Nolan Martin :
Hello, and welcome to the NEGOTIATEx podcast. My name is Nolan Martin, with me today is Aram Donigian. Aram, want to kick it off?
Aram Donigian :
I sure will. Thanks Nolan. And it’s good to see you folks. It’s my honor to introduce Stuart E. Eizenstat, who served as the Chief White House, Domestic Policy Advisor to President Jimmy Carter. In the Clinton administration, Stu served as the US ambassador to the European Union, Under Secretary of Commerce, Under Secretary Of State and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury.
He was also a special representative of the president and secretary of state on Holocaust issues with continuing responsibilities on Holocaust issues in the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. He is the author of President Carter: The White House years, The Future of the Jews: How Global Forces Are Impacting the Jewish People, Israel, and Its Relationship With the United States, and Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II.
He is an international lawyer in Washington, DC with Covington and Burling LLP, and serves as Chairman of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council appointed by President Biden. In 2003, he received the Great Negotiator Award from Harvard Law School. His latest book, The Art of Diplomacy: How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements That Changed the World was written in his personal capacity.
Ambassador, welcome to our podcast, and thank you for joining us today.
Stuart E. Eizenstat :
Well, thank you, Aram and Nolan. It’s a privilege to be with you.
AD :
Ambassador, we’ve never had an ambassador on the program before. Is it okay if we call you, Stu?
SE :
That’ll be just fine.
AD :
Thank you, sir. So we’d love to hear about your personal journey. How does someone set out to become a diplomat and do the things that you’ve done in your career?
Stuart’s Eizenstat’s Professional Journey [01:54]
SE :
Well, thank you. I have to admit that I didn’t set out to be a diplomat. I think in high school and I would have been voted the least likely to be involved in public affairs. I was shy and very studious, but I think my course really follows at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, I became very involved in student government. I wrote articles both on national and international affairs for The Daily Tar Heel, which is a school newspaper. I went in 1963 on a congressional internship from UNC to Congress. That was a very seminal year because it was the year of President Kennedy’s civil rights legislation. That really got me hooked on international and domestic issues.
And President Kennedy spoke at Kenan Memorial Stadium at Chapel Hill in 1962, and he challenged my generation to get involved in public affairs, to try to make the world a better place. And that really had a profound influence on me. I became the policy director for Jimmy Carter when he ran for governor in 1970, his president in 1974 to 76, and his chief domestic advisor on domestic issues in the White House, not international.
And that international breakthrough came when I was working on the Bill Clinton campaign in 1992, and I came into close contact with Vicki Cantor, who later became the trade representative for President Clinton, and Sandy Berger, who later became, after the election, the deputy national security advisor, and we formed a friendship and they recommended to president Clinton that because of the trade background that I had in the Carter administration on things like the Tokyo Round, that I should go to Brussels and be ambassador to the European Union.
And so that started me on my diplomatic path. I spent two and a half years there and was called back by Ron Brown, the secretary of commerce to be. The Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, and then in the second term of Clinton, Melodyn Albright, who I had known for many years, she was on the National Security Council staff of Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Carter White House, asked me to be her Under Secretary for Economic Affairs.
And then that led to being Deputy Treasurer’s Secretary, and one other cataclysmic event occurred in my life, which really, I think, set me down a path that I’m still following. This occurred in 1968. I had served a year in the Lyndon Johnson White House after Harvard Law School, and then when he decided not to run for the election, I became Hubert Humphreys, Vice President of this research director in the 1968 campaign against Richard Nixon.
And there I met a fellow worker in the campaign named Arthur Morse, who had just published a book called “While Six Million Died,” and it was using for the first time declassified records from the Roosevelt administration, and it showed what FDR and his top aides knew about the genocide of the Jews and failed.
And I pledged to myself, I was all of 25 years old at the time, if I ever had a senior position in any administration, which I hope would be the Humphrey administration, that I was going to do something to try to remove this cloud from the otherwise glorious history of the US and winning World War II.
And that’s set me on a path to do all the Holocaust work that I’ve done over the last 30 years, negotiating with Germany and Austria. And Swiss banks and French banks and white restitution and holocaust restitution for insurance policies. That one incident really was a spark for all of those negotiations.
AD :
Thank you for the work that you’ve done on holocaust issues, sir.
NM :
Stu, what do you see as the most critical negotiation skills a diplomat must master?
Unveiling The Skills & Strategies Of Influential Global Negotiators [05:33]
SE :
There are, and I try to set them out, I interviewed over 130 people for this book. And I try to put the reader in the room so they get a sense of what the negotiations are really about.
And I interviewed almost every Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, CIA directors, leading generals who led us in combat. And I found that there were common skills that the negotiators had, even on very different issues at very different times. And they are as follows. First, an ability to seize a historic opportunity when it comes and fiercely carry it to the end.
For example, When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and George H. W. Bush and Jim Baker, who wrote the report to my book, saw an opportunity, historical opportunity, to unite the two Germanys in NATO. It was a very heavy lift. None of our allies wanted to reunite Germany. Even Margaret Thatcher, our erstwhile ally in the UK, said, I love Germany so much I want to keep two of them. That’s one.
Second is courage. And not the kind of courage that, Aram, you had on the battlefield in Afghanistan. It was the political courage to break from established patterns, to take a risk from your own political base, to take actions to peace. Examples: Yasser Arafat didn’t have courage, but Anwar Sabbat did. He traveled from Cairo. to Jerusalem, lost his own foreign minister over that, and at Camp David lost his second foreign minister, pledging no more wars. That was a courageous thing to do.
More recently, the crown prince of the UAE decided to normalize relations with Israel. It’s not popular history, but he felt it was important to the future of this country. And perhaps most traumatic is that after 20 years of a brutal civil war in Northern Ireland, which the British in typical understatement called the Troubles, he killed 3,500 people in Maine, thousands of others. The leaders of the Catholic and Protestant communities, the Unionists and the Nationalists, finally said, this bloody warfare is getting us nowhere. We’ve got to make a peace orientation. That took courage to do.
Third, is intelligence combined with wisdom and with good judgment of people. Henry Kissinger, who wrote the foreword to my book, The Zhou Enlai, the Premier of China, showed that in the negotiations in 1972 to open Relations between China and the US.
Next is preparation, I asked the trade representative of President Trump. He’s very good to Bob Lighthizer. What was his most important skill that he brought? And he said three things, Preparation, Preparation and Preparation. And that is really critical. It’s knowing your issues and the other side so well that you can find the areas of confidence.
Next is a skill that you may not realize how important it is. Maybe it’s the most important of all. And that’s the ability to listen to what the other side is saying. It sometimes gets so wrapped up in your own presentation. What you think is such a brilliant exposition, that you really hear, but you don’t really listen to what the other side is saying. What is their response? Is it just talking points or is this really their red line? And that means putting yourself in the shoes of your opponent and looking at the negotiation from their standpoint.
After all, this is not a game of poker, winners take all. It has to be a win-win situation. They have to be able to take back an agreement to their president, to their capital, to their publics, and sell it. The ability to do that is critical. Example, the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Israel is on its heels after the attack by Syria and Egypt. With the help of the U S, with Nixon and Kissinger, are able to get the equipment in a counterattack. And now they have the whole Third Army, cream of Sadat’s army, isolated in the Sinai Desert.
Golda Meir, who was the pre prime minister at the time, had taken tremendous political heat for not being prepared. Now she has the chance to eliminate Sadat’s army and Kissinger standing in Sadat’s shoes, in effect, says, Golda, if you do that, it will be a pyrrhic victory because he’ll be so humiliated, he’ll never make peace with you. You’ve got to find a way to let that third army out and give him something to come back to. And that made the difference in the two disengagement agreements that Kissinger did afterward and campaigned with. So that’s really critical.
Next is to develop a personal relationship with your opponent, as difficult as that might be. So during the German reunification talks, they were going very badly. The Soviet Union was dead set against it. They had lost 20 million citizens in World War II. So Jim Baker, to develop a personal relationship with the Foreign Ministry of the Soviet Union, Edward Shevardnadze, took him to his retreat at Jackson Hole Island.
And the two of them really bonded. They talked about their children, their grandchildren, their hopes for peace. And that unfroze the situation and allowed Shevardnadze courageously to go against his own foreign ministry and convince Gorbachev to do this. Now let me go back, if I may, to my favorite example of preparation, because it’s something I was directly involved in.
So let’s put ourselves at Camp David. President Carter is mediating between Begin, Prime Minister of Israel, and Sadat, President of Egypt. Twenty two peace agreements he drafts. Thirteenth day, last Sunday, Begin comes to his cabinet, Camp David, and says, Mr. President, I’m sorry, I’ve tried, I cannot and will not make any more compromises.
Get me a limousine to take to the Andrews Air Force Base. I’ve got an LL plane I want to go home. Carter realizing that this would undercut Sadat’s courageous step in going to Jerusalem. And he might be assassinated coming home, and it would be a blight on Carter’s own record. Because of his preparation, he had read thoroughly the CIA profiles on Sadat and Begin.
And he knew that Begin’s soft spot was his eight grandchildren. So he gets his personal secretary, Susan Proud, to make eight copies of the original photograph taken of the three of them when they came in the first day. And he inscribes each to their name, with hopes for peace, Jimmy Carter walks over to Begin’s cabin, and then hears Begin vocalize the names of each of those grandchildren. You see his tears welling in Begin’s eyes, his lips are quivering, and he says, Mr. President, I’m putting my bag down, and my grandchildren will make one last try. That preparation was critical.
Next is creativity. I call my book The Art of Diplomacy because there is an art form, like an artist creating a picture on a canvas. Example, during the Good Friday agreements that George Mitchell was mediating for the United States between the Catholics and the Protestants Nationalists. The militias were still killing each other in the middle of the negotiation. No ceasefire. And each refused to disarm, not trusting the other.
So creatively, he came up with what became known as the Mitchell Principle. That is, okay, you don’t have to disarm, but you have to sign this piece of paper saying you’re going to negotiate the solution of this piece of it. And that active creativity got around what was an impasse. Next is that you oftentimes have to swing for a single instead of a home run. And what I mean by that is if you try to get too much in an agreement, it will all collapse.
So Jimmy Carter got off on the wrong foot with the Middle East. He tried to reconvene with the Soviet Union. 22 Arab countries and Israel to solve every problem all at once. That’s the goal of our lives. The West Bank, the Egyptian Santa, it was too much to bear. So Camp David was a more limited agreement just with Egypt, Halcyon’s weren’t even there.
But that built a bridge for a later normalization with Jordan and ultimately the Abraham Accords under President Trump. So I always say in sports terms, if you swing for a home run, they’ll often strike out. Go for singles.
Next attribute is stamina. I’ll use another sports analogy and that is the marathon. International negotiations are a long distance run. Chet Crocker, when he was mediating the Southwest Africa wars involving Cuba and Angola and Namibia and South Africa, he spent eight years negotiating and it’s not only a marathon, it’s a marathon that always seems to end in a sprint at the end of the marathon.
So you have to know stamina. For example, when Kissinger was doing his negotiations after the 73 war between Syria and Israel and Egypt. He got an average of one or two hours sleep for two weeks because he had to keep the momentum going. Jimmy Carter got an average of a couple of hours sleep over 13 days at Camp David. And when I was doing the climate change negotiations in Kyoto with a 190 countries, we got just a couple of hours sleep. So, stamina is really a very important attribute.
Next, you sometimes have to use what we call back channels. Now, that means that sometimes the two parties are so antagonistic, like for example, in Israel or Hezbollah in Israel, that they will not sit in the same room. So, you have to have back channels, you have to have some intermediary who’s trusted and that is critical. What happened in the first hostage deal between Gaza, between Hamas or Gaza and Israel was using Qatar and Egypt as intermediaries because the two wouldn’t get in the same room. We got to the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement by John Kerry using the Sultan of Oman, Qabas, who had good relations with both Iran and the United States to get that started, but they couldn’t get in the same room.
Next, and this is really important, is that when you come into office, you need to honor the agreements your predecessors have reached. And we oftentimes are not good negotiating partners because of that. It depends on who wins the next election. So let me give you polar opposites. Ronald Reagan defeats Jimmy Carter and us very handily, and he used many arguments, but one was he said the SALT II nuclear accord on nuclear arms gave too much to the Soviets and too little to the US. And yet, once he became president, realizing that even though it was never ratified by the Soviets, that it represented a solemn commitment by His predecessor, Jimmy Carter, he followed that agreement to the T and then built on it with a start agreement that lowered arms even more.
Contrast that with what happened to the nuclear agreement in 2015 with Iran, which, by the way, they faithfully followed. 2018, President Trump comes in office and says, I’m pulling out unilaterally. We didn’t just negotiate this with Iran. We had the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany, plus Iran. He pulls out and says he’s going to use maximum pressure.
What’s the result? The result is we have gotten their enriched uranium down to two and a half percent, which is civilian grade. It’s now 60% and in a couple of weeks, it can go to 90%. We’ve got two thirds of their centrifuges disabled. Now they have a whole new generation. We’ve got their plutonium. Now it’s back on there.
So there are always costs, and I found this out in climate change. Depending on who is president, we’re either in or out. Now I can assure you within a couple of weeks, President Trump inaugurated, he’s going to pull out of the Bureau of Civilians, which 190 countries. So when we go to China and we say, look, you’re now the number one emitter of greenhouse gases. It’s your responsibility to cut more. They say, who are you kidding? We don’t never know from president to president. Whether you’re in or out.
And last is leverage, and maybe I’ll stop at this because I know you have other questions. The ability of a negotiator to use positive and negative leverage. The positive leverage has a great superpower. The access to our market is a great incentive to get countries to negotiate with us. But let’s take another positive example of leverage. In the UAE negotiations with Israel in 2020 that normalized relations, the final icing on the cake is not something Israel gave them. They wanted F-35 fighter jets from the US and we gave it to them through President Trump and that made the deal possible.
The negative leverage takes three forms. Number one, economic sanctions, and I did all the economic sanctions in terms of this issue. They’re not as effective as they used to be because we don’t have a monopoly on products. We have sanctions on Russia. Putin is still fighting in Ukraine. We have sanctions on Iran. They’re still stepping up the nuclear program. We have sanctions on Maduro and Venezuela. He’s still there. The threat of war is also effective. And then the actual use of war, and that was done in Kosovo and Bosnia. And hopefully we’ll talk about that later in the program.
AD :
Well, I feel like we just got a little bit of a masterclass. I counted 12 skills. What I really appreciate, Stu, is obviously those are critical to being a successful diplomat. And I think they have great translation into almost any aspect of life, corporate negotiations, personal negotiations.
I think many of those seem transferable. I want to go to the folks you interviewed and you mentioned that you interviewed more than 130 US and international leaders, really negotiators who showcasing their unique personalities as well as some of the challenging situations they faced.
In addition to some of the examples you just gave, I’d love to ask you just some very quick response questions regarding these individuals, such as who demonstrated the most curiosity about their negotiation counterparts perspective. Who would you give that title to?
The Strategic Communication Skills Of Jim Baker & Richard Holbrook [19:11]
SE :
I think it was Jim Baker because he had to simultaneously negotiate with our own allies who were not happy about a reunited Germany, that is France and Great Britain. He had to negotiate with the Soviet Union. And then he had, frankly, to negotiate internally with his own administration. And that’s sometimes forgot that when you’re an international negotiator, you’ve got to get your ducks in a row internally. And here his own national security advisor versus Brent Scowcroft was not in favor of a reunited Germany.
So he had to deal with all these different personalities. And I think that part of curiosity about their perspective, his ability to look at things from the perspective of each of those was really critical.
AD :
Who did you think was the most effective communicator?
SE :
I think the most effective communicator was Richard Holbrook, my late great friend, who was the negotiator for the Dayton Accords, solving The Civil War in Bosnia.
And the reason I say that is the following. He had to negotiate with three of the toughest, roughest dictators, or even if they were elected, people who were really autocrats, and they each had such diametrically opposite. So we had Milosevic, who was the head of Serbia, a very tough guy. And in fact, in Kosovo, the next Balkan war, he had to bomb Serbia 77 days to get him to negotiate.
Second, he had to negotiate with Tusk, the head of Croatia, also a very tough guy, and he had to really stand him down and convince him to join with the Muslims in fighting the Serbs. And then third was actually our major ally, Visitor Baybridge, that is the Muslims, the so called Bosniaks. He was very difficult because he had to be convinced, in effect, not to get a hundred percent of his country.
There was gonna be something called Republic Serbia, a name called Serbskia and have a tripartite government with the Croats, the Serbs, and the Muslims. It was very tough for him and it took over 10 days at Dayton to negotiate with them, and only Holbrook who had a very tough personality himself could go against that threesome. You can’t put up a lightweight when you’re facing the defensive line of the Chicago Bureau.
AD :
All right, my last quick one here is going to be maybe the most difficult question. I want to know who you found to be most inspirational, and that’s got to be hard because every story you’re telling I’m finding pretty inspiring.
I know that the late Henry Kissinger wrote the foreword for your book just before he passed away, and then fellow former Secretary of State James Baker wrote the preface. I don’t know if they make your list, but in terms of whether it’s courage or just the ability to build relationship and trust as you interviewed folks, who did you find just personally the most inspiring?
Jimmy Carter’s Pivotal Role In Shaping Peace At Camp David [22:00]
SE :
I really thought, and I guess I’m being favorable to my own president. I thought that Jimmy Carter was, I did many interviews with him and what he did at Camp David and thereafter is really quite inspiring. So let’s put it in perspective. Sadat courageously goes to Jerusalem, pledges no more wars. What does that mean?
That’s a nice statement, but how do you concretize it? So after that trip to Jerusalem, there were a number of bilateral negotiations between Egypt and Israel, and they got nowhere. So Carter finally, in desperation, decides to invite them to Camp David, away from the press. And this was over the objection of all of his advisors, who said this will never work.
He negotiated, and I think it’s the greatest negotiating feat of any president in modern American history, even more than Woodrow Wilson in World War I. He drafts himself 22 peace agreements and shuttles between the parties. He tries to create a personal relationship. So he takes, on the first Sunday, he takes Sadat and Begin to the Gettysburg battlefield, which is a nearby drive to Camp David, to show them, in effect, symbolically, that it’s time for no more wars.
It’s time to reach an agreement and not have the kind of slaughter they saw at Gettysburg. And by the way, it so inspired Begin that verbatim, with no notes, he gave the entire Lincoln Gettysburg address on the spot. He had a Shabbat dinner with the Israeli team. He had a wonderfully close relationship with Sadat. As I mentioned, that last effort with the grandchildren’s photograph, it made the difference. But here’s a continuation of that. The Camp David Accords were a framework for these Accords. They were not a treaty and they called for converting it into a treaty within three months between Egypt and Israel.
But three months go by, four months go by, five months go by, we’re in our six months, no treaty. So Carter decides, again, I’m absolutely not exaggerating over everyone’s objection, he says, I’m going to go to the region. And try to finalize this and he said, Mr. President, you’re going to be 5,000 miles away.
It’s likely to fail. It’ll be humiliating. He said, I’ve got to do it. I’ve done all this for Camp David. I’ve now got to make it a binding treaty. Spends three days shuttling between Egypt and Israel. Again, he gets close, but not there. And everybody gives up. Air Force One was refueled at Ben Gurion Airport. The airspace was cleared. The staff is all coming down from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.
And we get a phone call from Begin early in the morning, on Sunday. He says, I’d like to see the president one last time before he goes. We all thought this just means he wants to thank him for coming and I’m sorry it didn’t work. So Carter, who had already gotten out of his suit and was in flight outfit, informal. Look, bacon is very formal. I’m going to put my coat and tab back. Please entertain him for a few minutes while I get these things soaked. Bacon comes to the lobby of the King David Hotel, and he says, young man, you know, this is a famous hotel.
Yes, sir, we know the King David’s. Not for the reasons you think. When I was head of the underground in Iroquois, I blew this hotel up with the British soldiers. And I said, Don’t worry, I’m not going to do it until President Carter leaves. He then goes up to the presidential suite. That’s where they seal the deal. When they come down, the elevator on the famous King David Hotel breaks between the first floor and the lobby. And the secret service has to pull Beginn and Carter out, but first, and I call it the breach birth of the treaty.
AD :
Never heard that story before. I can see why he tops the list. I think the proof is also in the fact that agreement has stood the test of time.
SE :
You’re so right, Aram. There have been so many conflicts in between, including the one in Gaza, and yet they’ve never breached that treaty.
AD :
Amazing
NM :
Hey everyone, Nolan here. I have to jump in and in today’s podcast for part A of the show. Be sure to rate, review and subscribe to the NEGOTIATEx podcast if you haven’t already. And also join us next week for part B of this awesome interview.
