Christian Science Monitor:

Howard LaFranchi has been the Monitor's diplomacy correspondent in DC since 2001. Previously, he spent 12 years as a reporter in the field; serving five years as the Monitor's Paris bureau chief from 1989 to 1994, and as a Latin America correspondent in Mexico City from 1994 to 2001. 

As tensions have risen between the United States and Iran over recent months, communications between the two longtime adversaries have been carried out over Twitter, through press interviews, and in speeches by leaders on the two sides – the latter more often than not aimed at domestic audiences.

When the U.S. Navy shot down an Iranian drone over the increasingly conflicted Strait of Hormuz Thursday, President Donald Trump announced the most recent incident in a statement from the White House. “This is the latest of many provocative and hostile actions by Iran against vessels operating in international waters,” he said. Iran on Friday denied it had lost any of its drones.

Missing from the mix of communications between the two foes, or so it seems, is the kind of back-channel diplomacy that U.S. administrations have often deployed in the past to cool tensions and avoid potentially catastrophic misunderstandings – or to pave the way to direct high-level talks.

Indeed, the Obama administration used back-channel diplomacy with Iran to get to the long and intense negotiations – largely carried out by then-Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif – that resulted in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Fast forward to mid-2019, and a very different U.S. president is employing roughly the same playbook with Iran that he did with North Korea before meeting with Kim Jong Un for the two leaders’ groundbreaking Singapore summit in 2018.

Tweets about Iran and pronouncements to the press in cabinet meetings or on the White House driveway are accompanied by a “maximum pressure” campaign of crippling sanctions designed, at least in part, to get the U.S. and Iran to the direct leader-to-leader talks Mr. Trump says he wants.

On the other side, Mr. Zarif sits down for interviews with the American press, while back in Tehran, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gives fiery speeches in which he fulminates about an untrustworthy America.

    A missing buffer

What is not part of the equation are under-the-radar contacts between governments that diplomats and regional experts say are a key part of keeping tense relations from spilling over into a hot conflict that neither side appears to want.

“The lack of open lines of communication between the Trump administration and the Iranian regime has led to a vacuum that makes it incredibly difficult to judge the messages the other side is sending and to understand the adversary’s motivations,” says Ned Price, a former CIA intelligence officer who served in the Obama White House National Security Council and is now director of policy at National Security Action, a Washington advocacy group.

What that means, experts say, is that when incidents occur – like Thursday’s drone shoot-down by the U.S.; or Iran’s confirmation earlier Thursday of its seizure of a foreign-flagged oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz (through which passes more than a fifth of the world’s oil and petroleum products); or when Iran shoots down a U.S. military drone it says was over national air space, as it did in May; or the U.S. imposes a new round of sanctions on Iranian leaders and businesses – the diplomatic channels aren’t there for the behind-the-scenes contacts that could nip tensions in the bud.

Those tensions appeared to ratchet up further Friday when Iran said that it had seized a British-flagged oil tanker in the Persian Gulf.

“This vacuum we have now contributes to a situation where heightened conflict could much more easily spiral out of control,” Mr. Price says.

He cites the example of Iran’s seizure in early 2016 of two U.S. Navy patrol boats with 10 crew members in Iranian coastal waters – a situation that under other circumstances could have easily led to a dangerous standoff or worse.

“But those sailors were sent on their way less than 24 hours after they were detained by Iranian forces,” he says. “That outcome didn’t happen by accident, it happened because the open channels of communication at various levels made it possible for Kerry to pick up the phone and work this out with Zarif.”

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