Obama and the art of corridor diplomacy | World news

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The UN general assembly often sees ‘impromptu’ meetings between leaders who would otherwise rather not be seen with each other. This year, all eyes are on the US and Iran

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Barack Obama and Hugo Chávez meet before the opening ceremony of the Summit of the Americas in 2009. Photograph: Reuters

With a new moderate and media-savvy Iranian leadership in place and a White House looking for a quick diplomatic victory, there is speculation about the prospect of a historic "chance encounter" in the corridors of the UN general assembly next week. There is talk that Barack Obama might shake hands with Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, which would be the first direct encounter between US and Iranian leaders since Jimmy Carter and Shaha Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1977. Failing that, diplomats say that a meeting between the US secretary of state, John Kerry, and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, could well be on the cards. That alone would be the highest-level exchange since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

"Corridor diplomacy", or the fancy-meeting-you-here school of foreign policy, has a long if not a particularly proud history as a tool for statesmen and women who have not quite made up their minds whether they want to be seen together. That applies particularly to the always-tricky relationship between the US and Iran. The late US special envoy on Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, bumped into Iran’s deputy foreign minister Mohammad-Mehdi Akhoondzadeh, at a conference on Afghanistan in The Hague in 2009. Holbrooke’s boss at the time, Hillary Clinton, called it "a cordial exchange" and said the two would stay in touch. But they did not. The time was definitely not ripe in Tehran and Akhoondzadeh spent much of his ensuing career back in Tehran trying to play it down, if not deny it altogether.

The Hague incident was followed later that year by a "sidebar" meeting between US and Iranian diplomats at Geneva talks on the Iranian nuclear programme. The "sidebar" is a notch up on the corridor meeting. Chairs are usually provided, for example, and sometimes even a table, but the bottom line is that neither side is particularly committed to the outcome. As it turned out, that was the case in Geneva, and there has been no official contact between the two powers ever since.

However, general assembly week at the UN, beginning next Monday, is an ever-fertile environment for such coy diplomatic trysts as the corridors are so crowded with world leaders it is sometimes difficult to avoid each other. Obama’s security detail went out of its way to make sure he did not get cornered into a grip-and-grin with Rouhani’s fiercely outspoken predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In a 2009 Summit of the Americas meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, the president was trapped into an involuntary handshake with another nemesis, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Chávez not only managed to sidle up to Obama but hand him a book, triggering much rightwing derision back in Washington. The cheeky publicity-hogging tactic subsequently became known as "pulling a Chávez".

Former British foreign secretary Jack Straw also found himself unwittingly shaking the hand of an undesirable foreign leader, in the shape of Robert Mugabe. Straw said later that it was an accident as he had been shaking lots of hands in a "dark corner" of the UN. But Gordon Brown suffered what is perhaps the opposite ignominy. In 2009, the then prime minister was desperate for some public face time with Obama. His team would have killed for some regular corridor diplomacy. Instead, the special relationship was relegated to a 15-minute "walk and talk" out of sight in the UN’s kitchens.

It was a reminder that political opportunity is forever rubbing shoulders with the potential for humiliation in the teeming halls of global diplomacy.

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Posted by

Julian Borger

Monday 16 September 2013 13.05 EDT

The Guardian

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World news

United Nations · Barack Obama · Hassan Rouhani · United States · Iran

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