At the 81st United Nations General Assembly, President Trump opened with language threatening Iran's annihilation — and yet, within hours, American and Iranian delegations sat together for three hours of unrecorded talks. The distance between a public threat and a private negotiation has long been one of diplomacy's most revealing measurements. That both gestures occurred on the same day, in the same building, speaks to the layered and often contradictory nature of how nations manage their deepest enmities.