The Corridor

 

This week, two of the world’s most combustible crises returned to the same city that has hosted them before. Ukraine. Iran. Different histories, different stakes — yet the same choreography: cautious language, guarded statements, and preparations for escalation continuing in parallel.

Nothing was resolved. That was expected.

What stood out was not the lack of outcome. It was the cast.

Steve Witkoff — real estate developer, New York, no diplomatic mandate beyond being a personal friend of Donald Trump. Jared Kushner — son-in-law, also in real estate, known for a Middle East peace plan that one side never saw and the other never recognised.

These are the men the world is waiting on.

Not the UN. Not the EU. Not the career diplomats with decades of experience and the institutional memory of what has already failed before.

A son-in-law. And a friend of the boss.

Anyone who has spent time in a foreign ministry knows what that combination signals — and what it doesn’t.

 

It would be easy to interpret this as a matter of style — loyalty preferred over bureaucracy, informality over protocol. That reading is tidy. It is also incomplete.

Because the institutions had already exhausted themselves long before the son-in-law and the friend arrived.

The Security Council met, voted, and vetoed. The OSCE observed and reported. The Normandy Format assembled leaders and faded. Minsk I and II were signed, cited, and overtaken by events. The JCPOA constrained nuclear activity until political will dissolved — and the agreement followed it.

None of this was trivial. But none of it produced a settlement capable of surviving domestic politics on all sides.

This was not incompetence. It was structural limitation. Institutions cannot impose compromise where leaders do not perceive it as aligned with survival. Diplomats can draft language. They cannot create incentives.

That distinction matters more than most briefing papers acknowledge.

 

So the son-in-law and the friend arrived.

When formal channels stall, systems gravitate toward informal ones. The logic is not absurd: if bureaucratic machinery cannot move the principals, perhaps personal proximity can.

But access is not strategy.

Kushner has experience, to be fair. In Trump’s first term he produced the Abraham Accords: Israel normalised relations with Gulf states that had never been at war with Israel. Elegantly packaged. Irrelevant to the actual conflict. His “Deal of the Century” for the Palestinians reduced them to recipients of an economic programme — without so much as mentioning their political claims. Hamas had not seen the plan. What followed, the world knows.

Now the son-in-law is back at the table. Three hours with Abbas Araghchi — a man who helped negotiate the JCPOA in 2015, watched it collapse, managed the wreckage, was removed from office in the interim, and now sits where he always sat. Thirty years of nuclear diplomacy. His counterpart: a real estate developer from New York.

Progress, says Araghchi. Still a lot to do, says Kushner.

Irregular diplomacy has reshaped world orders before. When Kissinger flew secretly to Beijing in 1971, he bypassed institutions — yet he did so anchored in a strategic conception of balance and alignment. The deviation from protocol was part of a larger design.

Witkoff knows the price per square foot in Miami Beach.

Access can open a door. It does not determine what lies beyond it.

 

And yet — this is the uncomfortable part — the corridor may be the only remaining space where movement is still conceivable.

Not the conference room with the microphones and the flags. But the hallway outside. The elevator. The conversation that officially does not take place. Public sessions are for constituencies. Private conversations test limits.

In Geneva, the official talks on the second day ended after just two hours — abruptly, without result. Medinsky’s comment was brief: difficult, but businesslike. Nothing more. What is known: there was a further closed meeting between Medinsky and parts of the Ukrainian side — confirmed, content unknown. The corridor existed. What was said there: nobody knows.

Anyone who has sat in such a room — or waited outside one — knows that silence has its own grammar.

This is not a flaw in the process. It is the process. Where visible compromise is politically toxic, ambiguity becomes the only workable instrument. What goes into the protocol is for the home front. What is said in the corridor is for the peace.

That is not cynicism. That is how it works.

Whether it moves anything this time: unknown. What is known: it is the last instrument in a world that has no others.

 

We have a war in Europe that cannot be decided — as we described here. And we have negotiations that cannot be decided — because none of the parties involved is willing to pay the price of genuine compromise.

Neither the experts nor the son-in-law are failing for lack of competence. They are failing for lack of political will on all sides. Moscow will not accept an outcome that reads as defeat. Tehran will not relinquish enrichment without guarantees it distrusts. Washington wants a deal that looks like victory. Kyiv cannot concede territory without jeopardising its own legitimacy and survival.

Under such constraints, no negotiator can deliver. Not Araghchi. Not Medinsky. Not Kissinger. Not God.

That is not defeatism. That is the correct diagnosis.

The corridor is not the solution. It is the final adjustable variable in a system otherwise locked in place.

 

Geneva produced no breakthrough. That is unsurprising.

What is more revealing is that the process continues. Delegations reconvene. Another round is scheduled. Not because confidence has returned — but because cessation would formalise stalemate. Continuing preserves optionality. Stopping would signal closure — and closure is politically more dangerous than drift.

The ritual runs. Not out of hope. Out of calculation.

Somewhere in a Geneva hotel, away from microphones and flags, sentences are being weighed for elasticity. Perhaps they alter nothing. Perhaps they shift a millimetre. In the present configuration of incentives, a millimetre is not negligible. It is the only unit of movement available.

If even that narrow space collapses — then the question changes.

It will no longer concern how these wars might end.

It will concern whether they end at all.