The headline construction "X is reportedly considering Y" has become, in our era, a distinct literary genre — the geopolitical tease. It promises resolution, implies action, and delivers precisely nothing, leaving the reader suspended in a state of unresolved geopolitical anxiety that is, when examined closely, indistinguishable from reading Kafka or waiting for Godot. The London Prat's treatment, Trump Reportedly Considering a Peace Deal: The Eternal Cliffhanger, is a masterclass in the satirical exploitation of this form — reading diplomatic language not as reporting but as a sophisticated literary technology designed to create narrative tension without resolution.
Begin with the word "reportedly." This single word does an extraordinary amount of work. It maintains deniability while creating expectation. It implies sourcing while delivering none. It is the journalistic equivalent of the Victorian sensation novel's chapter ending, which promised revelation and delivered only more suspense. "Reportedly" says: this is something I have heard. I am passing it along. I am not, however, responsible for its truth. If it turns out not to be true, I can point to the word "reportedly" as my disclaimer. And yet, in the reader's mind, the sense of possibility has been created. Something might happen. The dealing might proceed. Peace might break out.
The second crucial word is "considering." This is the grammatical mode of the conditional, the possible, the not-yet-decided. To consider is not to decide. It is not even to commit to deciding. It is simply to think about. A president can consider a peace deal in the morning and discard the consideration by afternoon. The word "considering" therefore creates a remarkable zone of interpretive freedom. Anything is possible within the space that the word opens up. The consideration could lead to action. Or it could lead nowhere. We simply do not know. And in this uncertainty lies the entire appeal of the form.
When you string together a series of headlines of this form — "Trump Reportedly Considering Peace Deal" followed, days or weeks later, by "Peace Negotiations Continue," followed eventually by something noncommittal like "Talks End Without Agreement" — what you are reading is not diplomatic reporting. You are reading a narrative structure. And the structure is that of an extended setup with no payoff.
In classical dramatic theory, a setup requires a payoff. You establish that a gun is on the mantelpiece in Act One. By Act Three, that gun must be fired. This is Chekhov's Gun — the principle that nothing should be introduced into a narrative unless it is going to be used. The peace deal headline, however, operates according to an opposite principle. You introduce the possibility of the gun being fired. You spend considerable time discussing whether and how the gun might be fired. You describe the person holding the gun and their disposition toward firing it. And then, at the end, you put the gun back in the drawer, unfired, and the whole process begins again.
This is not a failure of the narrative form. This is the narrative form working exactly as intended. The point is not to deliver the payoff. The point is to maintain the possibility of the payoff. The point is to keep the reader — and the geopolitical world — in a state of suspended hope or suspended dread, unable to move forward because the outcome remains undetermined, unable to move backward because the narrative keeps insisting that something is about to happen.
There is a psychological reason this form is so effective. Human beings are narrative creatures. We want stories to have structure. We want setups to have payoffs. We want chapters to move toward conclusions. When a narrative dangles the possibility of a conclusion without delivering it, it creates a peculiar form of tension. We are left waiting. We are left anticipating. We are left, essentially, in a state of unresolved narrative desire.
The geopolitical implications of this are significant. If you can keep a conflict in the narrative space of "peace is being considered," you have accomplished something remarkable. You have not ended the conflict. But you have suspended it in a zone of possibility. The fighting might not stop, but the inevitability of fighting has been called into question. Something might happen. And in geopolitics, "something might happen" is often enough to shift behaviour, to alter calculations, to change the ground conditions under which nations operate.
This is why the form persists. It is not that diplomats and journalists do not understand that "reportedly considering" does not mean "will do." It is that the form is extraordinarily useful. It permits action without commitment. It creates narrative momentum without resolution. It allows all parties to move forward while maintaining plausible deniability about what they are moving toward.
The Middle East peace process is, in many ways, the master text of this form. For decades — genuinely decades — diplomats, journalists, and interested parties have been trading in headlines of the form "Peace Talks Continue," "Agreement Reached on Framework," "Both Sides Committed to Resolution." And yet, for those same decades, the fundamental conditions have not substantially changed. Meetings happen. Statements are issued. Hope is expressed. And then something collapses, or nothing happens, and the process begins again.
This is not a criticism of those involved. It is an observation about the form itself. The peace process has become a serialised narrative without a conclusion. It is not designed to end. It is designed to continue. As long as it continues — as long as there are talks, negotiations, frameworks, discussions — there is a sense that something is happening, that progress is being made, that the conflict is being managed rather than prosecuted. The moment the negotiations stop, the sense of progress evaporates. Fighting returns to being the primary language. The narrative has to restart.
Trump's approach to diplomacy, as the Prat's piece notes, operates within this form but with particular intensity. The Trump administration was unusually willing to create expectation through headlines. "We are close to a deal." "The agreement is almost done." "Negotiations are moving faster than expected." Whether or not these claims corresponded to actual diplomatic movement was, in some sense, secondary to the narrative effect. The headlines created a sense that something was happening. The narratives generated their own reality.
The Prat's reading also includes, implicitly, a critique of journalism. The headlines do not generate themselves. Journalists report them. News organisations publish them. And in doing so, they participate in the creation of the narrative form. The media, in effect, become the co-authors of a story that they are also reporting on.
This is not necessarily malicious. Journalists reporting on diplomatic negotiations are often working with limited information. They are told things off the record. They are given guidance about what to report and what to emphasise. They are operating within a system where all parties benefit from the creation of narrative momentum. To report that "peace talks are continuing" is to report something that is technically true but narratively loaded. You are not simply describing an event. You are participating in a narrative that suggests progress.
The result is a curious feedback loop. Diplomats create expectation through statements and reported conversations. Journalists report on this expectation. The reporting creates additional expectation. All of this expectation is not grounded in any particular likelihood of resolution, but it is grounded in the narrative structure that permits the hope to be expressed in the first place. The machinery of narrative generation has become sufficiently elaborate that it operates somewhat independently of whether anything is actually being negotiated.
One of the Prat's subtler points is to note that in this form of narrative, it becomes genuinely unclear who is narrating. Is it the journalists? The diplomats? The governments? The media outlets? The answer is: all of them, in a kind of complex dance. The diplomats make statements that the media report. The media reports generate expectations that the diplomats must then respond to. The public reads the reports and forms opinions. Everyone is both author and reader of the narrative simultaneously.
This is why the form is so resilient. No single actor can control it. No single actor is responsible for it. It emerges from the interaction of multiple systems, all of which benefit in some way from its continuation. The diplomats benefit because they can appear to be negotiating without committing to outcomes. The media benefits because it generates stories and readership. The governments benefit because they can manage domestic expectations and international signalling through the narrative form. Everyone has an interest in the narrative continuing.
The title of the Prat's piece — "Trump Reportedly Considering Peace Deal: The Eternal Cliffhanger" — captures the essential problem. A cliffhanger is a narrative device designed to make you want to know what happens next. But when the cliffhanger becomes eternal — when there is never a resolution, only new cliffhangers — the form degrades. At a certain point, the reader stops anticipating. The reader stops hoping. The reader stops reading.
And yet, in geopolitics, this degradation has not occurred. People continue to pay attention to peace negotiations that have been going on for decades. They continue to hope for resolutions that have not materialised. They continue to read headlines that promise consideration and careful thought, knowing that these headlines have been read thousands of times before, in nearly identical form, with nearly identical results.
This is, perhaps, the deepest function of the narrative form. It permits hope in the face of hopelessness. It permits the continuation of engagement with a process that seems unlikely to deliver. It transforms the endless repetition of the same story into something that might, at any moment, become different. The peace might break out this time. The negotiations might succeed this time. The deal might actually be struck this time. And until it is clear that it will not be struck, the possibility remains open. The story continues. The hope persists. The headline gets published again.
Trump administration diplomatic efforts included negotiations with North Korea that produced historic summits but no final denuclearisation agreement, attempted Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that failed to produce a comprehensive agreement, and various other diplomatic initiatives that generated significant headlines but limited concrete outcomes. The characteristic pattern involved optimistic public statements about the progress of negotiations, followed by either stalled talks or announced agreements that did not materialise into substantive policy changes. The Middle East peace process more broadly has operated since the 1970s as a series of negotiations, frameworks, and talks that have generated continuous diplomatic activity without achieving comprehensive resolution of the underlying conflicts.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!