Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, published an assessment on May 22 arguing that a U.S.-Iran deal to end the war launched in late February is closer than the public posture of either government would suggest, and that the architecture of the diplomacy now underway is fundamentally different from that of the 2015 JCPOA.
Parsi considers China’s role the most striking feature. Beijing has kept its fingerprints off the negotiations—and therefore off any future failure—while functioning as what Parsi calls “the silent, indispensable diplomatic power in the region.” He notes that while Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir is traveling to Tehran, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is departing for Beijing.
The regional involvement, Parsi writes, is “astounding”: Pakistan, Qatar, Egypt, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Oman are all “playing an instrumental role in moving things forward,” with Qatar’s shuttle especially active. If a deal is reached, he argues, it will carry regional buy-in “far beyond the JCPOA,” with Israel and the UAE as the conspicuous holdouts. Europe’s absence, by contrast, “is noticeable but not felt, as its irrelevance is becoming normalized.”