The Richard Haass back channel
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The Richard Haass back channel was an unofficial April 2023 meeting at the United Nations in New York between Richard Haass, until the previous week the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, two of his former deputies from the National Security Council, and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. It was reported by NBC News in July 2023, and John Kiriakou discussed it the same day.

What Track 2 diplomacy is

Kiriakou used the report to explain the category. "This is something called Track 2 Diplomacy, which means that it's unofficial diplomacy. It's diplomacy carried out by private citizens, but in order to make it legal and constitutional it has to have the approval of the White House." In his account, the purpose of the meeting was to lay the groundwork for what would eventually become peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, "which really means between the Russians and the Americans."

What was and was not known

Kiriakou was careful about the limits of the reporting. "Nobody ran screaming from the room reportedly, so that's supposed to be a positive. We don't know if anything was agreed upon. We don't know if there have been subsequent meetings."

His verdict rested on the channel rather than its content: at the very least the participants "established this channel to get together so when the political situation necessitates actual diplomacy, there's a mechanism by which we can do that. It's a good thing."

The Chinese alternative

Asked about the Council on Foreign Relations brokering Ukrainian peace, Kiriakou interrupted to name what he saw as the larger American anxiety: that China might become involved. He listed Beijing's recent brokerage between Iran and Saudi Arabia, between Saudi Arabia and Syria, and between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and argued the Chinese "actually would be honest brokers in this thing, but a consequence of that is that it pushes us out of the equation." The objection, in his telling, was reputational: "We like to pretend that we're neutral... We're not neutral, and Chinese involvement would prove that we're not neutral, and we can't afford to that happen."

See also

- Sergey Lavrov
- China as mediator
- Ukraine as a proxy war
- The Taiwan Blank Check
