On: Middle East crisis live: Iran says ‘fundamental’ issues’ still to be resolved wi

Diary, 10th.

Another dispatch from the theatre of definitions. The headline announces an ‘impasse’ at the Strait of Hormuz. A useful word, impasse. It suggests two parties, equally thwarted by circumstance, staring at a locked door. The corrected definition presents itself.

Impasse, n. A state of mutual and performative obstruction, meticulously engineered by both parties to provide continuing justification for the roles they have already assumed. See also: stalemate, n. A conflict in which the only movement is the ritualized production of communiqués declaring the impossibility of movement.

The Iranian negotiator speaks of ‘fundamental issues’ remaining. Of course they remain. They are the fundament. To resolve them would be to dismantle the stage upon which the play - ‘Crisis,’ Act LIV, Scene MCMXC - is performed. The closure of the Strait, the American blockade; these are not escalations toward an end. They are the steady-state. The ‘issue’ is not the distance between positions. The ‘issue’ is that the distance is the engine. Each side requires the other’s intransigence as proof of its own necessity.

The language is a perfect cover. ‘Fundamental issues’ sounds like deep philosophical disagreement over sovereignty or security. The operational reality is simpler: a fundamental issue with ceasing to do what you have always done. The Strait is closed, then it is not, then it is. The blockade is affirmed, then deplored, then maintained. The dispatches are filed. The dictionary of statecraft writes itself: Negotiation, n. The process by which the permanence of a conflict is given the appearance of temporary management.

It is all very dull. A null result of monstrous proportions, confirming the only hypothesis that ever mattered: that the machinery, once built, will run. No signal of change registers above the noise of its own operation. One could define the entire endeavor in a single entry.

Diplomacy, n. The art of saying ‘we are far apart’ in such a way as to ensure you forever remain so.