10 Times Mediators Helped Change History

From Theodore Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter to George Mitchell and Kofi Annan

When lawyers talk about mediation, we tend to talk about commercial disputes, boundary arguments, probate claims or perhaps litigation which has reached the stage where everybody has spent enough money to start thinking seriously about settlement.

But mediation has also been used in disputes where the alternative was not another six months in the Business and Property Courts.

It was war.

Some of the most important settlements of the last century involved a third party doing something which would be entirely recognisable to a modern mediator: meeting the parties separately, carrying proposals between them, identifying what each side really needed, controlling the process, preserving face and, above all, keeping people talking when direct negotiation had become almost impossible.

I have deliberately applied a fairly strict test in choosing these examples.

It is not enough that there was a famous peace treaty or negotiated settlement. There had to be an identifiable third party — an individual, group or neutral state — performing a recognisable mediating or facilitating role.

That rules out quite a few famous agreements. Magna Carta, for example, may have begun life as an attempt at negotiated peace between King John and the rebel barons, but it is not really an example of third-party mediation in the modern sense.

The examples which do qualify are, I think, considerably more interesting.

And despite the enormous difference between international conflict and civil litigation, some of the techniques are surprisingly familiar.

1. Theodore Roosevelt and the Treaty of Portsmouth, 1905

By 1905 Russia and Japan had been at war for more than a year.

Japan had achieved remarkable military successes, but the war was imposing an enormous financial burden. Russia had suffered humiliating defeats but was not prepared simply to capitulate.

Both sides therefore had a problem familiar to mediators: their public positions were stronger than their private alternatives.

The Japanese approached US President Theodore Roosevelt about peace negotiations and representatives of Russia and Japan eventually met at Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Roosevelt did considerably more than provide the venue.

When negotiations became stuck over the Japanese demand for an indemnity and the future of Sakhalin Island, he intervened personally and explored possible compromises.

The eventual Treaty of Portsmouth ended the Russo-Japanese War. Russia did not pay the indemnity Japan had demanded, while Japan obtained significant territorial and strategic concessions.

Neither side got everything it wanted.

Indeed, there was considerable dissatisfaction with the settlement in both countries.

Which may itself be a useful lesson about successful mediation.

The test of a settlement is not necessarily whether everybody walks away delighted. Sometimes it is whether the alternative was worse.

Roosevelt subsequently received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.^[1]

2. Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Samoré and the war that didn’t happen

This may be one of the least-known examples in Britain and one of the best examples of mediation on this list.

In December 1978 Argentina and Chile were on the brink of war over islands and maritime rights in the Beagle Channel region.

Military preparations were well advanced.

Pope John Paul II intervened and sent Cardinal Antonio Samoré to Buenos Aires and Santiago.

The immediate task was not to negotiate a perfect permanent settlement.

It was to stop a war.

That succeeded.

Argentina and Chile subsequently formally asked the Holy See to act as mediator.

What followed was not a weekend mediation. It was a process lasting years.

Samoré led much of the detailed work until his death in 1983 and the papal mediation eventually culminated in the Treaty of Peace and Friendship signed at the Vatican on 29 November 1984.

John Paul II subsequently expressly described the Holy See’s role as mediation and paid tribute to Cardinal Samoré’s contribution to the peace process.^[2]

There is a useful lesson in the sequence.

Sometimes the mediator’s first task isn’t to settle the dispute.

It is to prevent the parties doing something which makes settlement impossible.

3. Jimmy Carter at Camp David, 1978

If there is a classic modern example of international mediation, this is probably it.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin arrived at Camp David in September 1978 with President Jimmy Carter attempting to broker an agreement between two countries which had repeatedly been at war.

What happened next sounds surprisingly familiar to anybody who has conducted a difficult commercial mediation.

Initially Carter tried bringing the principals together.

It didn’t work particularly well.

The trilateral format became so difficult that Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance spent much of the following twelve days meeting the Egyptian and Israeli delegations separately.

In other words, something remarkably close to caucus mediation.

Drafts moved backwards and forwards. Carter explored what each side could accept. Language was revised repeatedly. At various points the process appeared close to collapse.

After thirteen days the Camp David Accords were agreed.

They did not themselves constitute the final Egypt-Israel peace treaty, but they provided its framework. Six months later, in March 1979, Egypt and Israel signed that treaty.

The US State Department’s historical account records both Carter’s direct intervention and the move to separate meetings when the three-way format became impossible to sustain.^[3]

For mediators, there is something reassuring about that.

If Jimmy Carter couldn’t keep everyone happily sitting around the same table at Camp David, perhaps we shouldn’t feel too badly when joint sessions occasionally go wrong.

4. Algeria and the Iran hostage crisis, 1981

The mediator does not necessarily have to be an individual.

Sometimes it can be a state.

After American diplomats and citizens were taken hostage in Tehran in November 1979, relations between Iran and the United States were effectively broken.

Direct negotiation was extraordinarily difficult.

Algeria eventually became the intermediary.

The resulting Algiers Accords are unusually explicit about this. The declaration records that the governments of Iran and the United States had asked Algeria to serve as an intermediary in seeking a mutually acceptable resolution of the crisis.

Algerian diplomats carried communications and proposals between two governments which could barely communicate directly.

The agreement was concluded in January 1981 and the 52 American hostages were released.

It is difficult to imagine a clearer example of shuttle diplomacy.^[4]

The mediator didn’t need to agree with either side.

It needed sufficient confidence from both sides to carry a message which the recipient believed genuinely represented the position of the other.

That remains one of the fundamental currencies of mediation: trust in the intermediary.

5. Sant’Egidio and Mozambique, 1990–1992

Mozambique’s civil war had lasted for years and cost an enormous number of lives when representatives of the government and RENAMO began negotiations in Rome.

The mediating team was unusual.

It included Mario Raffaelli, representing the Italian government; Archbishop Jaime Gonçalves; and Andrea Riccardi and Matteo Zuppi of the Community of Sant’Egidio.

They were not simply hosts.

The peace documents themselves identify them as “the mediators”.^[5]

Negotiations continued over an extended period and eventually produced the General Peace Agreement signed in Rome on 4 October 1992.

It is a fascinating model because it demonstrates that mediation does not necessarily depend upon institutional power.

Sant’Egidio was not a superpower.

Its influence derived substantially from relationships, access, patience and the confidence the parties were prepared to place in the process.

Commercial mediators sometimes talk about “holding the room”.

The Mozambique process involved holding the room for rather longer than usual.

6. Richard Holbrooke and Dayton, 1995

The war in Bosnia had demonstrated the limitations of repeated ceasefires and conventional diplomatic initiatives.

By 1995 the United States adopted a much more intensive approach led by diplomat Richard Holbrooke.

He engaged in relentless shuttle diplomacy between the protagonists before bringing the leaders of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.

Even the choice of venue was part of the process.

The parties were effectively removed from their normal political environments and placed somewhere where sustained negotiation could take place away from much of the outside noise.

At Dayton the parties were kept in proximity while Holbrooke and the international team worked intensively between them.

Twenty-one days later an agreement had been reached which ended the Bosnian war.

It is perhaps more accurate to describe Holbrooke and the American team as brokers or facilitators than as wholly disinterested neutrals in the sense in which lawyers normally use that expression.

But the process contained many of the essential features of mediation.

There is also an obvious warning here for mediators who become too attached to a particular format.

Sometimes shuttle diplomacy works.

Sometimes everybody needs to be brought together.

The process is a tool, not a religion.

7. George Mitchell and the Good Friday Agreement, 1998

This is perhaps the closest British and Irish example to what lawyers would immediately recognise as a modern neutral chair or mediator.

Former US Senator George Mitchell chaired the multi-party talks which eventually produced the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.

He was an outsider with no previous political stake in Northern Ireland.

And perhaps his most important quality was patience.

The negotiations involved governments, political parties representing profoundly different constitutional objectives and representatives connected to communities which had experienced decades of violence.

Progress was painfully slow.

There were arguments not merely about the substantive settlement but about who could participate, decommissioning, procedure and the conditions under which negotiations could take place at all.

Mitchell stayed with it.

When Mo Mowlam addressed Parliament following the Agreement, she specifically praised his patience, impartiality and personal authority, describing them as a major factor in the success of the talks.^[6]

Those are interesting words.

Not brilliance.

Not aggression.

Not the ability to persuade everybody that he was right.

“Patience, impartiality and personal authority.”

There are probably worse job descriptions for a mediator.

8. Martti Ahtisaari and Aceh, 2005

The conflict between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement had continued for decades.

Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, through the Crisis Management Initiative, facilitated negotiations in Helsinki.

The resulting Memorandum of Understanding was signed on 15 August 2005.

What I particularly like about this example is that Ahtisaari’s role is not something historians have subsequently inferred.

The agreement itself identifies him as:

“Facilitator of the negotiation process.^[7]”

More importantly, the agreement dealt with implementation.

There were arrangements for monitoring, disarmament and the withdrawal or relocation of forces. It even provided mechanisms for dealing with disputes over implementation.

That is an important mediation lesson.

Getting signatures on the document is not necessarily the end of the job.

A settlement which cannot be implemented may simply create the next dispute.

Ahtisaari later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his international peace work.

9. Kofi Annan and Kenya, 2008

Kenya descended into serious violence following the disputed presidential election at the end of 2007.

Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan led the African Union Panel of Eminent African Personalities, alongside former Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa and Graça Machel.

The mediation was intensive and politically difficult.

Annan also understood something which commercial mediators occasionally encounter in a rather less dramatic form: too many would-be intermediaries can make matters worse.

A mediation needs a process.

If every friend, adviser, politician and interested third party is simultaneously carrying different proposals between the protagonists, nobody quite knows what is being negotiated.

The Annan-led mediation culminated on 28 February 2008 in a power-sharing agreement and ultimately the creation of a coalition government.

The United Nations describes the Panel’s efforts expressly as mediation and records that they brought the immediate political crisis to an end.^[8]

Again, the agreement was not based on one side achieving total victory.

It created a political structure within which both sides could move forward.

10. The mediator as the person who makes agreement possible

The striking thing about these examples is how different the mediators were.

A US President.

A Pope and a Cardinal.

A former Senator.

A former UN Secretary-General.

A Finnish former President.

An African mediation panel.

A religious community.

An entire country acting as intermediary.

Some had enormous political power. Others had remarkably little.

Some settlements were achieved in days. Others took years.

Some involved joint meetings. Others relied heavily on shuttle diplomacy.

But there are recurring themes.

The parties had usually reached a point where direct negotiation was failing.

Public positions had become entrenched.

The consequences of appearing weak mattered.

There were things each side could tell an intermediary which it could not comfortably say directly to its opponent.

Somebody needed to test whether the apparent red lines really were red lines.

Somebody needed to ask what happened if there was no agreement.

And somebody had to keep the process alive when one or both parties were tempted to walk away.

None of that will sound particularly revolutionary to a commercial mediator.

The scale is different.

The psychology isn’t.

And is another mediation taking place now?

There is an intriguing postscript to all of this.

As this article is being written in September 2026, the United States appears to be engaged in precisely the sort of third-party diplomacy described above between Ukraine and Russia.

On 25 August, CIA Director John Ratcliffe made an unusual and previously unannounced visit to Moscow for discussions with senior Russian intelligence officials.

Ukraine had been informed in advance that a senior US delegation was travelling to Moscow.

Subsequent reporting suggests that Ratcliffe explored Russian positions, urged Moscow to engage seriously in negotiations and raised the possibility of restarting US-mediated negotiations and, potentially, a meeting involving Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky.^[9]

Other American intermediaries have separately been involved in discussions with Russian and Ukrainian representatives.

Is this mediation?

It is probably still too early to attach a definitive label to it.

We don’t know everything that was discussed in Moscow and negotiations remain highly uncertain. A state engaged in international diplomacy also cannot necessarily be equated with an independent commercial mediator.

But the mechanics are fascinatingly familiar.

A third party is speaking separately to two protagonists who cannot presently agree directly.

It is exploring positions.

It is carrying information between them.

It is testing whether negotiations can restart.

And it is considering whether sufficient common ground exists to bring the principals together.

In another context we might simply call that shuttle mediation.

Whether it ultimately joins Camp David, Portsmouth and the Good Friday Agreement in the history books — or becomes one of the vastly greater number of mediation attempts which never produced an agreement — nobody yet knows.

And perhaps that is an appropriate place to finish.

We look back at famous peace agreements knowing that they succeeded.

The mediator didn’t have that luxury.

At Camp David, Jimmy Carter didn’t know that Egypt and Israel would sign a peace treaty.

George Mitchell didn’t know that the Good Friday negotiations would succeed.

The mediators in Mozambique didn’t know that years of talking would ultimately end in an agreement.

“Every successful mediation was, until the moment agreement was reached, an unsuccessful mediation.”

Perhaps that is the final lesson from history.

Sometimes the mediator’s greatest contribution is simply to keep people talking long enough for an agreement which initially seemed impossible to become possible.

The discussion of current Russia–Ukraine diplomacy reflects publicly available information as at 1 September 2026.

Notes and Sources

[1]US Department of State, Office of the Historian — The Treaty of Portsmouth and the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–1905. This official history records Japan’s request for Roosevelt’s involvement, the negotiations, Roosevelt’s intervention when they reached an impasse and the eventual compromise. ↩

[2]The Holy See — Pope John Paul II, address concerning the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Argentina and Chile. The Vatican account expressly refers to the process as mediation and records Cardinal Samoré’s contribution. ↩

[3]US Department of State, Office of the Historian — Camp David Accords and the Arab-Israeli Peace Process. This official account records that when the trilateral format became impossible to sustain, Carter and Cyrus Vance met the Egyptian and Israeli delegations individually over the following twelve days. ↩

[4]Iran–United States Claims Tribunal — Declaration of the Government of the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria (General Declaration), 19 January 1981. The Declaration records that Iran and the United States asked Algeria to serve as an intermediary. ↩

[5]Community of Sant’Egidio — General Peace Agreement for Mozambique, Rome, 4 October 1992. The agreement identifies Mario Raffaelli, Jaime Gonçalves, Andrea Riccardi and Matteo Zuppi as “the mediators”. ↩

[6]The National Archives — Statement from Mo Mowlam, Secretary of State, following the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. The source expressly refers to Senator Mitchell’s “patience, impartiality and personal authority” as a major factor in the success of the talks. ↩

[7]United Nations Peacemaker — Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement, 15 August 2005. The agreement identifies Martti Ahtisaari as “Facilitator of the negotiation process”. ↩

[8]United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs — Kenya. The UN records the mediation efforts of Kofi Annan, Benjamin Mkapa and Graça Machel and states that they culminated in the power-sharing agreement of 28 February 2008. ↩

[9]Axios, 29 August 2026 — CIA Director Ratcliffe’s Moscow proposal on renewed US-mediated negotiations and a possible Trump–Putin–Zelensky meeting; and Axios, 25 August 2026 — CIA Director Ratcliffe visits Moscow. ↩

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