Iran Rejects Trump’s Pressure as Diplomacy Hits a Breaking Point (with Tony Piazza)

0:00New intelligence reports just leaked and they paint a damning picture of the current state of the US war in Iran. These reports leaked to the New York Times and also intelligence officials spoke to the New York Times and they've also been speaking to other media outlets and what they are saying is alarming and it is consistent. They say and they assess that Iran believes, rightfully so that the United States has run out of critical weapons like the Patreon Interceptors, the Thad Interceptors and other key munitions. Iran sees itself in the strongest position yet and they see the United States in the weakest position yet. Iran sees no reason to engage in further negotiations with Trump. They don't believe that negotiations can go anywhere. They feel that Trump continue to change the terms of the deal as he did with the memorandum of understanding and they

1:02say that they're only thing that they're going to be focused on now is either Donald Trump will comply with the prior terms of the MOU or not. Iran believes it has a deal and either the deal will be followed or there will be continued escalation. Now we saw over the past 24 to 48 hours this escalation trap in action, right? 24 hours ago, sent comm announced that they struck three Iranian tankers in the Strait of Hormuz after sent comm alleges that Iran was shooting hypersonic missiles at the U.S. aircraft carriers and other U.S. ships in the region. Iran responded to the U.S. striking those three tankers by hitting six ships, three tankers and according to Iran, three other vessels and from there we've seen the escalation trap escalate to where it is right now

2:04and it certainly doesn't seem that there can be a resolution anytime soon. You have reports like this, Iran warns Washington that continued attacks, sanctions or strikes from regional bases will continue to face retaliation by Iran. Iran says, honor the MOU, we don't want to do further negotiations, we did a deal with you, either honor the MOU or not and if you don't honor the MOU, we're not just going to sit back as you do a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. We will continue to now try to strike the aircraft carriers in the region and we're not just going to be using short range anti ship ballistic missiles but we'll use hypersonic carrier killer, Tason Baseer, ASBMs, the upgraded version of the short range anti ballistic ship missiles that can reach speeds up to Mach 5 to Mach 8. We will start to use those and you haven't seen those

3:08in open warfare before United States and Iran assesses the United States as being weaker than ever right now. Now what is the former mediator who actually was able to get a deal between the United States and Iran, which after announcing there was a deal, then the United States struck Iran in late February and the deal was off but the Al-Man foreign minister just published a piece in the financial times. In an age of impunity diplomats are more important than ever, Al-Man's foreign minister says there is a tendency on the part of some world leaders to decide that they can do it themselves. In recent years diplomacy has been an unforgiving endeavor. A few provisional agreements have achieved limited de-escalations but there have been no lasting resolutions to any of the dangerous global conflicts that directly threaten lives in Palestine, Iran, Yemen, Sudan,

4:08Lebanon, Israel and Ukraine and which inflict serious damage upon regional neighbors and the global economy. The Oman foreign minister writes and he's known as like the most world-renowned mediator on these international diplomatic issues. The second is the tendency on the part of some world leaders to decide that they can do diplomacy themselves without involving diplomats. The problem is that they soon find that they have very fuel tools at their disposal with which to advance their objectives. They are forced to resort either to the traditional 19th century imperial method of gunboat diplomacy or to the more refined but equally destructive modern equivalent of using economic power to bully entire populations into submission in the hopes of regime change and the installation of a compliant proxy administration. How are smaller states supposed to act

5:09when the rules that once restrained larger states are increasingly ignored? It may be that the best response is to start by patiently, even a little pedantically, insisting upon adherence to some of the old norms. Repeated invocations of international law may be dismissed as tedious by those whose instincts are to move fast and break things but they are there to protect the vast majority of the global population. Now is not the time to give up on the principle that the law serves to constrain illegitimate uses of power. I want to explore that more in a way that's very unique and personal to me. Well, you join me on this because this is very important to me. As you know, I used to be a litigator before starting the Midas Touch Network about six years ago. And when I was a litigator, one of my mentors was an individual by the name of Tony Piazza,

6:14a world-renowned mediator often viewed as the godfather of mediation in modern civil litigation. Tony Piazza began as a mediator in 1980 and he really created and pushed forward what we know to be the modern mediation practice of civil litigation today. Now Tony Piazza has mediated thousands and thousands, five thousand, six thousand mediation. So many mediations and the most high profile cases, big corporations, fighting big corporations, billion dollar disputes. People show up and they mediate before Tony Piazza. And in a day, he's often able to resolve these massive cases with these big gigantic companies or big personalities. And he's the mediator. He's the most sought after civil mediator in the entire world right now. And he's someone who taught me how I could be a

7:18better mediator, how I could be a better listener, how I could deal with conflict resolution back when I was practicing law. I want to see in this interview, I want to bring them on, if we can apply these principles that he pioneered in a litigation context at the highest level to international diplomacy and the failure right now of international diplomacy to bring parties together despite the great efforts of some great international diplomats or at least at the end of the day to propose a new framework or a way of thinking about a mediation and mediating these types of disputes. I want to bring in Tony Piazza right now, my mentor. You're going to want to watch this full interview right now. Let's bring in the interview I did with Tony yesterday.

8:18Now I've done a lot of interviews here on the Midas Touch Network over the years, but this is a really special one to me because I'm bringing in a personal mentor of mine, someone who I've learned negotiations from someone who I've learned, mediations from someone who hasn't appeared on that many podcasts or shows and frankly keeps a lower profile out there, but within the business community, within the community of mediations, especially in high profile litigations, there's really in my opinion no equal out there to Tony Piazza who's done thousands of mediations and I know Tony's there and so Tony, your humble let me explain also your background. The way modern mediation in American litigation is structured and how it has developed, again not an understatement in my view to credit Tony Piazza with that. The biggest cases,

9:22the most high profile cases, cases involving international litigations, disputes that span borders, the biggest ones out there. I don't want to go into too much of it, but suffice to say in the litigation community, everybody knows Tony Piazza and what I wanted to do today because a lot of my foundational principles, how I think of the memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran, why it fell apart, the role of countries like Oman and Pakistan and Qatar and how I think through them, I think through them also through a lens sometimes of these massive cases that I used to work on some of them when I was a litigator, but these are the types of cases that Tony sees and just to give you a background and Tony mediates and he'll explain to you what that means just as a mediator, the role of a mediator, but lots of these cases could be lasting

10:23in some cases years and years or sometimes decades along cases, but you show up at Tony's office, it's often one day of a mediation, although he'll be there to work with the parties, whatever that, you know, whatever it is to get it to. But it's a one day mediation pretty much as a process and parties resolve these massive disputes in a day. And so I was curious, Tony, as I think about these massive geopolitical issues and I see a struggle for deals to happen. You know, I was reading an op ed the other day by the foreign minister of Oman talking about the role of the diplomat and the role of mid-powered diplomats to play mediator and to try to resolve these bigger disputes and what it takes, especially when we see a lot more instability in an international level.

11:23And it feels like a lot of the world-order post-World 2 has been disrupted and we're in this time period of great change and great chaos and great danger. And can there be an organizational principle out of your? So that's my foundational to start with you, Tony. But I know you've been thinking about this a lot, applying these concepts to international. I'd love to hear from you what you're thinking because there's a lot of people who watch this, a lot of international leaders who watch this, who I think can learn from you about some of your ideas. Well, the elephant in the room for a conversation like this is whether we are assuming that we have two sides that are committed to finding a resolution and then honoring it if a deal is struck. Because unless you have people that are negotiating table with that mindset and the actual authority

12:25to back it up, you're just witnessing crude political theater. So if we start with the premise whether it's trade negotiations with between the US and Canada, that there are really bona fide negotiations going on. The question is, can we harvest some insight from four decades of mediating literally thousands of complex contentious legal disputes both in the US and internationally? That might reduce the chance of a trade negotiation deteriorating into a trade war. The answer is, nah, probably not, but since it's so rare that I have a chance to have a conversation with you, I think at least we're spending a few minutes taking another look at it. And I say, nah, probably not because it is just so much more challenging. I bow before the courageous mediators

13:26in Oman and elsewhere who are trying to stop wars. It's just so much more complicated when it's that kind of a political overlay to a negotiation. But if we are determined to extract some useful insight from our hard one experience negotiating settlement of legal disputes, I think the best candidate would be to not default prematurely as a mediator to trading positions between the parties and strive instead to establish a real evaluative dialogue between the mediator and each party. And then just relentlessly stay in dialogue until both sides have realistically assessed and have a real objective grasp of the risks of not reaching an agreement and conversely have identified and evaluated all possible options for getting to an

14:31agreement. Because the single most disruptive force interfering with negotiations of any kind of dispute and protracting fighting gratuitously is simple reactivity direct negotiations between parties where parties are trading punches and counter punches, demands and counter demands is so fraught with reactivity that it really tends to blur objective evaluation of risks and options. We structure our mediation process in the field that I work in expressly to reduce that reactivity by redirecting the dialectic of direct negotiations into a dialogue between the mediator and each party. And without I'm going to do a lateral back to you for a moment Ben.

15:34So talk to us though about two parties hype this is a hypothetical. They show up maybe one side is there for the right reasons one side isn't maybe both sides were ordered to show up but there's a great deal of tension and to remind our audience lots of these situations could be some of the biggest disputes out there in litigation context. These are parties going after each other's throats and they may be there reluctant they may be there reluctantly they may be there willingly but they they don't like each other you know and there's levels to the not like from don't like to hate to I can't even look at them but you have to create a environment that removes the reactivity and refocuses the dialogue not on a horse trade of numbers 25% 30% 15% you don't do that now that's

16:42that's a bad strategy and talk to us about that that what we are doing is understanding and building common understandings almost like one of these you know circular graphs of where is their commonality how do we bring people together and so how do you find in those environments where people don't even want to have the conversation to start that what are strategies that you do to make it more concrete I'll sanitize names but borrow an actual case from last year where two multinational companies neither of which are us based flew me out to Hong Kong for a day to mediate closure on a patent licensing dispute where the parties at the start of the day were only a little over three billion dollars apart in terms of what they thought the balancing payment should be so it's a good example of a few principles one it really doesn't matter how far or

17:51part the parties are at the start of the day what matters is determining what is driving those disparate evaluations of what things should be like at the end of the day obviously they're self-interest but assume sophisticated parties who have been looking at the various factors in the dispute sometimes for years and just as an aside kind of work we have we have people come to us after they've been fighting sometimes for a decade having spent millions tens of millions and in a few notable cases over a hundred million dollars each fighting with each other now again these sophisticated parties they're trying to resolve a dispute what could possibly be getting in the way of their evaluations about where realistically they could land the plane and resolve

18:52the dispute and the answer is simple reactivity and I know that seems simplistic but it's such a powerful force when parties are trying to negotiate directly it's just another display of Newton's second law every action is listening more of a reaction than a response so let's get back to that case so they flew me off for a day heading into the day said good morning thank you all for making time to be here the end of the day they had an agreement now what could possibly have changed in one day to take parties that distance and the answer is we were not during that day engaged in the same process they had been in and it was not that I added something that made a difference in their discussions it was that we extracted something that was getting in the way of their discussions and we did that simply by after that initial joint session with the parties made a presentation

19:57explained how right they were and why it should come up where they wanted and I summarized the appreciation stations back to demonstrate that I had actually taken the time in advance to really assimilate what the dispute was about we went into caucus and from then on the process was one of the evaluative dialogue between each side and the mediator rather than a dialectic between the parties up until that day this had been going on during that day we simply redirected it so that each party was in a less reactive evaluative dialogue with me and simple as it sounds that's really the heart of it and maybe on a good day I add 10 15% of the equation in terms of helping it to get worked out but that's not false modesty the heart of the process is simply making sure that you're not just

20:58trading offers and demands or position statements that you're giving the parties the opportunity to assess risks and assess options in a less reactive environment as we talk about the US Canada negotiations among the accusations of what led to the breakdown was different points of negotiating people who were taking different positions to Canada and then a last minute change in some of the terms and that and by the way the sides fight each other over what was what but I think for purposes of this dialogue and focused on strategically how you see these things that must happen where you've been in a day and it's productive and you think you're dealing with decision makers who have all the attributes of the right decision makers you know they have the title they have the position

21:59you know right away when you're dealing with and we would know right away when we're not dealing with the right people but you know you think you have the right people and then push all of a sudden a board member comes in that you're like where's this guy from or you know the spouse of the chairman comes in or or the chairman who you didn't realize still has a role so I ain't effing doing this so talk to us about that though and how you deal how do you deal with that and then get the parties back on track when this when a variable comes in and changes the dynamic and give me another 46 years and I might get to be good enough to be able to routinely deal with that situation effectively but as I sit here now I can tell you that that is the number one reason for a failed mediation to not really have at the table engaged in the process moment by moment the people who really have the final say in it so we counsel people everything you can't

23:03advance to figure that one out so you're not wasting your time and money spending the day but you are absolutely right that is the A number one reason for failure having said that can you ever retrieve it sometimes but it's tough if you thought you had a deal and then party came back and says yeah no we can't get that confirmed by our board what I do personally I'm not saying this is you know how standard practice should be but I figure at that point I got put my money where my mouth is and I'll usually donate my time to see if I can have either a final session with the right people there or maybe some kind of caucus with the parties who are having trouble deciding what their position should be and we just continue it continuing dialogue when you've lost the momentum of the day in mediation is really hard but continuing dialogue is the

24:08only way I know in any relationship in any negotiation to really give it a chance now mediation I've learned all of like a lot of my truthfully foundational principles of how I think about deal making and negotiations you know is from you and reflecting and never trying to lose my temper and you know I would give opening statements you know when I would do mediation with you and they evolved over time as I learned you know as I went out as this you know what I thought was a hard charging litigator and how you were supposed to you know act in front of your client to maybe that's not the most effective approach if my job is to actually do a deal which brings me to this kind of final point and I hope this is kind of chapter one of a lot of chapters that we can do together because I want you to share your wisdom with people but mediation and resolution and

25:09negotiation is not an act of domination there's litigation and then in the international sphere there's war and at the end of a mediation it's not one side usually almost always not destroying the other side and the other side leaves just like we got destroyed and demolished and crushed there's other forums for that that's not what you do and so I think part of the entering in with a idea of negotiation the process getting away the reactivity is also recognizing why do we even do this why why why have you devoted your life Tony Piazza to mediation which has now become foundational in the American jurisprudence and international jurisprudence with a lot of the learnings from you but why do we do this that's what I want to end with why why do we care why mediate why negotiate why

26:11do this why not just you know what the parties hate each other let's let's let's duke it out that to me may be sound simple but there's layers to it and levels to it and it's important what mediation has done in litigation consp talk to us about that more brother well if we had another hour I'd love to have a broader conversation with you about that since we don't all close with this thought I've relatedly come to accept that if I want to have the benefits of living in the democracy which I'm personally really fond of that what comes with that is I have to be willing and I think this really applies in any relationship political or otherwise I have to be willing to accept that I'm in relationship I'm in this with people with a very broad array of life experiences and opinions about things many of which I'm going to rather vigorously disagree with

27:15and I have to stay and dialogue with them so the relevance of that back to mediating it almost doesn't matter what you come in with what level of baggage what level of emotion it is nice when people don't start the day by yelling at each other and getting people's backs up but it isn't really critical what's critical again is not how people come in not how far apart not how religiously convicted they are to their positions it's what the process comprises to redirect that from that kind of a highly charged and generally unproductive reactive exchange into an evaluative dialogue so if you really want to aspire to have that as a mediator it behooves you to have spent time in advance really immersing yourself in my work usually people

28:21providers briefs allow us to do that but really doing a deep dive into what the parties see as the main issues they're fighting over demonstrating that early on the process again in our work in the joint session by being able to summarize back a lengthy complicated presentation by a party in a few minutes without spinning it distorting it missing any of the critical facts thereby reassuring the party the made a presentation that you've in fact put into time in advance and therefore they have some rational reason for putting credibility into the discussion you're going to have privately in caucus where you start trying to give realistic feedback about what their risks are going forward on the path they're on so to tie it together as best I can in a few minutes what I try to do in my work and what I'm very slowly learning to try to do in my life

29:23is to just accept that there are going to be ever so many opportunities for conflict and then to try to approach discussions about how to deal with the conflict in a more productive evaluative dialogue a less reactive dialectic Tony Piazza everyone personal mentor of mine someone who is in the legal community an absolute legend in the field of mediation a pioneer in the field of mediation someone who's done mediation thousands of them the this you know with some of them the size of disputes between nation states with these major corporate disputes that you resolve and so I want to call this chapter one because I want to do more of them whether you like it or not so I'm gonna I'm gonna throw that out there so this is chapter one and I hope we'll be able to have chapter two three

30:24and four where we can start with this platform with this audience with world leaders who watch this show here from it and take from it what they will and what they won't but I think sincerely that there is learning lessons that have been helpful to these disputes here in the United States and abroad litigation that can be extracted and can be learned and you know I I hope I hope we can do more of these Tony so thanks for all you do thanks for thanks for everything man I appreciate you Pia things I'd rather do with my time than converse with you my friend thank you take care everybody and subscribe let's get to seven million subscribers hey if you want the full story how democracy got here and how we take it back pre-order our new book WTF America today just scan the QR code or click the link in the description let's do this

31:36for the adventures