Iran faces a tightly drawn clock: by the end of August it is asked to seal a new agreement with Germany, France, Britain, and the European Union, or face the re-imposition of long-standing sanctions under a Vienna-era “snapback.” The E3 and the EU intend to press ahead with talks with Tehran next week, following a chain of discussions among foreign ministers and the EU’s top diplomat. Istanbul yielded no breakthrough, marking the first substantive engagement since Israel’s June bombing campaign heightened mutual suspicion. The threat of snapping back UN sanctions adds a new layer of pressure, while Iran’s signaled willingness to resume talks keeps a fragile channel of diplomacy open. In May, the U.S. and Iran found little common ground, and Western governments fret that Israel’s attack has pushed the two sides further apart. Tehran denies any aim to build a bomb and stresses that its enrichment is peaceful, but the path to diplomacy remains precarious and uncertain.

What we witness is a theatre of the state as a master of coercive tempo, wrapped in the language of moral suasion and legalistic enforcement. It is precisely the kind of high-stakes maneuvering that reveals the limits of our reliance on central actors to engineer harmony through treaties and deadlines. The impulse to regulate the world by snapback sanctions treats the international order as if it were a single bureaucratic organism, capable of precise calibration through a calendar and a vote. Yet knowledge is dispersed and local: the consequences of every coercive act ripple through markets, communities, and the very incentives that sustain cooperation. To assume that a “policy fix” can be swapped in or out on a timetable, without unpredictable side effects, is to forget what makes peaceful cooperation possible in the first place—the open, lawful, predictable interactions among innumerable individuals and firms whose plans are woven together by prices, contracts, and mutual expectations.

The danger lies not only in the likely immediate effects of renewed sanctions, but in the deeper erosion of the very conditions that make diplomacy meaningful. When the language of policy becomes a game of deadlines and threats—time running out, red lines, verifications—the delicate art of negotiated restraint is recast as a weapon in a broader struggle for political prestige. The snapback mechanism, whatever its legal geometry, is a device that can undermine legitimate expectations and induce states to recalibrate their beliefs about what is enforceable and what is merely fragile bravado. In such a climate, the probability of miscalculation rises. The incentive to bluff, to exaggerate political resolve, or to read signals through the lens of domestic political advantage grows, while the search for principled, enduring cooperation gets crowded out by the spectacle of brinkmanship.

From a perspective that esteems the limits of central planning in both domestic and international arenas, the wiser course would be to anchor diplomacy in the ordinary securities of a rule-governed order rather than in the extraordinary coercions of sanctions merely because a clock dictates urgency. A durable peace cannot hinge on the capacity of one coalition to compel another into a single engineered outcome. It rests on widely accepted rules, credible commitments that survive changes in leadership, and an environment in which information flows are not choked by fear of immediate punitive action. The plausible guarantee of restraint comes not from the threat of immediate punishment, but from a shared understanding that restraint serves the long-run interests of all parties in ways that no quick fix can substitute.

To be sure, critics will say that urgent times demand decisive action and that the international community cannot gamble on the hope of spontaneous order arising from patient dialogue. Yet the very record of this episode suggests the opposite: the most reliable form of order across borders is not the result of coercive decrees but the outcome of voluntary cooperation built upon predictable rules, reciprocal transparency, and a shared respect for property and civil liberties—extending even to states with divergent aims. The attempt to separate peaceful enrichment from broader strategic intentions, to distinguish legitimate security concerns from the politics of punishment, requires a steadiness of purpose that no timetable can manufacture.

The path forward, in my view, is to reaffirm the general, predictable framework that makes international exchange safe and stable: focus on verifiable, non-disruptive constraints; insist on credible mechanisms for verification that respect sovereignty and minimize the chance of cascading sanctions; and place greater faith in the long-run incentives for peaceful behavior that emerge when economies remain open and lawful. Diplomacy should be seen as an ongoing process of mutual adjustment under general rules, not a race to fulfill a deadline that legitimizes coercion as a substitute for persuasion. If the European states and their partners wish to reduce the danger of miscalculation, they would center their effort on strengthening a common legal order that can accommodate disagreement without dissolving the very fabric of peaceful cooperation.

In the end, the test is whether we permit the search for a reasonable arrangement to be overtaken by the drama of ultimatums. If we retreat into this theatre, where sanctions loom as a perpetual threat and diplomacy is merely a means to an escalatory end, we betray the very prerequisite of civilization: the ability to live together under rules we can all defend, know, and improve through peaceful, collaborative effort. The alternative is a world in which coercion substitutes for understanding, and certainty for prudence—precisely the horizon from which the worst kind of conflict often emerges.