TEHRAN

“WE ARE TRYING to negotiate. But we just can’t understand a word President Trump is saying any more. Is he actually speaking English?”

These words, in a message from Iranian negotiators to Pakistani intermediaries, were intercepted by a Danish listening post based in Greenland, due to peculiar atmospherics which mean that the best place to hear what’s being said in the deserts of the Middle East is an ice sheet north of the Arctic Circle.

“Has he had a stroke?” the message ends.