Just about every aspect of international relations, foreign policy, and diplomacy
at one time or another is subject to a negotiation.
Negotiations can be about capabilities; negotiations could be about terms of trade;
You can have them, say, about territory.
Peace negotiations are a form of diplomacy where parties - they may or may
not be governments - get together to essentially hammer out some sort of a
compromise over some dispute. Negotiations of any sort always take
place in a context. There's the question, say, of whether fighting is going on? What is the
relationship between the parties? What's the history of trust or mistrust? How
many failed or successful negotiations have there been in the past? What are
public attitudes on the various sides? How much space or flexibility do the
negotiators have? You can make a very long list of things that determine
the context for any negotiation - and you'd better make that list,
because negotiations never take place in a vacuum.
There's no limit to the ways in which an agreement or a negotiation can be shaped.
You can try to solve everything; you can simply try to solve one piece of it;
the parties to the dispute themselves can get together, or can take some outsider -
say the United States, or some other government, or it can be an organization, say
the United Nations - Outsiders can bring in incentives. For example, the United
States has often encouraged Israelis to compromise in various negotiations with
Arab entities. Why or how? By offering Israel various types of military support.
It's important to keep in mind the distinction between negotiations and
consultations. The premise of a negotiation is, you've got a dispute - there's a
degree of specificity and usually it's to resolve or prevent a disagreement from
coming about.
Consultations are actually much more forward-looking: it's not so
much that you've got a dispute, but you may have a common problem. What, say, to do
about climate change?
Consultations are the day-to-day of what diplomats do, and sometimes they succeed
simply by each side walking away with a better idea of what the other side is
thinking, what the other side values, so you're able to anticipate how they may
act in this or that situation.
Consultations can be useful as an end in themselves, and sometimes consultations
can be useful cause they can actually set the ground for a successful negotiation.
The reason negotiations fail or succeed, more than anything else, comes down to
what I would call ripeness. What that is is a measure of whether the various
leaders of the sides have the willingness to compromise and agree, and whether they
have the ability.
It's not enough for one or another side to want an agreement: they have to be strong
enough politically to put their name on the dotted line and then sell it to
their own respective Congress, Parliament, Politburo, whatever it is. If they are
unable or unwilling to make compromises for whatever reason - they lack the
political strength or they think they could do better
away from the table, say using arms - then you're not going to get a deal. One of
the dangers in a negotiation is trying to get a hundred percent of what it is
you want. That's a danger because if you get a hundred percent, you've often
created a situation where you can go home and carry your political process but
the other side hasn't.
Cyprus is an island that's been now divided for more than four decades, but there's
been almost non-stop peace negotiations. I was involved for years as the U.S.
representative to the talks and for one reason or another
the talks have failed. It's almost never for the reason that the ideas were not
on the table. The ideas are painfully, painfully well known, almost like the
Middle East. It's the political barriers, not the intellectual barriers, to
agreement that so often explain why you fail to to have success. There is a
potential downside to trying and failing at peace negotiations. Secretaries of
state, presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers only have so much time. It's what
economists call opportunity cost: the time spent doing one thing is time and
energy you don't have available for something else.
Secondly, if you try and fail, people may then lose some respect, you may lose some,
some standing. There is also the problem of people feeling let down. You try a
negotiation, if it fails - then a lot of people are going to say, "well hold it:
does that mean compromise is impossible? Maybe then we should continue fighting."
And I think we see some of those attitudes in the Middle East. Sometimes
you're going to make an assessment that a situation simply isn't ripe, it's
not teed up to be resolved - but then the answer isn't necessarily do nothing.
The United States and the Soviet Union had all sorts of arrangements not to solve
crises, but to manage them. Sometimes in foreign policy and diplomacy, your goal
isn't to solve something, but rather it's to take an imperfect situation and to
keep it from getting much worse.