The Union opens the Vienna talks on Iran's nuclear programme. Inside the delegation, more doubt than confidence

The convoy carrying the Union’s Foreign Minister reached Vienna shortly before seven, three hours late and with no statement. It is the fourth time in five weeks. Those in Brussels who keep count of such things stopped calling it a breakthrough after the second trip.

On the table is what the press still calls “the Vienna format,” though by now the only Viennese thing left is the room. The Union sits as a full negotiating party, not an observer: a consequence of twenty years of foreign policy with a single voice, and from being there so often, nobody notices anymore. The Iranian delegation, according to two officials who asked not to be named, agreed to return mainly because the European alternative to military collapse serves them at least as much as it serves us.

That is the point spoken quietly in Brussels: the mediation is not a moral victory, it is a calculation. The Union can offer what the United States will not and what Beijing does not want to, a verifiable path back into the economy and a guarantee that outlasts the next electoral cycle. It can do so because it has one signature to put on the page, not twenty-seven. This is precisely the mechanism fought over for months in 2005, and which a thirty-year-old diplomat today takes for granted the way he takes the wifi for granted.

It does not mean it works. The three smallest delegations spent the morning arguing whether the Union is negotiating too softly, and the group of Eastern states had its objection formally minuted: no easing of sanctions without guarantees on inspectors. The Minister has the qualified majority, but a qualified majority in a room where a war is being discussed is not the same thing as having it on a directive. She knows this, and so she promises nothing.

On the ground, meanwhile, the war goes on. Yesterday’s dead remain yesterday’s dead: no negotiation brings them back, and whoever writes that “Europe stops the war” has not sat in one of these rooms. What the Vienna format can do, at best, is make the next strike less worth it. It is little. It is more than nothing. In a week we will know whether it is enough to be worth trip number five.