After glowing reviews for the last round of talks and big expectations for the next round between the P5+1 and Iran, beginning next week, surprisingly little attention was paid to the planned side-meeting in Vienna over the past two days.
The talks were supposed to center on shoring up some of the technical details of the wording of a potential final deal ahead of the upcoming talks, and ended at 3 pm local time today.
What came of the talks is anybody’s guess, as every single diplomatic involved in the negotiations refused any comment on the meeting, and hopes for a “preliminary” deal of some sort remain entirely speculative.
That is disappointing to those wondering about the talks, but is also perhaps unsurprising, as today’s meeting wasn’t intended to finalize anything, and officials have shown a reluctance to get into the sort of specifics that today’s talks were meant to cover publicly. The best hope for some insight is that there will be a leak in the coming days.
I think it is a good thing that the parties to the negotiations are not speaking publicly (or leaking, as yet) about details of the negotiations. Nobody is going to be harmed by waiting a few days (or weeks) to learn what, if anything, is going to come out of these negotiations. If keeping the negotiations confidential facilitates an honest exchange of ideas and proposals, so much the better. Certainly the history of public posturing and unsourced leaking has not led to anything positive over the past several years. So, to those of us who want a mutually satisfactory solution to this long-standing dispute, let's just wait and see if this time something good emerges.