THE year ended, quite unexpectedly, on a high note for diplomacy. After 53 years of a barren freeze, the US and Cuba agreed to restore diplomatic relations in a deal secretly hammered out in Canada and the Vatican over 18 months.

The agreement — which involved an exchange of imprisoned spies and the release of an American contractor, Alan Gross — came as a remarkable Christmas surprise, and not just because of the remarkably leak-free discretion of the talks. It also cut across the prevailing trend in 2014 for diplomatic failure, from the missed chance of a nuclear deal with Iran in November, to a hollow truce in Ukraine and the growing concern of a new cold war.

The Cuba deal raised hopes among many Iranians (and a good number of Americans) that Barack Obama was in the mood for breaking diplomatic taboos in his last, supposedly lame, two years in office. But burying the hatchet with Havana is a good deal easier than doing that with Tehran. No one could argue the isolation of Cuba had succeeded in dislodging the communist regime. It was generally seen as a pointless policy, and it had not been a strategic or nuclear issue since 1962. On the other hand, rightly or wrongly, sanctions are widely credited for bringing Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear programme.

However, coming to the table and striking a historic bargain are quite different things. This year’s talks in Vienna were a diplomatic marathon, aimed at producing an enduring settlement that would set limits on Iran’s nuclear aspirations in return for relief from international sanctions.

In the final week before the self-imposed deadline of Nov 24, it was clear that the framework for a deal was in place, but crossing the finishing line still required acts of political will in Tehran and Washington. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, would have to accept that his country’s capacity to enrich uranium would be reduced in the short and medium term. The US would have to offer a significant lightening of the burden of the punitive measures imposed on Iran over the years.

In the end, neither side blinked. Unable to agree or walk away, they gave themselves a seven-month extension. However, delay will strengthen hard-line opposition to compromise, particularly in Washington, where a Republican-dominated Congress will convene on Jan 6. That provides a hard political deadline. A new sanctions bill could kill the negotiations, and a diplomatic window will close, perhaps for many years.

Prospects look even more daunting for an end to another of the world’s most precarious nuclear stand-offs, in North Korea, were multilateral negotiations stalled in February. The best that could be said about 2014 is that it could have been a lot worse had Pyongyang delivered on a threat to conduct a fourth nuclear test. However, tensions with Washington may have entered a new arena with US claims North Korea had launched a cyber-attack on Hollywood, in the form of a hack of embarrassing emails exchanged between movie executives at Sony Pictures, in a supposed reprisal for a Sony comedy film about the assassination of the Kim Jong-un.

In Ukraine, diplomacy largely served as a cover for the continuation of war. Following the Russian annexation of Crimea in March, the shooting down of Malaysia airlines flight MH17 in July and the spread of conflict across the east of the country, senior diplomatic contacts between Kiev and Moscow in Berlin in August led the next month to the Minsk protocol, signed in the Belarusian capital. The truce was supposed to stop the fighting, halt the cross-border flow of arms and paramilitaries from Russia, and restore Ukrainian state control over the national borders. It did none of the above. With the winter deepening, both sides continue to shell each other and the civilians in between with few signs of restraint.

That conflict, the waves of western sanctions on Russia and Vladimir Putin’s belligerent rhetoric about restoring a greater Russia have spurred talk of a new cold war. Russia may not be a superpower on the scale of the Soviet Union, nor does it have a readily exportable ideology, but it does retain one defining attribute of the cold war: a substantial nuclear arsenal. The early promise of Obama’s administration to lead the drive towards nuclear disarmament now looks like a relic of another, more optimistic age.

The diplomatic track record in Africa was equally gloomy. Despite a series of peace talks in Ethiopia, the South Sudanese power struggle between President Salva Kiir and the former vice-president, Riek Machar, is mutating into an uncontrollable ethnic conflict between Dinka and Nuer. Nearly two million people have been displaced, and five million face the very real prospect of famine. All the signs point to an escalation in the fighting at the end of the rainy season.

As 2015 approaches, it is hard to find signs of optimism. In the Oval Office, Obama enters the last two years of his presidency looking to earn the Nobel peace prize he was awarded near the beginning of his term. His legacy of extricating US combat troops from Iraq and Afghanistan is hostage to the fight against Islamic State and the fate of the new government in Kabul. His best hope of going down in history as a truly peacemaking president is still a nuclear deal with Iran, but much depends on whether Iran’s supreme leader seeks a similar legacy. If the nuclear talks collapse after all the painstaking diplomatic work in Vienna, the world could look an even more dangerous place in 2015.

—By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, January 2nd, 2015