Negotiation

There is a lot in the news on the international front just at this moment.  A civilian airliner has been shot down over Ukraine and the Israelis have invaded Gaza.  I try to take a longer view in these posts so the specifics of either of these events is not my primary focus.  But I was already thinking about both areas when I started thinking about the subject at hand.

These two currently red hot hotspots join a much longer list of merely hot hotspots.  There is Syria, which merits two entries.  There is the "chemical weapons" entry and the "ongoing civil war" entry.  Iraq is breaking wide open.  There is the "what to do about al Maliki" issue, the ISIS "Sunni eruption" issue (which can be linked to the "Syria civil war" entry), and the "what to do about the Kurds" issue.  Iran too gets two entries; one for the "nuclear" negotiations and one for its participation in Syria/ISIS (and possibly Palestine support, which is related to the Gaza invasion issue).  Then there is Afghanistan, which has just completed disputed elections and is the object of some sort of a U.S. military withdrawal.  There are other hotspots on the International front but I think we now have a list that is plenty long enough.

One could find a number of commonalities in this list but the one I want to focus on is "negotiations".  A hotspot will flare up and immediately someone, and frequently several some ones, will immediately call for negotiations.  In more long run crises the periodic hew and cry for "negotiations" is a standard feature of their evolution.

The idea is simple:  "jaw jaw is better than kill kill".  If people are talking they are not shooting and if they are not shooting people are not dying.  That's the theory anyhow.  But negotiations don't seem to have a very good track record.  The current Gaza situation is a classic example.  I am going to skip the long and complicated history here and focus on just focus on the events of the last few days.  Israel started bombing Gaza and threatened an invasion.  The U.S. immediately popped up and made loud "negotiations" noises.  Egypt jumped on the U.S. bandwagon and came up with a deal that the Israelis accepted.  But then Hamas balked and the "deal" never happened.  At a more micro level both sides agreed to a "5 hour" cease fire but the terms were widely violated.  And at this hour the Israeli military is rooting around on the ground in Gaza.  This is a particularly depressing example of negotiations failing but it is far from unique.  What's going on here?

Several hundred years ago white settlers "negotiated" a sale of Manhattan Island from the local Indians for chump change.  This is an example of a negotiation that went badly wrong for one side.  But since then most people have gotten wise to how negotiation works.  So you can still find situations where one side or the other gets taken to the cleaner but this now rarely happens.  The art of negotiation has been an area of serious study for many decades now.  You can read books or get degrees in how to conduct negotiations.  So the chance of someone pulling off a coup against the other guys is very small these days.  And the situation is actually worse.  People have been "horse trading" for millennia.  It is easy to find examples of disadvantaged people who do fine in a negotiation.  Somehow or other they turn out to be to be good at it.

This was driven home to me many decades ago.  It is another lesson from the U.S. experience in Vietnam.  On one side you had smart sophisticated Americans.  The U.S. team was led by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.  Before becoming Defense Secretary he had been President of Ford Motor Company.  There he had cut his teeth negotiating with auto unions.  So he knew a thing or two about negotiation.  On the other side you had the North Vietnamese.  North Vietnam was half of a third world country, for God sakes.  On paper they stood no chance.  The whole thing should have been a repeat of the Indians and the Dutch in Manhattan.  But it wasn't.  The North Vietnamese more than held their own at every stage of the years long negotiations.  Beyond that I learned that negotiations don't get anywhere until both parties want them to get somewhere.  The North Vietnamese in particular thought that they could win by continuing to do what they were doing outside the setting of the negotiations.  This resulted in a comic situation.  It took over two years to decide what the shape of the negotiating table would be.  Would it be round, where all parties would be on an equal footing or would it be square so each party would have its own side.  (It's been so long now I don't member what the final outcome was.)

My take away from this is that negotiations can't get you anywhere until all sides actually want to come to an agreement.  Part and parcel of this is that what each side wants must be what the other parties are willing to let them have.  The Vietnam negotiations did eventually come to a successful resolution.  The North Vietnamese wanted the U.S. out of Vietnam and a negotiated "settlement" as a necessary condition for that to happen.  The U.S. wanted to "declare victory and leave".  A "successful" negotiation gave them the fig leaf they needed to pull this off.  The other parties involved were too weak to affect the outcome.  Ultimately, the North Vietnamese were right.  Continuing to do what they were already doing eventually led to them winning the war.  The U.S. had concluded but couldn't publicly say that the war effort was doomed to failure.  The South Vietnamese held on long enough so that the U.S. could pretend that the U.S. withdrawal and the takeover of all of Vietnam by the North Vietnamese were two separate events. So in a "cut your losses" sense, the negotiations were ultimately a success for the U.S. too.

This left me with the belief that negotiations don't settle anything until the parties are ready for them to be settled.  I expect negotiations to fail whenever I think that the underlying positions are still in conflict.  If there is a formula then the parties can find it quickly.  If there is no formula then nothing will come of negotiations.  Having depressed you with a situation where the U.S. fared badly let me talk about a situation where things went surprisingly well.  This is the whole "chemical weapons in Syria" issue.

It has long been known that Syria had large stockpiles of relatively modern chemical weapons and the military means to use them.  When the whole Syrian revolution went hot a lot of people became seriously concerned.  The concern was justified.  At some point the Assad regime started actually using them.  Previously President Obama had drawn a "red line" around the use of chemical weapons in Syria.  The first evidence seemed to be pretty much small bore.  Obama tried to hand wave this away in the reasonable belief that if he had to do something he didn't have any good options.  This resulted in some criticism but it wasn't just the President that saw no good options.  Then Assad launched a chemical attack that was big enough it couldn't practically be ignored.  That put the fat in the fire.

Then, as Obama is weighing his many bad options, the idea was floated to do a deal where the weapons would be taken out of Syria and destroyed.  In a remarkably short time a deal was struck and all of the known chemical weapons have since been removed from Syria.  Any doubt about how good this news was got dispelled when ISIS declared a caliphate in eastern Syria and western Iraq.  Assad rates high on the "bad guy"-o-meter.  But ISIS rates an eleven.  The world is a better place now that we don't have to worry about ISIS getting its hands on chemical weapons.  It seems very likely that they would use them aggressively.  Saddam used them in Iraq against the Kurds not that long ago in the same part of the world.  So it is a very good thing that the weapons are gone.  And it appears negotiations played a key role in making that happen.  And that's true.  But, having set up the background I want to talk about why they succeeded this time.

Chemical weapons were first used on a large scale in World War I.  But the WWI experience taught two lessons:  In the right circumstances they can kill a lot of people and they are very hard to control.  So the "right circumstances" are much harder to come by when you most need them.  Immediately after the end of the war various efforts were made to ban them.  And they were not used to any extent in World War II.  Now various horrific techniques were used:  torpedoing of neutral ships, bombing of largely civilian targets (London, Berlin, Tokyo), extermination camps, firebombing, drone attacks, rocket attacks, and the Atomic Bomb.  The case can be made that chemical weapons are no more horrific than these other techniques that were used.  So why not use them too?  The reason is this whole "control" thing.  It is hard to make sure the large scale use of chemical weapons kills the bad guys without killing the good guys.  All these other techniques could be much more easily controlled.

The modern fear industry does not talk about this when discussing chemical weapons.  It would interfere with their ability to make us afraid of whatever they want us to be afraid of today.  But the people involved in the negotiations were aware of this disadvantage.  Both the U.S. and Russia saw advantage in being on the side of eliminating them.  Assad was put under pressure from the Russians.  But he also saw that he could be equally effective militarily without chemical weapons.  And the other tools in his military toolbox did not carry the heavy propaganda cost of using chemical weapons.  So he did not put up that much of a fight when the Russians pressured him.  And ultimately everyone (Assad, the rebels, the U.S., the Russians, other less important players) cooperated to get the weapons removed under horrific wartime conditions.

Here we had a deal that everyone could sign on to and that everyone saw some personal benefit in being a party to it.  Once all the parties figured this out the deal came together very quickly and has since been carried out.  With this perspective in mind let me run down the list and see how things fit (or don't) in these other situations.

Ukraine - The Ukrainians have suffered from a spate of bad governments in the post-Soviet era.  This resulted in Putin seeing an opportunity and engineering the annexation of the Crimea to Russia. Having succeeded there Putin fomented unrest in the eastern provinces of Ukraine, which contain large numbers of people who are culturally Russian.  Incompetence and disorganization on the part of the current Ukrainian government contributed to a belief that he would be successful here too.  But this annexation has not been going as smoothly as the Crimean one did.  And now we have the latest event where a Malaysian civilian jetliner was shot down over the disputed territories.  Over, above, around, and through all this have been various calls for negotiations.  The official U.S. position on the "unrest" in eastern Ukraine is a call for negotiations between the current government of Ukraine, Russia, and possibly others.

I believe it is too soon to expect anything.  But we may be close to the time to sit down and start taking.  The Ukrainian government seems to be quickly getting its act together.  The "rebels" started out with a lot of support from the local population and even more support from Russia.  But they have played their hand badly.  I see the Russian role as opportunist.  Putin styles himself as a great Russian nationalist who is a champion of Russian interests.  Annexing Crimea was a success because it was cheap in terms of both blood and treasure and was well received (for the most part) by the population involved.  It definitely advanced the interests of Greater Russia - we are powerful and successful and we are the champion of Russian people wherever they are.  But Ukraine is turning out to be a much more expensive proposition.

The Ukrainian government, after a number of early stumbles has started reacting effectively.  And the shooting down of the airliner is a giant black eye.  Russia has long been seen as a bully by its neighbors during the Putin era.  Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and now especially the airliner shoot down feed that narrative.  And if Russia is ultimately unsuccessful in annexing eastern Ukraine that is a blow to the whole "Greater Russia" narrative.  It's not even necessary for the effort to fail.  It is only necessary for important interests in Russia to decide it is likely to fail or to be too expensive,  As a basically opportunist endeavor Russia will want a graceful exit as soon as they decide the whole thing is a bad idea.  In the same way that the U.S. objectives changed in the Vietnam negotiations the Russian objectives will change in the eastern Ukraine negotiations.  At that point successful negotiations become possible.  I don't think we are there now but I think we could be soon.

Gaza - Here I expect failure into the foreseeable future.  Hamas still thinks it can outlast Israel.  For political reasons within the Arab world Hamas receives enough support so that they have the luxury of continuing to hold that position.  Israel believes it is confronted with an existential crisis.  They believe that if Hamas wins then Israel will cease to exist.  These are incompatible positions.  They have been firmly held on the Israeli side since the country came into existence in the late '40s.  And the position has been supported by one Palestinian faction or another over the same period of time.  That faction has always been powerful enough to veto any Palestinian peace initiative.  Until this changes negotiations are doomed.  I don't see this changing any time soon.

Syria - I have discussed the chemical weapons situation.  Let me move on to the civil war.  Here both sides see themselves in an existential situation.  Until that changes I see no hope for negotiations.  But unlike the Israeli/Palestinian situation, where nothing material has changed in decades, the Syrian situation is in flux.  ISIS has a strong potential for upending the playing field.  I believe that ISIS has a real possibility of creating a country consisting of eastern Syria and western Iraq.  The current boundaries were drawn up by the British and French at the end of World War I.  Then make no geographic or cultural sense.  ISIS may cause some of those boundaries to be redrawn along lines that make much more sense geographically and culturally.  The big barrier to ISIS success that I see is the question of whether ISIS can actually govern.  This is hard to predict.  But if they actually turn out to know how to govern then I think they have a real chance of creating a country.  Whether it is a caliphate or not is a minor consideration.  And its politics might not be what the west and the U.S. will prefer but that won't stop it from happening.  Frankly, I don't know what the cultural map of Syria looks like if you slice the Sunni east out.  So I don't know how an ISIS success will affect Syria.  But there is too much in flux for negotiations to be worth the trouble at this time.

Iraq - Here I think my crystal ball is clearer.  I think Iraq in its current form is doomed.  The three main factions in Iraq are Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd.  The Kurds have already signaled where they stand.  They want their own country.  The al Maliki government in Bagdad is too weak to stand in their way.  Considering the alternatives the outside world may decide that an independent Kurdistan is better than the alternatives.  It is up to the Shiites in Iraq to decide how important it is to do something about ISIS.  I think the U.S. will have little influence on that decision.  There is talk about replacing al Maliki with someone else.  That was tried by the U.S. in South Vietnam.  It didn't work then.  I don't think it will work now especially given that no competitor has emerged so far.  I think that the Shiites are stuck with al Maliki.  One possible outcome is that the Shiites in Iraq will unite with the Shiites in Iran.  I think this is an interesting possibility but unlikely.  The Iraqi Shiites are Arabs.  The Iranian Shiites are Persian.  The Arabs and the Persians have been fighting for several millennia.  I so no reason to believe it will stop any time soon.  So what I see is a Shiite Iraq, a Sunni caliphate (for lack of a better term), and a Kurd Kurdistan.  I think all this will happen relatively soon but not right now.  So right now negotiations are a waste of time.

Iran - I have already covered the Iraq/Syria/ISIS issue.  Let me move on to the nuclear negotiations.  The "deadline" for talks to conclude has just been extended.  This is a less than shocking development.  Nuclear weapons share some similarities with chemical weapons.  They are not that controllable.  Sure, you can explode one exactly where you want.  But they tend to be too big.  And they are a propaganda disaster.  The only benefit seems to be the prestige angle.  "I am a big bad nuclear power who has to be accorded due respect."  But several countries including Brazil and South Africa have decided they are more trouble than they are worth.  Everybody assumes Israel has nuclear weapons but officially they won't admit it.  Where's the prestige in being a nuclear power if you don't brag about being a nuclear power?  And other countries seem to be willing to go after Israel anyway.  So the prestige looks vastly overrated.  Then there is North Korea.  They are a nuclear power and everybody knows it.  But they are still seen as a pipsqueak country.  So North Korea represents another blow to the prestige argument.

What Iran says is that they want to be a nuclear power in the sense that they process nuclear fuel.  Their official position is that they don't want a bomb.  Some people think they are telling the truth about this and some people think they are lying.  But either way it represents the basis for a deal.  The U.S. and other western powers said they didn't want Iran processing nuclear fuel at all.  But all the international treaties say it is OK for Iran to process fuel.  The deal consists of Iran not making a bomb in exchange for Iran being allowed to have a heavily monitored nuclear fuel industry.  I think that's a feasible deal.  And I think there is enough prestige in being a fuel processor to make up for what ever prestige they miss out on by not being a nuclear power.  So Iran gets the prestige they want.  On the other side Iran gets to do what treaties already say it can do, namely process nuclear fuel.  But that nuclear fuel industry ends up being heavily monitored.  In short I think there is a deal to be had here.  But there is also the art of the deal.

A deal must be sold to both sides.  Going in each side promises its supporters that it will come away with more than it actually gets in the end.  This has to be dealt with.  The standard method is "we got as much as we could and the deal we got is better than no deal".  The specifics of the deal (in this case the prestige for Iran of being a nuclear processor balanced against the fact that they are a heavily monitored one) is what you use to manage the second problem.  The standard technique for handling the first problem is brinksmanship.  First, you set up a "hard deadline".  Then you go past the deadline.  Then you reach a middle of the night deal after the deadline.  It may be ugly but it works.  I think there will be an Iranian nuclear deal along the lines outlined above.  I think it is a "win/win" all around.  But the western public has been promised that the Iranian nuclear capability will be wiped away completely and the Iranian public has been promised that the Iranian government will not be pushed around by the "running dog" west.  Most Iranians probably don't want Iran to be a nuclear power but they also don't want their government to cave to the west.  By going to the last minute and beyond each side can credibly argue that they got the best deal they could get.  Without the drama and brinksmanship the argument is much harder to make.  So I predict more brinksmanship but ultimately a deal.

Afghanistan - If I had my way the U.S. would be completely out of Afghanistan.  Iraq is falling apart because the fissions in its society keep growing and there was no opposing force to shrink them.  We have much the same situation in Afghanistan.  The Northern Alliance represents Pashtuns but not the other components of Afghan society.  There is rampant corruption coupled with bad government.  This results in a classic "the center is not holding" situation.  We need to get out of the way and let the Afghans sort this out.  They need to figure out how to do this on their own.  Otherwise they will never build the strong institutions necessary for long term success.

Then there is Pakistan.  Pakistan has subsisted on blackmail from various foreign powers since it came into existence when the British relinquished control of India in the late '40s.  The U.S., the Chinese, the Russians, the Saudis, and others have been pouring money into Pakistan at various times for various geostrategic reasons.  Currently the U.S.'s reason is that Pakistan squats on the supply lifeline to our troops in Afghanistan.  If we have no troops there then we have no reason to continue to pay the blackmail.  Getting all of our troops out of Afghanistan gives us a much better position vis a vis Pakistan.

Getting all of our troops out of Afghanistan cleanly may not be possible.  But our leverage in Afghanistan is weak.  If we can do something about making sure the election was not rigged then so much the better.  But that's about it.  We should tread very carefully with respect to any commitment beyond the end of 2014.

Finally, let me return to the whole "talking is always better than fighting" argument for why negotiations are supposedly always a good idea.  There is a cost to full tilt negotiation.  You lean on one or both sides to try to lever concessions out of them.  If the negotiations ultimately fail there is a cost associated with this kind of power diplomacy.  We may have pressured one side into a concession that is no longer worth it after negotiations fail.  But the concession may stay hung around their necks anyhow.  And countries do not like to be leaned on any more than people do.  They resent it.  So strictly "going through the motions" calls for negotiations are probably OK because the costs are low and in line with the benefits ("we are pro-peace types").  But the kind of negotiations the U.S. has engaged in between Israel and Palestine have been full bore enough so that the costs of the ultimate failure may be significant.

I have very little good to say about George W. Bush.  But I think he made the correct decision to not push hard for Israeli/Palestinian peace.  It was not in the cards then.  I don't think it is in the cards now.  I salute George Mitchell and John Kerry for trying.  But I think it is important that these efforts be realistic.  If there is a deal to be had, great.  Charge ahead full steam.  But if the deal is not really there make sure that your efforts are not counterproductive.

Of course none of this will in any way diminish the vast volumes of hot air that will continue to be expended on why negotiations should be forced into existence immediately and everywhere.  Nor will it diminish the micro-criticism of the people engaged in or not engaged in any particular set of negotiations.  But hopefully this piece will make us all more informed spectators.