The intermediary changes; the negotiations continue.

Qatar today finds itself in a strange position. According to Reuters, attacks on the Ras Laffan facilities have taken 17 per cent of the country’s LNG export capacity offline. Yet Qatar is once again travelling between Tehran and Washington. According to Axios, Trump has rejected Iran’s latest proposal but expects talks to continue, and Qatar has also put forward a middle-ground plan for the two sides. Rejecting a proposal does not, at least for now, mean the end of negotiations.

The question is: why, over more than two decades, have intermediaries and host countries changed repeatedly, while the negotiating table has never been cleared away for good?

Who were the intermediaries?

2003 to 2005: Germany, France and Britain were the European parties to the nuclear negotiations with Iran.

2006 to 2015: The P5+1 negotiated with Iran, coordinated by the European Union. During this period, too, there was no ‘intermediary’ in the precise sense of the word.

2012 to 2013: Oman was the confidential channel between Iran and the United States, a role also confirmed by US officials. This channel paved the way for more formal negotiations and ultimately for the Geneva agreement and then the JCPOA.

2021 and 2022: Negotiations took place in Vienna under the coordination of the European Union. Iran and the United States did not negotiate directly; messages were exchanged through European representatives.

2025: Oman once again hosted talks between Iran and representatives of the US administration, including Steve Witkoff.

2026: As the conditions of war and regional security changed, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and then Qatar took on a more prominent role in mediation efforts.

Why did they change?

When the focus shifts from the nuclear dossier to a ceasefire, Gulf security and the Strait of Hormuz, countries closer to the crisis become more important. Trust in a channel can also be worn down by events and changes, changes of government or war.

Every intermediary also has its own interests. Energy security and stability in the Gulf are vital issues for Qatar; Oman has for years sought to preserve its position as a low-tension, trusted channel. Each side may also prefer an intermediary it trusts more.

Intermediaries’ roles are not all the same: sometimes they merely relay messages, sometimes they provide a safe space for talks, and sometimes they try to propose a middle-ground text. An intermediary is not a decision-maker; its job is to reduce the cost and difficulty of dialogue.

What can be observed is a clearer pattern: when one channel becomes worn out, the process does not necessarily end; another channel opens.

The intermediary changes, but the negotiating table is not cleared away.

Negotiation as a means of buying time

At certain points, negotiation in the diplomacy of the Islamic Republic has served a purpose beyond reaching an agreement: postponing a difficult decision, easing pressure, preventing an immediate escalation of the crisis and keeping political channels open.

Hassan Rouhani has said of the 2003–2005 negotiations that, while talks with the Europeans were under way, the installation of equipment in Isfahan continued, and that continuing the negotiations could delay the referral of Iran’s case to the Security Council. The significance of this statement is that it was made by one of the principal officials responsible for those very negotiations.

The JCPOA is an important example in the opposite direction. On 16 January 2016, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that the measures stipulated for “Implementation Day” had been carried out, and real restrictions and increased monitoring of Iran’s nuclear programme were put in place.

In the Vienna negotiations of 2021 and 2022, the European Union said that the expansion of Iran’s nuclear programme made reaching an agreement more difficult; although disagreements over sanctions relief, the guarantees Iran requested, and changes of government also contributed to the deadlock. Therefore, not every delay or failure in negotiations can necessarily be attributed to deliberate stalling. Sometimes a genuine disagreement over the terms of an agreement, or the two sides’ inability to make a political decision, is also a factor in the deadlock.

Two clocks

Perhaps we can describe this situation in terms of “two clocks”: the clock of negotiations and the clock of events.

The first clock moves at the negotiating table: proposals, messages, responses and the next round.

But the second clock does not stop: technical capacity, the regional balance, sanctions, oil exports, energy prices and, today, the Strait of Hormuz.

From this perspective, we can distinguish four kinds of attrition: temporal attrition, through successive deadlines; thematic attrition, as discussion shifts from enrichment to sanctions, a ceasefire or Hormuz; intermediary attrition, as dialogue moves from one channel to another; and cost attrition, when a prolonged crisis imposes growing costs on the parties involved and the countries of the region.

This four-part framework is an interpretive lens, not a set of proven facts about the parties’ intentions.

Who benefits from time?

Time is a two-sided tool.

At certain moments, it has benefited Iran: it has postponed an escalation of the crisis, and in some periods nuclear capacity has also increased while negotiations continued.

But time can also be a tool of pressure for the United States and Europe. Sanctions are essentially based on the assumption that economic pressure, over time, increases the cost of the other side’s policies and affects its political calculations.

So the mere fact that negotiations are taking a long time does not tell us who is winning.

Three practical measures may be more useful in assessing this: who can bear the cost of waiting for longer? Whose leverage is strengthened or eroded as time passes? And which side has a better alternative if an agreement fails?

The costs of this attrition are not distributed equally either. Iran faces economic pressure, inflation, reduced income, isolation and the risk of war. The United States and Europe face advances in Iran’s technical capacity and increasingly difficult monitoring. The Gulf countries, too, may bear the security and economic costs of the crisis without being its principal decision-makers.

But a large share of the cost of this attrition—from inflation and sanctions to insecurity and war—is ultimately passed on to society: to people who have no role in determining how long the negotiations last or how they end.

More than two decades of experience show that in this diplomacy, time is not always merely the interval between two rounds of negotiations; at certain moments, it becomes part of the calculation and the bargaining itself.

But to understand whose interests time is really serving, we should not simply count the rounds of negotiations or the changes of intermediary. We should ask who can bear the cost of waiting for longer, whose leverage grows in the meantime, and who has more options beyond an agreement.

Ultimately, perhaps the main question is not who negotiates more, but who feels the effects of attrition later—and who pays its costs without having any part in this game.