Kuala Lampur, April 13 -- The latest round of US-Iran diplomacy, stretched across 21 intense hours, was never meant to produce an immediate breakthrough.

It was, rather, a calibrated exercise in pressure, signalling, and strategic endurance, almost a willingness to mutually bomb each other as and when necessary.

The fact that the April 20 deadline has quietly slipped without formal acknowledgment is not a failure per se.

Instead, it is a rather revealing insight into how both Washington and Tehran now negotiate: not toward resolution, but toward leverage.

At the centre of this delicate choreography stands J.D. Vance.

His tone, markedly more nuanced than the traditional hardline rhetoric emanating from Washington, suggested that the U...