(AFP) – From the corridors of power in Washington to a Swiss mountaintop resort, via Tehran and a French spa, it has been a dizzying week of diplomacy on Iran — marked by surprise twists and a last-ditch hunt for a printer in the Palace of Versailles.
Talks mediator Pakistan announced on June 14 that a deal had been reached to end the Middle East war. It was US President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday and the eve of his departure for the G7 summit in the French spa town of Evian-les-Bains. The announcement surprised many in Iran who had been braced for a third successive night of US strikes after a ceasefire ending the Middle East war began to fray.
But the intrigue did not end there. Where would the formal signing of the deal take place? And by whom? What would be the framework for taking discussions further between two foes who have had no diplomatic relations since the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution? Trump arrived at the G7 summit in ebullient mood, flush from celebrating his birthday by watching MMA cage fights at the White House and clinching the deal. Host President Emmanuel Macron said the deal had in fact already been signed “electronically.” However, it remained unclear throughout Trump’s stay in Evian when the formal signing would take place.
It had been expected that Vice President JD Vance would sign the document with top Iranian negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf in Switzerland on Friday. But Trump then muddied the waters on the final day of the summit Wednesday by saying, “the deal we reached with Iran on Sunday will be signed shortly, tomorrow, maybe the next day.” After the summit ended, with the fate of the deal still far from clear, Macron took Trump to dinner at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris, where the American president, impressed by the golden splendour, signed it himself on a candlelit white tablecloth.
Macron told French TV that the American president’s decision to sign the text “was made quite spontaneously.” So spontaneously that it had not even been printed out, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had to scramble to source a printer from within the grand palace. Trump used a fat black marker pen to sign the deal, with the crockery jangling on the table after the dinner of lobster and caviar, as he put pen to paper. In a parallel move, Iranian President Masoud Pezehshkian followed suit, with Iranian news agencies showing him brandishing his copy of the deal.
Attention then turned to the luxury hotel complex in Burgenstock on the top of a mountain overlooking Lake Lucerne in central Switzerland, which had been chosen as the safest and most isolated place for the next stage of the US-Iran talks. The iconic venue has played host to the rich and famous for decades and was famously where screen idol Audrey Hepburn married her first husband Mel Ferrer.
But the allure of Burgenstock only added more intrigue, and when late Thursday the talks finally appeared likely to go ahead on Friday, they were postponed at the last minute, reportedly because of Israeli military action against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Journalists covering the White House, already waiting on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base to board with Vance or in Zurich ready to take a shuttle to the venue, received a terse message from the administration that the vice president was not leaving that evening. The hotel, whose guests had reportedly been quietly asked to leave to accommodate the talks, loomed down from the mountaintop precipice. Journalists who were already staking out the area around Burgenstock under tight security beat a retreat, knowing that the talks could be on again at any moment.
But Iran, on Friday, said there was now “no urgency,” but added that “we are planning to hold a meeting in the coming days.”
– Aurélia End with Francisco Fontemaggi in Paris, Sébastien Ricci in Tehran and Stuart Williams in Geneva
© 2024 AFP
