerland with them for an intensive two-week visit introducing the basics of international diplomacy.

Each year I traveled to Bern to meet with the number two in the Swiss Foreign Ministry to discuss where the program might go next. After seven years, the program had developed a successful rhythm. In 1999, I asked him, “Why not Iran?” Although Iran was not a newly independent country, the Graduate Institute had a historical relationship with it, and after the 1979 Revolution, Switzerland’s “good offices” represented United States interests there.

I tried to convince the State Secretary that bringing young Iranian diplomats to Geneva would be a promising step in Swiss-Iranian relations. In a more personal moment, he asked me, “Why Iran?” I replied that one of my best friends in high school had been the son of the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations and that I had always dreamed of visiting Isfahan, Tabriz, and Shiraz.

With typical Swiss caution, he said he had to check with others in the ministry and would get back to........

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