From the corridors of power in Washington to a Swiss mountain resort, via Tehran and a French spa, it has been a dizzying week of diplomacy for Iran – marked by unexpected twists and turns and a last-ditch hunt for a printer at the Palace of Versailles.
Negotiator Pakistan announced on June 14 that an agreement had been reached to end the war in the Middle East.
It was US President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday and on the eve of his departure for the G7 summit in the French spa town of Evian-les-Bains.
The announcement surprised many in Iran, who had braced for a third straight night of US strikes as a cease-fire ending the Middle East war began to crumble.
But the intrigue did not end there. Where would the official signing of the agreement take place? And from whom? And what would be the framework for further discussions between the two enemies who have not had diplomatic relations since the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution?
Trump arrived at the G7 summit in high spirits, fresh off celebrating his birthday by watching MMA cage fights at the White House and hammering out the deal.
Host President Emmanuel Macron said the agreement had in fact already been signed “electronically”. But it remained unclear throughout Trump’s stay in Evian when the official signing would take place.
Vice President JD Vance was expected to sign the document with senior Iranian negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf in Switzerland on Friday.
But Trump then muddied the waters on the summit’s final day on Wednesday, saying “the deal we reached with Iran on Sunday will be signed soon, tomorrow, maybe the next day.”
After the summit ended, with the fate of the deal still far from clear, Macron took Trump to dinner at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris, where the US president, impressed by the golden glow, signed it himself, on a white candlelit tablecloth.
– A printer in a building? –
Macron told French television that the US president’s decision to sign the text “was taken spontaneously”.
So spontaneous that it wasn’t even printed and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had to try to get a printer from inside the mansion.
Trump used a plump black pen to sign the deal, with dishes clinking on the after-dinner table or lobster and caviar as he put pen to paper.
In a parallel move, Iranian President Masoud Pezehshkian followed suit, with Iranian news agencies showing him waving his copy of the deal.
– The Magic Mountain –
Attention then turned to the Burgenstock luxury hotel complex atop a mountain overlooking Lake Lucerne in central Switzerland, which had been chosen as the safest and most isolated site for the next phase of US-Iran talks.
The iconic venue has played host to the rich and famous for decades and was famously where screen idol Audrey Hepburn married her first husband Mel Ferrer.
But the lure of Burgenstock only added more intrigue, and when, late on Thursday, the talks finally appeared to resume on Friday, they were postponed at the last minute, reportedly because of Israeli military action against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
White House reporters, already waiting on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base to board Vance or in Zurich ready to take a shuttle to the venue, received a brief message from the administration that the vice president was not leaving that evening.
The hotel, whose guests were said to have been quietly asked to leave to accommodate the talks, appeared from the mountaintop’s slope.
Journalists already occupying the area around Burgenstock under tight security retreated, knowing the talks could resume at any moment.
But Iran, on Friday, said there was now “no urgency” but added that “we are planning to hold a meeting in the coming days.”
