Introduction

"In a time when negotiations, both great and small, continue to shape our world, this book provides an excellent opportunity to learn from the past and understand the present."--Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Prize Winner and former Secretary General of the United States

"A thought-provoking, informative book, highly recommended for all readers interested in international affairs"--Library Journal

"For anyone with an interest in diplomacy and political history, Stanton's book is both entertaining and informative."Foreign Policy Watch "Every professional concerned with dispute resolution and every student of negotiation has much to learn from Fredrik Stanton's lively stories of eight history-shaping negotiations."--Robert H. Mnookin, Chair Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School

"An excellent introduction into some of the great triumphs and failures of modern diplomacy."--Seattle Post-Intelligencer "An interesting, informative study well worth reading and pondering."American Diplomacy

"Stanton deftly illustrates that the power of haggling can easily rival that of any army or warhead."--Roll Call

"Exhaustive research and careful thought have enabled Stanton to employ an extraordinary writing talent to produce a contribution to history and a source of enjoyable reading."--New York Law Journal

"Stanton brings back to life both famous and some long forgotten personalities in the history of major American, European, and Asian negotiations. He persuasively makes his case for the importance of negotiators and negotiations both when wars can be kept from beginning and when wars end. He weaves in deft descriptions of the personal strengths and foibles of negotiators and homes in on the ability of the best to improvise when maneuvering on unfamiliar terrain."-- Ambassador Richard W. Murphy, Council on Foreign Relations

Words as much as weapons have shaped the course of history. Whether to avert, resolve, assist, or secure the outcome of a conflict, diplomacy in the modern age has had great triumphs and bitter failures, from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which narrowly spared humanity from a nuclear Armageddon, to the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, which created problems that still confront us today. Drawing on primary sources, transcripts, and interviews, Great Negotiations: Agreements that Changed the Modern World tells the stories of eight key episodes in modern diplomacy. From Benjamin Franklin securing crucial French support for the American revolution to Reagan and Gorbachev laying the groundwork to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons, Fredrik Stanton explains what each party brought to the negotiating table, the stakes, the obstacles to success, and how they were overcome.

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Excerpt

Introduction

Words, as much as weapons, shape history. Whether to avert, assist, or secure the resolution of a conflict, in the modern age diplomacy has had great triumphs and bitter failures, from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which narrowly spared humanity from nuclear Armageddon, to the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, which created problems that still confront us today.

In negotiations, great opportunity lies alongside the potential for disaster, and the rules are often written as the action takes place. Every successful negotiation is a triumph of reason over force, and a confirmation that conflict is not an inevitable outcome of a clash of interests. These unique moments provide individuals, armed only with cunning, determination, and personal charisma, an opportunity to leave an immediate and lasting mark on the fates of nations. German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz described warfare as “politics by other means,” and in the same vein negotiations can be perceived as war by other means. Looking at the powerful role great negotiations have played in the course of history and how they still affect our lives helps us understand policy alternatives available today and informs our choices for the future.

When it works, it seems like magic—the ability to reconcile opposing elements, or to create a situation that leaves both sides better off than before. Major negotiations, which Winston Churchill called “conversations of silk and steel,” are made of contradictions: confrontation and collaboration, conflict and seduction. The stakes are high, the margin for error is small, and the clock is ticking. With lives and nations’ fates in the balance, participants must use perseverance, creativity, bluff, and the ability to capitalize on the unexpected to overcome obstacles to agreement, which may include their adversary, the strategic environment, and even the demands of their own side.

Not surprisingly, in addition to inspiring stories of nobility and sacrifice, one finds colorful figures and a full array of treachery, blackmail, betrayal, and assassination. The characters’ weaknesses, as well as their strengths, make each negotiation a fascinating insight into cardinal moments in history.

Despite their challenges, the negotiators accomplished amazing victories. The Louisiana Purchase turned a potential war into an opportunity for one of history’s greatest acquisitions. In securing the Treaty of Portsmouth, Theodore Roosevelt helped save a quarter-million lives and prevented a world war. Kennedy and Khrushchev successfully navigated a crisis that insiders had given a 50 percent chance of leading to nuclear holocaust.

Europe, Asia, and the Middle East have been fundamentally changed by decisions made at the negotiating table. America has as well. Its birth, growth, and emergence as a world power were driven to a large extent by negotiating successes, and for all its military might, the United States has gained more from negotiations than from all of its wars combined.

Essential to the colonies’ success in the American Revolution was the support they received from France as a direct result of Benjamin Franklin’s negotiations in Paris. France’s coming to

America’s aid turned the tide against the British and paved the way for the colonists’ victory over what was then the greatest empire on earth.

Twenty-five years later, the young American republic pulled off what has been described as the best real estate deal in history. By manipulating the strategic tension between France and

England, American envoys James Monroe and Robert Livingston were able to convince Napoleon to sell all eight hundred thousand square miles of the Louisiana Territory to the United States for fifteen million dollars. The Louisiana Purchase sent the nation down a new, entirely unexpected path, and turned the collection of former colonies into a continental power. The transaction nearly doubled the size of the United States, making it one of the largest nations in the world.

In 1814, Napoleon’s adventures (partly financed by his sale of the Louisiana Territory to the United States) led to France’s defeat by the great powers and his exile to Elba. The Congress of Vienna was intended to be a dictation of terms, but by driving a wedge between the victorious powers and exploiting their differences, Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, was able to gain a seat at the table and ensure that despite its military defeat France’s interests were protected as Europe was redrawn. The resulting agreement restructured Europe, restored the power of monarchy, and established a framework that provided a durable peace in Europe for almost a century.

In the summer of 1905, Theodore Roosevelt invited Japanese and Russian representatives to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in an attempt to broker a peace between them and end the Russo- Japanese War. Although Russia had suffered serious setbacks and the war was costing both parties dearly, neither side was exhausted, and influential elements in each country pressed to continue fighting. After tortuous negotiations, an agreement was reached only after the Russian negotiator disobeyed direct instructions to break off the talks and presented terms he was not authorized to give. The resulting peace irretrievably altered the balance of power in the Far East and raised America’s status as an emerging great power on the world diplomatic stage.

In January 1919, diplomats met at Versailles to negotiate an end to World War I, which had bled Europe dry with over forty million casualties. The war’s cost in life and treasure had raised the stakes for all sides, and the results were both sweeping and tragically flawed. The outcome reordered Europe and the Middle East, eliminated the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman

Empires, and planted the seeds of conflict on two continents.

Sometimes a first, tentative step toward peace becomes a lasting accomplishment in its own right, as in the Egyptian-Israeli armistice accords. In late 1948, Ralph Bunche took over as United Nations mediator in Palestine. The previous mediator, Bunche’s colleague and friend, had just been assassinated. The parties were at war, and none of their representatives would look at, speak to, or shake hands with each other. Through meticulous diplomacy over a period of several months, Bunche was able to bring all sides to agreement, securing an armistice that ended the crisis. For his efforts, Bunche became the first black American and the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sometimes it is enough to avoid catastrophe, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kennedy and Khrushchev navigated a way through the crisis and averted a nuclear war that could have destroyed mankind. In the depths of the Cold War, with the balance of power teetering between the two superpowers, American intelligence discovered a clandestine attempt by the Soviet Union to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. If successful, the United States would have been placed in immediate jeopardy, and it was prepared to go to war to prevent it. Over the course of thirteen days, President Kennedy and his advisers found an accommodation with Premier Khrushchev that averted the threat and avoided a global nuclear war.

In 1986, at the high-water mark of the Cold War, President Reagan met with Soviet leader Gorbachev in a summit in Iceland. That two-day meeting led to the first arms-control agreement to reduce nuclear weapons and marked the turning point in the conflict between the superpowers.

By averting wars or restructuring continents, each of these negotiations has had a profound and enduring impact on history. While they addressed different situations and problems, all of the figures faced the common challenge of bringing home a deal on the best terms against competing forces. As a result, one finds strategic patterns, as well as the recurring elements of persistence and the ability to capitalize on the unexpected. These examples provide timely evidence of how people have used reason and persuasion to avoid violence and prevail over adversity and can do so again. Negotiating, always at the heart of diplomacy, remains one of the indispensable tools of statecraft.

The better we understand what has worked in the past and which mistakes to avoid, the less often states may find the need to resort to violence to settle differences.

Chapter Excerpt: The Cuban Missile Crisis

The seeds of the Cuban Missile Crisis were planted on New Year’s Day 1959, when an insurrection led by Fidel Castro replaced General Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship with a Marxist government that turned Cuba into a client of the Soviet Union. The United States, alarmed by the establishment of a communist beachhead in the Western Hemisphere just ninety miles from the Florida coast, tried to destabilize the Castro regime, and in April 1961 landed twelve hundred armed Cuban exiles on the Bay of Pigs in a failed attempt to spark an uprising. Nearly all were killed or taken prisoner.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev worried that sooner or later the United States would try again with better luck and preparation, and spent the next thirteen months searching for a way to protect his new and vulnerable Caribbean ally. While vacationing in Bulgaria in May 1962, he conceived an idea that with a single stroke could eliminate the possibility of future U.S.-backed invasions of Cuba and nearly double the Soviet offensive nuclear-strike capability against the United States. “Why not,” Khrushchev asked, “throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants?”1 By placing Soviet missiles on the island, he could bypass the Soviet Union’s seventeen-to-one inferiority in strategic nuclear forces and reduce the warning time for incoming missiles from twenty minutes to less than three. “My thinking,” Khrushchev explained, “went like this: if we installed the missiles secretly and then if the United States discovered the missiles were there after they were already poised and ready to strike, the Americans would think twice before trying to liquidate our installations by military means. I knew that the United States could knock out some of our installations, but not all of them. If a quarter or even a tenth of our missiles [in Cuba] survived—even if only one or two big ones were left—we could still hit New York, and there wouldn’t be much of New York left.”2

With Castro’s consent, the operation, code-named Anadyr, began that summer. Over the course of five months, more than eighty ships, the entire sealift capacity of the Soviet Union, secretly transported forty-two medium-range missiles, forty two long-range bombers, one hundred sixty-four nuclear warheads and fifty thousand troops, advisers, and engineers, along with fighter aircraft, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), and support vehicles and equipment across the Atlantic.

Everything went according to Khrushchev’s plan until an American U-2 spy plane returned on October 14 from a routine flight over western Cuba with photographs clearly revealing the outline of a nearly completed missile launch site. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy informed President John F. Kennedy of the discovery over breakfast on October 16, and the president immediately assembled an ad hoc crisis-management team. Known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExComm, the group’s fourteen members included the national security adviser, secretaries of state and defense, director of central intelligence, attorney general (The president’s younger brother Robert), and a handful of other senior officials whose judgment and intellect the president respected. “In the Executive Committee,” wrote presidential adviser Arthur Schlesinger, “consideration was free, intent and continuous. Discussion ranged widely, as it had to in a situation of such exceptional urgency, novelty and difficulty. . . . Every alternative was laid on the table for examination, from living with the missiles to taking them out with surprise attack, from making the issue with Castro to making it with Khrushchev. In effect, the members walked around the problem, inspecting it first from this angle, then from that, viewing it in a variety of perspectives.”3

They winnowed their choices down to three: air strike, invasion, or blockade. An air strike had the advantage of a focused response, but as Khrushchev had predicted, with the targeting technology at the time, the Air Force could only be sure of destroying sixty to ninety percent of the missiles. The military preferred an air strike followed by an invasion, which would eliminate the threat and rid Cuba of Castro for good. But the situation was too volatile for such an escalation, and Kennedy wanted to give the Soviets a chance to back down before taking irrevocable action. A blockade leveraging the overwhelming American naval superiority in the region offered a graduated response and preserved American flexibility. “The blockade,” Bundy explained, “would not remove the missiles; it would not prevent the Russians from completing their installations if they had all the necessary materials at hand, and while the evidence was incomplete, no one could assume they did not. A blockade might produce a deeply embarrassing counterblockade, most obviously in Berlin, and it might require deadly force in its application. But it did not begin with sudden death, and it was a first step, not a last.”4

Kennedy and his advisers prepared for the worst. The president deployed three hundred Navy warships to the Caribbean and South Atlantic in preparation for the blockade; mobilized one hundred eighty thousand troops for a possible invasion of Cuba, the largest invasion force assembled since D-Day; and ordered U.S. missile forces to be ready to launch a full-scale nuclear strike within several minutes’ notice. He ordered emergency supplies of food, water, and medicine sent to nuclear fallout shelters nationwide and prepared a speech to the nation for the evening of Monday, October 22, announcing the discovery of the missiles and his decision to impose a blockade of Cuba.

As the nation sat glued to its television screens, the president calmly delivered his speech from his desk in the Oval Office: “Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. . . . We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril. Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace. . . . The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to grow unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war. . . . [O]ur unswerving objective, therefore, must be to prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country, and to secure their withdrawal or elimination from the Western Hemisphere.”5

The president warned that he had directed the armed forces to prepare for any eventualities, and that “these actions may only be the beginning. . . . We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war,” he maintained, “but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.” Kennedy further declared, “It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” He called on Khrushchev “to abandon this course of world domination, and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and transform the history of man.” “This nation,” he said, “is prepared to present its case against the Soviet threat to peace, and our own proposals for a peaceful world, at any time and in any forum—in the OAS, in the United Nations, or in any other meeting that could be useful—without limiting our freedom of action.” It “was not the best speech of JFK’s presidency,” Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen wrote, “but it surely was his most important.”6

The Soviets responded immediately. Following Kennedy’s speech, Khrushchev activated the Soviet Union’s strategic missile forces and ordered all Soviet ships bound for Cuba to maintain their course. Khrushchev convened the twelve-man Presidium, the highest Soviet governing body, in the Kremlin and told them, “This may end in a big war.”7

Khrushchev composed a defiant letter to Kennedy, advising him to “renounce the actions pursued by you, which may lead to catastrophic consequences for world peace.” He characterized Kennedy’s actions as “undisguised interference in the internal affairs of the Republic of Cuba, the Soviet Union and other states,” and accused the blockade of Cuba of violating the United Nations Charter and international norms of freedom of navigation on the high seas, calling it an “aggressive action” against both Cuba and the Soviet Union. Rejecting Kennedy’s argument, he wrote, “And naturally, neither can we recognize the right of the United States to establish control over armaments which are necessary for the Republic of Cuba to strengthen its defense capability. We reaffirm that the armaments which are in Cuba, regardless of the classification to which they may belong, are intended solely for defensive purposes.”8 That night, Khrushchev recalled, “I slept on a couch in my office—and I kept my clothes on. I was ready for alarming news to come any moment, and I wanted to be ready to act immediately.”9

Kennedy responded with a terse letter to Khrushchev:

“Dear Mr. Chairman,

I have received your letter of October twenty-third. I think you will recognize that the steps which started the current chain of events was the action of your Government in secretly furnishing offensive weapons to Cuba. We will be discussing this matter in the Security Council. In the meantime, I am concerned that we both show prudence and do nothing to allow events to make the situation more difficult to control than it already is. I hope that you will issue immediately the necessary instructions to your ships to observe the terms of the quarantine, the basis of which was established by the vote of the Organization of American States this afternoon, and which will go into effect at 1400 hours Greenwich time October twenty-four.”10

Following Kennedy’s announcement, the Americans secured the backing of key allies and neighbors. In his briefing to the ambassadors of member states of the Organization of American

States, Secretary of State Dean Rusk told them, “I would not be candid and I would not be fair with you if I did not say that we are in as grave a crisis as mankind has been in.”11 The OAS unanimously approved the quarantine, and its members offered naval ships to assist with the blockade. That night Harlan Cleveland, the assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, said offhandedly to Rusk, “I’ll see you in the morning.” A weary, worried Rusk replied, “I hope so.”12 view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

Questions from the author:

1. How have great diplomatic achievements shaped the world we live in?
2. How are great leaders able to bridge differences when the millions of lives are at stake and the clock is ticking?
3. What lessons can we learn from historical negotiating successes that can help us in our everyday lives?

Weblinks

»	Author Frederik Stanton's web site

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