Editor’s Note: This op-ed was submitted to JURIST prior to the joint US-Israeli military strikes on Iran that began on February 28, 2026. The author is based in Tehran. JURIST has confirmed that he is safe. Due to ongoing internet disruptions and security conditions on the ground, he is currently unable to file. He will share his perspectives on the unfolding situation when he is able to do so. We publish his essay now because its arguments about the relationship between political language, negotiation, and state power have taken on an immediacy its author could not have anticipated.

Mother and child

Sit before the house door,

Looking upon the peace.

Few seem to die:

A premonition, sent from the golden light,

Holds the soul back;

A promise retains the eldest.

Celebration of Peace – by Friedrich Hölderlin, Translated by James Mitchell

Peace, Hölderlin suggests, begins as language—as a promise that holds. A few weeks after the protests erupted across Iran at the end of 2025, schools reopened in person. When I walked into my philosophy class, the students had only one question: When will the United States attack? Will it attack at all? What will happen? Is negotiation good for us, or bad? They were asking with a seriousness that no teenager should have to learn so early. They were not asking about missiles; they were asking about language. About promises and threats, about rumors and silence, about the strange ritual of diplomacy that seems to decide the fate of nations while ordinary people watch from the dark. Their words have stayed with me ever since. They were the beginning of this manifesto: an attempt to think about negotiation not as a technical instrument of foreign policy but as a problem in the philosophy of language and law, as a drama in which regimes confront the limits of their own speech.

The diplomat and historian Henry Kissinger once drew a distinction that feels almost theological itself. He argued that negotiation has two dimensions: psychological and theological. The idea runs through his work, from Diplomacy (1994) to his portraits of mid-twentieth-century statecraft in Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy (2022). In the psychological mode, adversaries meet not because they trust each other but because they recognize the danger of misunderstanding. Negotiation becomes a way to manage uncertainty. Even without agreement, conversation stabilizes the world. In the theological mode, the adversary is not merely mistaken but illegitimate. Dialogue becomes betrayal. Compromise becomes sin. Negotiation collapses before it begins because language itself is closed. According to this interpretation, negotiation fails when language is treated as complete rather than provisional—when vocabulary is sacred, not contingent. But this distinction, insightful as it is, leaves an unanswered question: why do some regimes fail at negotiation even when they try? Why do leaders who believe in their own strength either concede too much or lash out in fury? Kissinger noticed the pattern without naming it. Leaders with absolute confidence are often poor negotiators. They cannot calibrate language because they believe it is already complete. They speak as if certainty were clarity. They negotiate as if listening were weakness. They fall into what I call political stuttering. Political stuttering is not hesitation. It is speech that repeats itself because it cannot change. It is language that believes it is final. It is the condition in which power confuses volume with truth. Slogans replace arguments; ritual replaces conversation. The state speaks constantly yet says nothing new. And when it meets an adversary, it cannot translate itself into a vocabulary the other side can hear.

Here the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer becomes indispensable. In Truth and Method (1960), Gadamer argues that understanding is always dialogical: we do not stand outside language and use it as a tool; we live inside it. Meaning is never complete. There is always something unsaid, something that escapes expression. This incompleteness is not a flaw but the very condition of understanding. Dialogue exists because no one possesses language fully. Gadamer’s insight carries a political warning: if understanding happens only in language, then regimes that close language close reality. They silence dissent, yes, but they also silence self‑knowledge. They begin to believe their own formulas. They repeat them louder and more often until words detach from experience. When such a regime enters negotiation, it discovers that its vocabulary cannot carry the complexity of reality. It stutters. To see this pattern in practice, consider the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In October of that year, a popular uprising in Hungary challenged the rigid communist regime backed by the Soviet Union. The reformist leader Imre Nagy attempted to open political space and negotiate Hungary’s neutrality and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact—an alliance that bound Eastern Bloc countries under Soviet influence. After initial signals of possible openness, the Soviets intervened militarily, arresting negotiators and crushing the uprising with overwhelming force. The Soviet leadership could not translate Nagy’s language of reform into a shared political vocabulary, viewing his demands as betrayal rather than legitimate negotiation. Their refusal to engage meaningfully with those linguistic signals turned negotiation into coercion and ultimately violence. The failure of diplomacy in 1956 did not occur because of a lack of military power, but because the vocabulary of authority could not accommodate plurality, reform, or shared meaning. The Soviet refusal to admit conceptual openness in the language of negotiation exemplifies political stuttering at its most destructive.

Kissinger’s psychological negotiation assumes that adversaries can admit misunderstanding. Gadamer explains why that admission is necessary: because language itself is incomplete. Negotiation succeeds when both sides accept that their words are provisional. It fails when one side insists that its vocabulary is sacred. At that point, diplomacy becomes theater—summits without translation, communiqués without comprehension, agreements that cannot survive contact with reality. This is especially visible in systems that reduce public discourse to a single dimension. In such regimes, speech becomes ritual. Citizens learn to repeat phrases rather than argue. Officials speak in formulas that cannot be questioned. Over time, the state loses fluency. It cannot describe crises honestly because honesty would require new language. It cannot negotiate effectively because negotiation demands nuance. It oscillates between concession and aggression because it lacks a vocabulary for recognition. Another historical illustration of linguistic impasse in diplomacy is the Sino‑Soviet split—the rupture in relations between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Initially bound by the 1950 Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance, the two governments diverged ideologically over interpretations of Marxism‑Leninism and approaches to global strategy. As tensions escalated, high‑level meetings and negotiations failed not because of material incapacity but because each side’s language was constrained by absolutist ideological claims. China accused the Soviet leadership of betrayal of revolutionary orthodoxy, while the Soviets saw Chinese criticisms as destabilizing and illegitimate.

Written communication replaced face‑to‑face dialogue, each party issuing doctrinal statements that reaffirmed rather than questioned its foundational premises. In July 1963, a series of negotiations in Moscow collapsed because both sides maintained incompatible ideological vocabularies, making mutual understanding impossible. Continued efforts in 1964 likewise yielded no substantive rapprochement. This diplomatic impasse demonstrates how ideological certainty can disable negotiation by preventing the linguistic flexibility necessary for translation between political vocabularies.

History offers many such examples. Revolutionary governments that once defined legitimacy through absolute ideology often found that both war and negotiation forced them into translation. Some survived by expanding their language; others could not. The pressure of dialogue exposed contradictions that slogans had concealed. Their authority did not collapse in a single moment of defeat; it eroded as their words lost meaning. Long before institutions fell, language had already fractured. This pattern is not confined to any single country or era. Wherever legitimacy is tied to a rigid vocabulary, negotiation becomes dangerous. War forces explanation; peace requires translation. Both expose the limits of language. A regime that cannot tolerate plural speech internally cannot sustain dialogue externally. Its leaders must either concede unpredictably or escalate irrationally because they cannot explain compromise to themselves.

Legal philosophy often treats negotiation as inherently rational, a neutral technique for resolving disputes. But negotiation presupposes a shared grammar of recognition. Without that grammar, dialogue becomes performance. Agreements become fragile. Each side speaks, but neither hears. Political stuttering deepens until reality breaks through in crisis.

Think again of those students. They sensed the disconnect between official speech and lived experience. They knew that declarations of strength and threats of retaliation did not answer their question: What will happen to us? They were confronting a hermeneutic crisis before they knew the word. They were asking whether language still connected rulers and ruled, enemies and allies, promises and consequences. Kissinger’s distinction explains the surface of their fear. Gadamer explains its depth. When governments speak only in theological terms, negotiation becomes taboo. When they attempt psychological negotiation without linguistic openness, it becomes incoherent. Political stuttering emerges precisely there: power speaks louder yet communicates less; it negotiates yet cannot hear; it promises yet cannot define success.

This manifesto proposes a simple test for negotiation in legal philosophy. Do regimes allow plural speech within their own borders? Do they tolerate ambiguity in public language? Can they translate ideology into arguments that others can contest? If not, negotiation will not stabilize them. It will expose them. Their language will fracture under the pressure of dialogue. Some governments survive this encounter. They reform. They widen their vocabulary. They discover that legitimacy can be renewed through conversation. Others cannot. They discover that their identity depended on silence. When silence breaks, meaning dissolves. They confront a choice between linguistic transformation and internal collapse. In certain contemporary systems, this dilemma is especially acute. Where revolutionary legitimacy has been fused with theological certainty, both war and negotiation threaten the same outcome. War forces explanation to citizens who demand clarity. Negotiation forces translation before an external audience that demands coherence. Each path compels language to expand. If language cannot expand, authority contracts. What appears as geopolitical crisis is often a crisis of vocabulary. Political stuttering names this moment. It is the echo of power speaking without listening. It is the repetition of certainty in the face of contradiction. It is the illusion that louder speech can repair broken meaning. But language does not obey power indefinitely. When words detach from reality, they collapse. And when they collapse, institutions follow.

The students who asked about war were really asking about trust in language. They wanted to know whether promises meant anything, whether threats were real, whether negotiation could be understood. Their questions were the purest form of political philosophy. They were asking whether language still made a common world possible. I write this manifesto for them. Negotiation is not always a path to peace. Sometimes it is a mirror held up to power. It reveals whether a regime can speak in more than one voice, whether it can hear disagreement without panic, whether it can translate conviction into argument. Systems that forbid dialogue eventually suffocate in their own words. Systems that accept linguistic incompleteness can adapt, survive, and coexist. Political stuttering is the warning sign. It is the sound of ideology colliding with reality. It is the moment when language begins to collapse before institutions do. And when that collapse begins, neither war nor negotiation can save a regime that has nothing left to say. The fate of governments may depend less on their weapons than on their grammar—and on their courage to admit that understanding begins not in certainty, but in dialogue.