Peace Talks and the Illusion of Peace

Executive Summary

This article is a representation of the authors own opinion. It cannot be seen as the conception of the Berghof Foundation.

Recent attempts to end wars through negotiations teach a simple lesson: peace talks are rarely the shortest path to peace.

This is particularly evident today in the continuing debates over Russia’s war against Ukraine, the military confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah, and the growing tensions between the United States and Iran. In all three cases, negotiations are widely presented as the obvious path. Yet the assumption that negotiations naturally lead to peace rests on a series of misconceptions about what negotiations are designed to achieve.

Negotiations continue to be widely regarded as the preferred instrument for ending armed conflict. Yet they are often more accurately understood as instruments of conflict management. Rather than representing an alternative to power politics, negotiations usually operate within it, allowing parties to pursue their interests by political means while conflict continues in other forms. Nor are calls for negotiations politically neutral. They frequently imply judgments about whose interests should be accommodated, whose concessions should be expected, and whose risks should be accepted. Finally, negotiated agreements tell us little about the durability of peace. Sustainable peace depends less on reaching agreements than on implementing them. Negotiations may open the door to peace, but they do not walk the parties through it.

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The search for peace often begins with a deceptively simple demand: the parties must negotiate. As wars become longer, deadlier, and more costly, calls for negotiations grow louder. This is currently the case in debates about Ukraine, the confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah, and the escalating tensions between the United States and Iran. In Germany and elsewhere, political actors increasingly portray negotiations as a straightforward alternative to continued military resistance, often overstating what negotiations can realistically achieve while understating the risks involved.

The appeal is understandable. Negotiations offer hope where military solutions appear elusive. They promise dialogue instead of violence, compromise instead of confrontation, and a path away from war. If adversaries are willing to talk, many assume, they must also be willing to compromise. My own experience suggests a different conclusion.

Having spent years observing and supporting peace negotiations on the ground—including the Doha talks on Afghanistan from their inception to their ultimate collapse—I have come to believe that peace negotiations are among the most misunderstood instruments of international politics. They are routinely romanticized and burdened with expectations they cannot possibly fulfill. More importantly, they are often portrayed as alternatives to conflict when they are, in reality, part of the conflict itself.

This is not an argument against negotiations. Quite the opposite. Negotiations remain indispensable. But understanding what they can realistically achieve requires abandoning a number of persistent illusions. The most important lesson I took away from Doha was not about peace. It was about interests.

In Doha, the Afghan Republic, the Taliban, and the United States all spoke about peace. Yet they meant fundamentally different things. The Afghan government sought survival. The Taliban sought power. The United States sought a politically acceptable exit from a war that had become strategically unsustainable. All parties negotiated. None of them negotiated for the same reason. The negotiations were real. The peace process was not.

That experience has become increasingly relevant as policymakers and commentators debate how current conflicts might end. Too often, negotiations are discussed as though they exist in a political space separate from power, interests, and coercion. In reality, they rarely escape those forces. They reflect them.

Illusion One: Negotiations as the opposite of war

The first and perhaps most persistent illusion is that negotiations represent the opposite of war.

History suggests otherwise. More often than not, negotiations accompany violence rather than replace it. Russia and Ukraine have negotiated throughout the war. Humanitarian arrangements, prisoner exchanges, and diplomatic contacts continued even as military operations intensified. The same pattern has been visible in the Middle East. Israel and Hezbollah have communicated through intermediaries while exchanging fire. Similarly, Israel and Hamas remained engaged in indirect negotiations over hostages and temporary ceasefires while continuing to pursue military objectives. This simultaneity is not unusual. States and armed groups negotiate while fighting because negotiations serve purposes other than ending war. They help manage escalation, communicate intentions, test adversaries, influence external actors, and improve bargaining positions. In a reversal of Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum, negotiations often become a continuation of armed conflict by other means.

Illusion Two: Fair compromise through negotiations

An equally persistent misconception is that negotiations naturally produce fair compromises.

They do not.

Negotiated settlements are not exercises in abstract justice. They reflect power, leverage, military realities, and political constraints. What emerges from negotiations is often less a fair solution than a temporary equilibrium between competing interests.

The debate surrounding Ukraine illustrates the point. Calls for a “realistic settlement” frequently imply territorial concessions by Kyiv. Such proposals may be strategically defensible. They may also be politically unacceptable. But they are not neutral. They involve choices about whose interests should prevail and whose should be subordinated.

The same logic applies elsewhere. For Israelis, security remains paramount after the trauma of October 7 and subsequent regional escalation. For Palestinians, questions of sovereignty, dignity, and self-determination remain unresolved. For Hezbollah and its supporters, resistance remains part of a broader strategic narrative. Outside observers often invoke compromise as though it were a technical exercise. For the parties themselves, however, the issues under discussion are frequently perceived as existential.

Negotiations do not transcend politics. They express it. And because they do, every negotiated outcome inevitably reflects political choices about interests, risks, and power.

Illusion Three: Necessity of quiet guns for peace talks

A third illusion is that negotiations become possible only after violence has ended. In reality, sincere negotiations often occur during the most dangerous phases of conflict.

When tensions rise between Washington and Tehran, diplomatic channels tend to become more active rather than less. The objective is rarely peace in any comprehensive sense. More often, it is crisis management—testing the waters of what may be achievable and where the limits of compromise lie. The same logic applies to Ukraine and the Middle East. Negotiations over humanitarian access, temporary ceasefires, prisoner exchanges, and de-escalation mechanisms frequently take place while violence continues.

The key varable is not the level of violence. It is political calculation. Negotiations become possible when the parties conclude that talking serves their interests better than the available alternatives—even when those alternatives still include military action.

Illusion Four: Calls for negotiations are neutral

Perhaps the most consequential illusion, however, concerns neutrality.

Calls for negotiations are often treated as occupying the moral high ground. Advocating diplomacy is widely assumed to be synonymous with advocating peace. Those who question the timing or terms of negotiations can quickly find themselves portrayed as opponents of peace itself. Yet calls for negotiations are not neutral. They are political interventions in their own right. Every demand for negotiations contains assumptions about who should compromise, which interests should be prioritized, and what risks are acceptable. The language of diplomacy often obscures these choices, but it does not eliminate them.

This has become particularly visible in debates about Ukraine. Many calls for immediate negotiations implicitly assume that Ukraine should accept territorial losses, reduced security guarantees, or limitations on its strategic autonomy. Whether such concessions are justified is a legitimate subject of debate. But presenting them as the self-evident price of peace disguises the political choices involved.

The same dynamic exists in the Middle East. Calls for ceasefires, de-escalation arrangements, or regional settlements may be motivated by entirely understandable humanitarian concerns. Yet they can also underestimate the extent to which the parties view security as a matter of survival.

The problem is not diplomacy. The problem is pretending that diplomacy comes without costs. Too often, those advocating negotiations do not bear the consequences of the compromises they propose. They ask others to accept risks they themselves will never have to face. Ukrainians asked to surrender territory, Palestinians asked to abandon political aspirations, or Israelis asked to accept greater insecurity may view such proposals very differently from observers thousands of miles away. This does not mean negotiations should not occur. It means that demands for negotiations deserve the same scrutiny as demands for military action.

Illusion Five: Negotiating automatically leads to peace

The final illusion is perhaps the most seductive: the belief that peace emerges from negotiations themselves. Recent developments in Gaza offer a powerful reminder of why this assumption is flawed. Negotiations have repeatedly produced temporary ceasefires, hostage arrangements, humanitarian understandings, and limited agreements between the parties. Yet many of these arrangements proved fragile because implementation faltered and mutual trust remained absent.

The lesson is not that negotiations failed to occur. The lesson is that negotiations alone were insufficient. Peace agreements do not create peace. At best, they create opportunities for peace. The real test begins after the negotiations end. Implementation, institutions, security guarantees, political leadership, and public acceptance ultimately determine whether agreements survive. Peace, in other words, is not a diplomatic event. It is a political process.

Germany’s own experience offers a useful reminder. The trust and confidence that eventually enabled German reunification after the Second World War were not the product of a single negotiation or legal agreement. They emerged from decades of political transformation, institution-building, security guarantees, and gradual reconciliation between former enemies.

Negotiations can establish frameworks. They can reduce uncertainty. They can create opportunities. But they cannot substitute for the difficult political work that follows. This distinction matters because public debate often treats negotiations as the finish line. In reality, they are usually the starting point. The current debates surrounding Ukraine, the Middle East, and Iran would benefit from less diplomatic romanticism and more strategic realism. Negotiations are not exits from conflict. They are instruments within it.

That is not a reason to abandon diplomacy. It is a reason to understand it more clearly. Policymakers should not ask merely whether negotiations are taking place. They should ask what the parties hope to achieve through them, what interests are driving them, and whether the political conditions exist to sustain whatever agreements emerge.

Negotiations are most effective when they help create reliable frameworks for relationships based on transparent and verifiable agreements. Arms control arrangements, disengagement mechanisms, ceasefire agreements, and prisoner exchanges belong to this category. They do not, by themselves, ensure durable peace. But they can establish structural benchmarks and rules of engagement to which the parties commit themselves in measurable terms.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply to promote negotiations. It is to understand what negotiations can realistically achieve—and what they cannot. It is also to recognize when other approaches may be more effective, either because they reinforce the value of negotiations or because they are strengthened by negotiations that precede or accompany them.

A more comprehensive answer lies in mediation and dialogue. Peace is more than a bargain, and it cannot be reduced to a deal. Durable peace between adversaries depends on a transformation of strategic and political interests: away from zero-sum thinking and toward patterns of cooperation based on mutual advantage. Such transformation requires a different quality of engagement. Mediation can help influence the parties’ interests, attitudes, and relationships. Dialogue can create an environment conducive to trust-building through joint learning.

Yet, like negotiations, mediation and dialogue also have their own benefits, risks, and limitations. Both deserve closer examination. Understanding how negotiations, mediation, and dialogue can be effectively intertwined is essential for developing a more convincing path toward durable peace. This will be the focus of the next two essays: mediation in Blog 2 and dialogue in Blog 3.

This text is an extended version of an opinion piece published by the German Newspaper “Der Tagesspiegel” on June 15, 2026.