The US-Iran memorandum of understanding has opened a path towards a permanent peace agreement, but spoilers inside and outside the process – including Israel, Donald Trump and Iranian hardliners – could still derail it.

In a seminal article, entitled Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes, Stephen Stedman writes that “peacemaking is a risky business.” The greatest source of risk “comes from spoilers – leaders and parties who believe that peace emerging from negotiations threatens their power, worldview, and interests, and use violence to undermine attempts to achieve it.”

Spoilers can be inside or outside a peace process. Those inside have signed an agreement but fail to fulfil key obligations; those outside are either excluded from it or have excluded themselves. In terms of managing spoilers, it is important to determine why a particular party is refusing to honor a peace agreement.

Spoilers are already causing problems for the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Iran and the US announced on 14 June, after weeks of Pakistani mediators trading proposals back and forth between the parties. The 14-point MOU was officially signed by President Donald Trump on 17 June in Versailles and by President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran the next day.

To develop the MOU into a permanent peace agreement, face-to-face negotiations were scheduled for 19 June in Bürgenstock, Switzerland under the auspices of Pakistani and Qatari mediators. But because heavy fighting in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah was violating the first clause of the MOU, which called for the termination of military operations “including in Lebanon,” the Iranians declared that they would not attend and threatened to reclose the Strait of Hormuz. Vice President JD Vance, who was to lead the US delegation, also canceled his flight to Switzerland.

Nonetheless, on 20 June, after Iranian state TV announced that Iran’s delegation, led by the Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, had arrived in Switzerland, Vance departed the US to join Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had traveled there earlier.

The talks, dubbed the Lake Lucerne Summit, began on the morning of 21 June with separate meetings between the leaders of each delegation with the mediators, followed by quadrilateral talks in the afternoon between the two parties and two mediators.

Vance presented a promising opening statement, saying: “Never before has the Iranian and American leadership met at such a high level… What the President has asked us to do is turn over a new leaf to transform our relationship with the people of Iran, and to extend an outstretched hand that says to the people of Iran that if your leadership is willing to give up being a driver of regional instability, if they are willing to give up nuclear weapons ambitions for the long term, then the United States is willing to fundamentally transform our relationship.”

But 80 minutes later, the Iranians got word that Trump (apparently annoyed by the threatened closure of the Strait of Hormuz) told Fox News in a phone call that unless the strait remained open, the negotiators talking to Vance will “never make it back to their country........

© Pearls and Irritations