Iran’s Foreign Minister Subtweets Kerry

As my colleague Mark Landler reports, Secretary of State John Kerry insisted on Monday that it was unfair to blame last-minute objections from his French counterpart, Laurent Fabius, for scuttling a potential deal with Iran over its nuclear energy program last weekend in Geneva. “The French signed off on it, we signed off on it,” Mr. Kerry said of the final proposal presented to Iran’s negotiating team. “There was unity, but Iran couldn’t take it.”

Shortly after these remarks were reported, Iran’s chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, pushed back on Twitter, claiming that the draft proposal from the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany, known as the P5+1, changed drastically after the French intervention on Saturday, as the Guardian diplomatic correspondent Julian Borger reported.

Since Mr. Zarif did not mention Mr. Kerry’s name or Twitter handle in that message, it fell into a category of gibe known as a subtweet on the social network, which is the rough equivalent of talking behind someone’s back, but doing so in such a loud stage whisper that you expect them to hear the criticism.

Just to make sure that his message was heard, however, Mr. Zarif addressed the secretary of state by title in a follow-up missive, in which he also appeared to complain about public comments from Mr. Fabius disparaging an early draft of the deal as “a fool’s bargain.”

The minister, who says that he enjoys reading comments posted on his Persian-language Facebook page, ended his brief flurry of Twitter diplomacy on Monday on a more positive note.

There was no response from Mr. Kerry on the official State Department Twitter account where the talks were documented, and the secretary occasionally posts signed tweets.

One day earlier, though, an American opponent of the proposed deal, Senator John McCain, posted a message saluting what some neoconservatives have hailed as heroic French resistance.