By Patricia H. Kushlis
July 1, 2010 Update (see final paragraph below)
If I had to summarize Fredrik Stanton’s forthcoming book Great
Negotiations: Agreements that Changed the Modern World in one sentence it
would be the observation Winston Churchill made in a speech at the White House on
a trip to the US
in 1954:
“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” – Winston
Churchill, White House, June 26, 1954.
Keeping this in mind, Stanton
demonstrates the critical role negotiations have played in shaping America’s
future as well as the world’s destiny from the Revolutionary War onward. He does this through a series of mercifully readable
but also sophisticated and instructive chapters – arranged chronologically – beginning
with the Republic’s founding in 1789 through the 1987 Reykjavik Summit between
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Each
chapter emphasizes the context and dynamics of a particular negotiation as well
as the people involved, their personalities, connections and the roles they played
in the deliberations.
All but one of the negotiations included in this 227 pages
of text (plus end notes, a bibliography and an index) represent successes –
albeit only after a number of cliff-hanger, fingernail biting episodes which Stanton chronicles well before
the negotiations drew to conclusion.
One failure amidst the successes
Stanton also includes one
colossal failure – the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, a multilateral extravaganza,
into which the US
entered totally unprepared and at far too high a level and whose consequences set
the stage for the rise of Hitler and World War II. This chapter delineates the multitude of
reasons for the failure. Even if the
Wilson Administration had had its ducks in a row – which it did not - the
mammoth size, scope and complexity of the conference itself and the cavalier attitudes
of the European victors were such that they might still have overridden US policies
and interests regardless of the lack of preparedness on the American side.
In earlier chapters, Stanton explains how the US acquired
the vast territories known as the Louisiana Purchase from the French via
diplomatic, not military, means and how the Theodore Roosevelt administration –
with Teddy playing long-distance mediator - engineered an end to the 1905 Japanese-Russian
War.
These negotiations took place in
the form of peace talks held on a
US
military base across the water from
Portsmouth,
New Hampshire. Before Roosevelt
himself helped diffuse a seemingly unsurpassable impasse, these negotiations too
lurked on the brink of failure.
Diplomatic negotiations and military action not mutually exclusive
Throughout the book, Stanton
demonstrates that negotiations and military actions on the battlefield are in no
way mutually exclusive – that the two represent different tracks of dispute
settlement as they play out often simultaneously on the world’s chess
board. He left out the Vietnam Peace
Talks which took place in Paris in the early
1970s but these talks were yet another example of negotiations designed to end US military participation while the battlefield
that was South Vietnam
was still thick with smoke. At the time,
the Nixon administration needed cover – a face-saving device – to withdraw American
troops but also keep its supporters on the political right on board. These face-saving
negotiations fit his purpose to a T.
Stanton also underscores the role
of informal emissaries for passing messages and floating ideas, like veteran US journalist Charles Bartlett for the Kennedys and
ABC correspondent John Scali and US
businessman William Knox, the resident representative of Westinghouse in Moscow, for Khrushchev, during
the Cuban Missile Crisis. He,
furthermore, outlines the chillingly irresponsible advice given to both Kennedy
and Khrushchev by their respective military leaders – which if either leader had
followed the recommendations his side proffered would have likely caused a
nuclear Armageddon for all the wrong reasons.
Importance of Saving Face
Finally Stanton
emphasizes the need for victors and vanquished to save face for negotiations to
succeed. This happened in spades during
the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US secretly agreed to withdraw aging missiles
targeted at the Soviet Union and based in northern Turkey
and to stop threatening to invade Cuba
as long as withdrawal of the US
missiles remained secret and the Soviets turned their supply ships around and took
their missiles and bombers already on the island back home.
When I taught international politics, I included a
negotiation-mediation game in the course that I had played earlier at a US
Institute for Peace symposium. I think
the students gained more from participation in that simulation than any of the
readings I had assigned or my lectures because the game helped internalize
negotiating and mediating experiences in ways simply reading and hearing about
them did not.
If I were teaching the class again, I would likely
incorporate Stanton’s
book because it is so readable and the negotiations he chose to include should be familiar
to students of American history. If I taught negotiations per se it would also be
one of the books I would also assign because it brings out aspects – in
particular the importance of the human factor – that too many books on
negotiations fail to emphasize enough.
Beyond the classroom
Yet Great Negotiations should also be read well beyond the
classroom. It should appeal to those
interested in history and who want to learn from the past, to those intrigued
by the strategy and tactics employed by great leaders and also to those who are
interested in current affairs. In sum,
Great Negotiations emphasizes lessons from the past that remain instructive for
the present – and into the future.
Stanton,
of course, selected certain negotiations and omitted others. I understand that he looked for ones that
focused on more than a single geographic region and crossed different
historical time periods. He also chose high-stakes ones that featured outsized
personalities who, as individuals, had a crucial impact on the negotiations outcome
– hence the title of his book.
Unique characteristics of negotiations
Throughout, he included a number of characteristics
intrinsic to international negotiations which people who have not themselves
been involved in the negotiating process are unlikely to realize: the pace, the rhythm, the fits-and-starts,
the climaxes near the end, the use of on and off-site mediators, the well
placed leaks to the media, the use of the media to send messages from one party
to the other, the domestic constraints placed on the negotiators that the other
side may or may not be cognizant of, the added complexities and risks of
multilateral versus bilateral negotiations, the need to explore options quietly
and away from the strobe lights, the real and self-imposed time constraints, and
sometimes the requirement for involvement at the very highest levels of
government to break an impasse.
This was just demonstrated in a recent Obama-Medvedev
telephone call to help resolve a couple of final sticking points on the
replacement treaty to the START agreement before the US
and Russian leaders meet in Washington
in April. Both sides plan to make the
signing of this key arms control agreement a capstone to the visit but for it
to happen at least one nudge from the top was needed.
Typical US approach to negotiations
America’s
approach in many international negotiations, however, is far more pedestrian
than the high wire stories in this book:
the US
normally relies on a committee system that includes various government agencies
and appropriate NGOs in the formulation of its negotiating positions. This is a time consuming enterprise. Far more
hours are spent negotiating across agency lines than across the negotiating table
– yet, this approach also produces a stronger foundation if and when an
agreement needs inter-agency support and Congressional approval.
In sum, Stanton’s book is important because it humanizes and
makes accessible a process often shrouded in secrecy that needs far better
understanding in a country that only imperfectly grasps that waging war should
be the last resort in protecting the national interest and that proficiency at
the negotiating table is as important, if not more so, than prowess on the
battlefield.
A condensed version of this review appeared in the June 2010 Foreign Service Journal entitled "The Value of Jaw-Jaw" on page 60.
Fredrik Stanton,
Great Negotiations Agreements that Changed the Modern World, Yardley, Pennsylvania: Westholme Publishing, 2010. To be released in April 2010.
