Negotiating With a Predator: Why Talks With Russia Are Structurally Impossible
Watch any single round of the so-called peace talks and you will recognize it as the next showing of a film you have already seen. The same delegations file into the same hall. The same demands are read from the same pages. The same word, “negotiations,” is pronounced with the same gravity, and at the end nothing has moved an inch closer to peace. It is Groundhog Day staged with cameras and translators. The Turkish hosts pronounce a meeting “not negative,” which seems to mean only that there was no fistfight, and the world is invited to take this as progress. I want to argue something blunter than the diplomatic vocabulary allows: these talks are not a road to peace that keeps hitting potholes. They are a fraud by design. You cannot negotiate an end to a war while you are busy waging it, and you cannot find a compromise with a party whose only real demand is that the other party cease to exist. ...