When "Diplomats" Engineer War

The eerie parallels between July 23, 1914 and February 27, 2026

One of the most ominous and fateful moments in history happened on July 23, 1914, at 6:00 PM, almost one month after the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. At that moment, the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum, which led directly to World War I, was delivered to Serbia.

The document was presented in Belgrade by Baron Wladimir Giesl von Gieslingen, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Serbia, to the Serbian Minister of Finance, Lazar Paču, who was the acting deputy of the Serbian Prime Minister, Nikola Pašić.

The document was a formal diplomatic memo and a list of ten demands, designed to be unacceptable to secure a pretext for war. The note demanded a response within 48 hours—by 6:00 PM on July 25, 1914.

The Austrians delayed delivery until 6:00 PM to be sure that French President Raymond Poincaré and Premier René Viviani had left St. Petersburg after their Russian visit to prevent a rapid and coordinated diplomatic action between allied Russia and France.

The Austrian schemers formulated their demands so that the Kingdom of Serbia could NOT accept them without surrendering its sovereignty to Austria-Hungary. In other words, the Austrian court was NOT seeking concessions from Serbia that Serbia could deliver, but WAR with Serbia.

This set in motion a chain of events that led to World War I, which resulted in the death of 20 million people, the downfall Austria-Hungary, and the end of the 600-year-old Habsburg Monarchy.

I used to live near the old Imperial Palace in Vienna and often thought about this fateful moment when hotheaded and imprudent schemers in the Austrian court decided to roll the dice with their ultimatum. I was pals with a girl descended from Count Hoyos—one of the foremost advocates in the Vienna court for war on Serbia—and I marveled that her ancestor had played a key role in such world altering events.

Most ordinary Austrians had no idea just how risky the Serbian gambit was until it was too late and it became painfully evident that they were going to lose everything.

I was reminded of this fateful moment when I watched the February 27, 2026, CBS “Face the Nation” interview with Oman Foreign Minister Badr Al Busaidi, who stated that a nuclear deal was “within our reach” and encouraged the Trump administration to give the talks between U.S. envoys and the Iranian Foreign Minister more time.

The talks were between Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and senior advisor Jared Kushner and the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

Oman Foreign Minister Al Busaidi met separately with both sides to relay proposals.

Witkoff and Kushner made the following demands:

• Destruction of Nuclear Sites: Iran was required to destroy its three main nuclear sites—Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan.

• Surrender of Enriched Uranium: Iran was demanded to deliver all of its remaining enriched uranium to the United States.

• Elimination of the Navy: Witkoff stated a demand was made for the “elimination of [Iran’s] navy” to ensure freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.

• End to Proxy Support: Demands were made to end Iran’s support for regional proxy groups.

• End of Ballistic Missile Program—even ballistic missiles armed with conventional warheads.

In other words, the U.S. envoys asked Iran to surrender ALL of its capacity for projecting military power and deterring missile and aerial attacks on its homeland.

It doesn’t matter what you think about the Iranian regime, just as it didn’t matter in 1914 what the Austrian people thought about the Serbian regime. There was simply no way that either regime could accept these demands without placing themselves entirely at the mercy of the Austrians and Americans respectively.

Even so, according to Al Busaidi, the Iranian Foreign Minister put Iran’s 60% enriched uranium on the table as a bargaining chip. In Witkoff’s telling of the story, he twisted this to make it sound like a boastful threat and not an asset that the Iranians would consider giving up in exchange for U.S. concessions.

The entire discussion can only be properly understood within the conceptual framework of the balance of power, which Henry Kissinger famously claimed to be the basis of all foreign relations among adversarial nations.

Despite Al Busaidi’s encouraging news on the evening of February 27, the Trump administration commenced hostilities at 8:10 local time in Iran the next morning.

Though it seems that millions of Americans still don’t understand it, a strong case can be made that World War III has begun. Trump campaigned with an assurance that he would not wage destructive wars, but would use an array of artful negotiating tactics to persuade our adversaries to give us what we want. I was naive enough to believe him, and steadfastly defended him for the better part of a decade.

And yet, when it came to negotiating with the Iranian envoys in Geneva and Muscat, President Trump did NOT attend, but sent Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.

Here they are in an Oct. 2025 “60 Minutes” interview in which they talk about their “master plan” for rebuilding Gaza after it has been blown to smithereens. Watch Kushner’s face when Witkoff says they’ve been working on the master plan for “a couple of years”--that is, since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks.

Some of my friends have rebuked me for implying that—just because they are Jewish and working on a master plan for developing Gaza— they weren’t solely representing the interests of the American people at their meetings with the Iranian Foreign Minister.

Maybe they were solely representing the interests of the American people, but as everyone who has ever studied international relations for ten minutes understands, when it comes to high level diplomacy, PERCEPTION plays a huge role.

How could the Iranian Foreign Minister possibly perceive these guys to be negotiating in good faith? Netanyahu has himself stated that he has been dreaming for forty years about a military confrontation of Iran, and these guys are known to be part of his political circle.

Here is former Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, talking about how the Obama administration was pressured to declare war on Iran, but refused to play along. No one can accuse Blinken of being an anti-Semite or anti-Israeli.

How I perceive Witkoff and Kushner is totally irrelevant. The key issue is how the Iranian Foreign Minister perceived them.

Again, why didn’t President Trump attend the meetings to practice his vaunted Art of the Deal? This is precisely what I and millions of fellow Americans elected him to do, and I resent the implication that I should simply accept that he didn’t attend and shut my mouth.

It’s very hard for me to understand what kind of mental gymnastics Trump’s diehard supporter must be performing to avoid seeing the painful reality that he completely broke his most important promise to millions of his voters that he would not drag this country into another terrible war.

Note that the majority of Democrats are also supporting this war, just as they did every other war since 2001. This makes me wonder if the ONLY true party in this country is the War Party, and the apparent opposition between Republicans and Democrats is pure theater for the purpose of dividing and conquering We the People.