How a plain old whiteboard saved the Iranian nuclear negotiations

published 4 April 2015

The New York Times' tick-tock of the Iranian nuclear negotiations in Lausanne, Switzerland, is recommended reading for many reasons, showing how Iranian and American negotiators overcame decades of mistrust to hammer out the outline of a deal that has the potential to resolve one of the knottiest problems in international relations. But the most striking detail involves a plain old whiteboard, which enabled the two sides to write things down without leaving a record. As David E. Sanger and Michael R. Gordon write:

Wherever Wendy Sherman, the lead American negotiator, traveled in the ornate hotel here, she was trailed by a whiteboard, where the Iranians and the Americans marked down their understandings, sometimes in both English and Persian.The board served a major diplomatic purpose, letting both sides consider proposals without putting anything on paper. That allowed the Iranians to talk without sending a document back to Tehran for review, where hard-liners could chip away at it, according to several American officials interviewed for this article, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations."It was a brilliantly low-tech solution," one White House official said. [The New York Times]