Oslo on the Strait of Hormuz

The most successful peace processes are often those that allow the stronger party to continue the war under diplomatic cover.

Bombs fall. Ports close. Civilians die. Then diplomats appear before polished lecterns to announce that dialogue remains “constructive.” Constructive for whom is never explained.

Not for those beneath the aircraft. Not for the states ordered to negotiate while under attack. But extremely constructive for empire, which has perfected the art of converting aggression into procedure and coercion into statesmanship.

The emerging American-Iranian “peace process” belongs to this tradition of organised fraud.

A Pakistan-brokered, 14-point memorandum was presented as a path toward ending hostilities, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, suspending attacks, and negotiating a durable settlement. Within weeks, the United States resumed strikes across Iran. Tehran retaliated against American military infrastructure and regional facilities used to sustain Washington’s war machine. The diplomats continued talking. The missiles continued flying.

This is not diplomacy failing. This is diplomacy doing its job.

The model is Oslo. Oslo did not simply fail to halt Israeli colonisation. It gave colonization a timetable, a vocabulary, and international protection. Palestinian resistance was converted into negotiation; negotiation into delay; delay into settlements, checkpoints, land seizures, assassinations, and walls. Israel manufactured facts on the ground while Western diplomats manufactured expressions of concern.

The bulldozer advanced. The communiqué regretted.

Washington now offers Tehran the same poisoned chalice: suspend your momentum, surrender your leverage, enter an endless process, and trust the empire that is bombing you to define what “de-escalation” means.

In the imperial dictionary, American violence is never violence. It is “deterrence,” “force protection,” “stabilisation,” or some other phrase embalmed in Pentagon varnish. Israeli violence enjoys the same miraculous purification. Occupation becomes security. Siege becomes self-defence. Mass killing becomes an operational necessity. The victims, meanwhile, are accused of escalation the moment they refuse to die quietly.

Empire’s greatest privilege is not military superiority. It is control over chronology. History begins when the target retaliates.

The memorandum’s asymmetry is therefore not accidental. Iran is expected to prove good faith materially: restrain its forces, facilitate shipping, limit retaliation, and enter negotiations over sanctions, reconstruction, regional security, and its nuclear program. Washington proves good faith rhetorically, usually while refuelling the aircraft.

This is imperial reciprocity: one side relinquishes power; the other supplies adjectives.

The Oslo analogy is structural. Oslo transformed an anti-colonial struggle into a management system supervised by Israel’s chief sponsor. The danger now is that the US-Iran framework becomes a similar mechanism: Iran is asked to regulate its resistance while the United States regulates nothing — not its sanctions, not its bases, not its blockades, not its covert operations, and certainly not its appetite for regime change.

Negotiations become a waiting room in which the besieged are ordered to sit patiently while the empire rearranges the battlefield.

The Israeli precedent makes the danger unmistakable. For decades, Israel has negotiated precisely as it wages war: to gain time, divide opponents, neutralize pressure, and convert temporary advantage into permanent domination. Its “peace process” with the Palestinians was never designed to end colonialism. It was designed to make colonialism
administratively respectable.

Washington learned the lesson well because Washington financed it. The choice of Switzerland for subsequent talks merely perfects the obscenity. Imperial violence has always preferred beautiful scenery. There is something reassuringly civilized about discussing missile strikes beneath snow-covered mountains while people elsewhere are
reduced to ash. The coffee is excellent. The language is measured. The corpses, mercifully, remain offstage.

From Oslo to the Alps, the scenery changes. The choreography does not.

Iran should negotiate, but it should not confuse negotiation with peace. States negotiate because war is costly and strategy requires flexibility. The question is whether talks restrain coercion or merely reorganize it. A process that permits one side to bomb, sanction, blockade, threaten, and sabotage while demanding “confidence-building
measures” from the other is not diplomacy.

It is war translated into bureaucratic prose.

Oslo’s warning is brutal: what empire cannot destroy militarily, it will attempt to dissolve procedurally. The Palestinians entered Oslo with an uprising and emerged with an authority compelled to administer fragments of their own dispossession. Iran must not enter negotiations possessing deterrence and emerge possessing minutes from meetings.

The United States will continue bombing in the name of peace because contradiction is the operating system of empire. It destroys a facility on Monday, demands restraint on Tuesday, and convenes talks on Wednesday about Iran’s troubling lack of trust. The satire writes itself. The dead cannot laugh.

Oslo taught the world that negotiations can become the diplomatic wing of conquest. The question now is whether Tehran has learned that lesson — or whether history will repeat itself with Persian ruins, Pakistani mediators, Swiss hotels, Israeli applause, and the Pentagon solemnly bombing its way toward peace.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.