The collapse of recent US–Iran talks highlights how flawed negotiation design – not just substance – can doom peace efforts from the start.

The challenges of structuring a peace process that can overcome 47 years of mutual grievances between the US and Iran were highlighted by the recent talks between the US and Iran in Pakistan.

Although the international community still knows very little about the peace talks – facilitated by Shehbaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan – some obvious red flags appeared in the morning-after news reports, as JD Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner flew home less than 24 hours after their arrival in Islamabad.

As the _New York Times_ reported: “Vice President JD Vance summed up the failure of 21 hours of negotiations with Iran in one sentence: ‘They have chosen not to accept our terms.’ To Iranian officials, that line reflected their biggest problem with the talks: The United States they argue, had not come to negotiate.” As Javid Zarif (who led the Iranian negotiating team on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, negotiated by the Obama administration to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, but later torn up by Trump) wrote on X: “No negotiations — at least with Iran — will succeed based on ‘our/your terms.’ ”

This highlights that, as expected, the talks took the form of a “ hard-bargaining” (also called distributive bargaining) approach to negotiation where the parties seek to achieve a zero-sum (win-lose) outcome rather than a positive sum (win-win) outcome. Too often, however, they end up with a lose-lose outcome, as occurred in this situation. In hard-bargaining, parties present their positions (i.e., their preferred solution to the issues) as........

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