Nolan Martin :
Hey everyone! Thanks for joining us on the NEGOTIATEx podcast. We are continuing our conversation with Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat. If you haven’t already checked out part a of the show, be sure to do that first. Let’s jump into that conversation with Stu.
NM :
So sir, part one of your book deals with the US and national security. Could you discuss a little about the challenges to negotiating with a country like Iran and what you see as critical keys to success in these situations?
Diplomatic Negotiations With Iran: Insights & Outcomes [00:27]
Stuart E. Eizenstat :
I make it clear in my book that not all the negotiations are successful. So in dealing with Iran, which is a radical government with a supreme leader, the Ayatollah, when 444 days to get our hostages back. Yes, we finally succeeded, only after the election, only released just before, in fact, the actual release was just after Reagan was inaugurated.
And one of the things we recognized, but only belatedly, is we did have agreements with many of his negotiators with the Ayatollah. But each time they were taken back to him, he detailed it because he was using those hostages, our hostages, his pawns, and his own political effort to solidify his power. And by not being able to negotiate directly with the decision maker, we ended up having to go through 444 days.
Second, another negotiation with Iran was the famous JCPOA, which is the nuclear agreement between the G5 countries, Germany, and of course, including the US and Iran on the nuclear deal that I’ve discussed earlier. Now here, when you’re dealing with a government like Iran, which is not trustworthy, you have to build in very clear markers.
You know, Ronald Reagan famously said when he was negotiating with the Soviet Union, trust but verify. So built into the JCPOA was an intrusive inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency and reports every several months on anything they found. They had cameras in all their facilities. They could do spot checks without any notice.
Every six month period they would report and even the Trump administration never found a violation. So when you’re negotiating with a country that is not trustworthy, you have to build in those kinds of implementation tests and standards that will give you some assurance that the pressure will be. Now we are facing that right now.
Just today, as we speak, an agreement was reached for a ceasefire for 60 days in Lebanon between Hezbollah, the Lebanese government, and the United States. And it’s a great tribute to President Biden, Tony Blinken, and Amos, you know, Special Envoy. The question is, will it last? Is Hezbollah trustworthy? So there again, you just don’t take their word.
We’re trying to build in a safeguard of having the Lebanese army, a UN force, come in to make sure that Hezbollah stays north of the Litania River and not too close to Israel. In the agreement, each side agreed in language, sometimes you have to use ambiguous language, in diplomacy. But each side retained the right to self defense.
What that means is, if Hezbollah cheats and starts firing rockets, Israel is not bound by the ceasefire. So you sometimes have to build in that kind of a safe ground.
Aram Donigian :
You know, sir, you, in your book, you discuss the role the United States has had as a mediator in various parts of the world, certainly the case in the Middle East. What are your thoughts? Have we always been effective mediators in these conflicts and what ought we have learned from past experiences?
Stuart Eizenstat On The Challenges & Strategies Of US Diplomacy [03:30]
SE :
First of all, what I’ve learned, and doing the negotiations and seeing others do it or reading and interviewing others is that the United States really is, as Madeleine Albright said, the indispensable party. If we’re not engaged, things are not going to work. Now that doesn’t mean they will work. It does not mean that. There are times when the negotiations are simply not right. We’ve been trying now with very good negotiators, Tony Blinken has been going over 10-15 times to try to reach a permanent ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.
If the parties themselves aren’t on the same wavelength in terms of what the end result is, as they were ultimately in Northern Ireland, but as they’re not in Gaza, but Hamas wants to stay in power and Israel rightly says, we can’t tolerate you staying in power. So you have to be able to mediate between parties that want, that have a commonality of, and without that, the best mediations, the best negotiations don’t work.
Also, there’s an issue of rightness. Chet Crocker negotiated for eight years with a brilliant concept, talking about creativity, which he called linkage. So to put you in the situation, South Africa had occupied Namibia and its troops were there, and it was trying to make Namibia into another apartheid regime.
There was a rebel group fighting against South Africa. At the same time, Soviet backed Cuban troops are in Angola, and they’re attacking South Africa. So, with a brilliant concept of linkage, as a mediator, Chet Crocker got an agreement in which the Cuban troops pulled out of Angola, and the South African troops pulled out of Namibia, gave Namibia their independence.
That linkage between the Cubans in Angola and the South Africans in Namibia was really quite brilliant, but it took eight years to do. And that’s why I say it takes stamina, it takes determination, but it also takes brilliance and insight. I mean, what Chet did was really quite amazing. It’s a great example of US’ successful mediation.
AD :
Now I like this idea of rightness, and the patience that you said it requires, as well as some of that intelligence and kind of being able to see what the future might hold.
SE :
Yeah, and I would say, Aram, another example of rightness is that several British prime ministers, particularly John Major, tried to reach an agreement in Northern Ireland, and they did have some agreements, but not with the IRA, which was the radical Catholic militia. They were excluded from negotiation.
It was still not right, because both sides still believed they could achieve more on the battlefield than they could negotiate. And finally, it became right when both sides realized that they were not going to achieve their objectives militarily, and that they had to come to a political agreement.
So George Mitchell did a great job. But he came at a time when the feeling was it’s now ripe for a settlement. We’ve had so many deaths, so many injuries, so much dislocation. We’ve got to find a way out of this, and that’s when it’s ripe. It was ripe when George H. W. Bush and Jim Baker saw the Berlin Wall fall. The day before, would it have been ripe to reunite the two Germanies? Of course not.
The Soviets were occupying East Germany. But when that occurred, it led to a whole cascade of events with Gorbachev and Perestroika, and that made it possible for the agreement to occur because it was right, the timing was right.
NM :
Your focus on the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq certainly resonate with both of us as former service members. How do these case studies explain the often tenuous relationship between military force and diplomacy either successes or failures?
Lessons In Diplomacy & Military Strategy: Insights From Stuart Eizenstat’s Experiences [07:18]
SE :
So I wrote this book for three reasons. One, we are in a world that seems to face almost insoluble problems, a turbulent time. And I wanted to show by this book more than a dozen examples over the last 50 years where we faced equally daunting problems and where American diplomacy was successful and it can do so again.
Second, and something that will resonate to you both, and I really applaud your public service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that is we are in the midst of two hot wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the threat of conflict always looms over China, and during at least my lifetime, you’re much younger, we’ve had a very mixed record of success with military efforts in Vietnam, the two Balkan wars with Kosovo and Bosnia.
The two Iraq wars under President Bush, one and two, the Afghan war, which was our longest war in American history, 20 years, and the Libyan war with President Obama, which was his worst mistake. And so I wanted to take a hard look at when, how, and whether military force can be a constructive way to achieve peace agreement.
And third, I’m very concerned that we’re entering into an isolationist period, not unlike that between World War I and World War II, where we’re trying to retreat behind our two oceans and not engage. And that would leave a terrible vacuum for the Russians and Chinese and Iranians and others to put their values and interests to fill.
And I wanted, therefore, to show how much US engagement has achieved. So when you come to the use of military force, military force alone can never succeed. That’s one lesson in Gaza right now. Israel never has had a war planned for Gaza. It has, however, succeeded elsewhere. So, for example, in Bosnia and Kosovo, we combined NATO and US forces against the Serbs, and that brought people to the negotiating table.
For example, in Dayton, Ohio, with Holbrook for Bosnia. It took 77 days of bombing to get Milosevic and Kosovo to come to the negotiating table. In the two Iraq wars, great lessons to be learned. So in the first Iraq war, where Saddam had invaded Kuwait against oil fields, President George H. W. Bush and Colin Powell got it exactly right, N. Jim Baker. They got a U. N. resolution authorizing force. Even the Soviets, the Russians approved, and the Chinese. They got a NATO resolution authorizing force. They got a 38 country coalition. And they got what Colin Powell said in his interview to me was decisive force 500,000 troops to get Saddam out and they had a limited political objective. Just get him back into Iraq.
In fact, they were criticized, if you remember, you’ve got him on the run, just choke him, let’s get rid of him. And they say, if we do that, we’ll own Baghdad. Well, if you contrast that with The Sun, 12 years later in the second Iraq war, no UN resolution, no NATO resolution, a very thin coalition force, and Don Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense for George H.W. Bush, exactly the opposite of Colin Powell’s decisive force. He said, and I’m quoting, we’re going to use a quote unquote light footprint, only initially 10,000 troops. We even took some from Afghanistan. We never had decisive force in either theater. It took several surges. Later even got Obama to get enough decisive force to make it a draw in Iraq.
A number of lessons from military force. Number one, it should be the last option you use, not the first. Try diplomacy, try economic sanctions, try the threat of war. For example, Bill Clinton did in 1994 against Haiti to get their dictator out and let the elected prime minister come down. So all of those should be exhausted for a second.
It needs to be in the supreme national interest of the country. It’s the hardest decision a president makes. I’ve served in eight administrations. It’s a painfully difficult decision for the president to put young men and women in harm’s way. So it has to be something that is very much in our national interest.
So let’s take an example. Right now there is a horrible genocide going on in Sudan with the Arab Sudanese killing by the tens of thousands black Sudanese. Now we should certainly do everything we can to get the UN involved, separate the forces. But it’s not in our national interest to have U. S. troops involved in it.
Third, and this is something I really applaud, Steve Hadley was the National Security Advisor to Ponder Lisa Rice, who’s the Secretary of State. They were both very candid in their interviews. And they said the mistake we made in the second Iraq war, trying to depose Saddam Hussein and put a Western South democracy in it, is that we did it as Steve Hadley said back, before you go into the war, you should know what the political objective is, have an agreement with the military, military strategy around that political objective, not the other way around.
Well, unfortunately, that’s again, what’s happening in Israel now. And they militarily are making progress in Basel, but they have more political plans in advance. And so getting it right and the right sequencing is absolutely critical. Next, General Petraeus said, if you’re going to intervene with a US military force, you must know, as he called it, the nuances of the understanding of what the country is all about, its culture. It’s history, it’s internal politics, or you shouldn’t go in at all. And we did not know that in Iraq and Afghanistan. We really did not understand that country. For example, in deposing Saddam, he was a minority Sunni leader in a majority Shiite country.
But what was going to happen when nobody thought that through? Next, know that there were always barriers. and challenges and costs military action. However great our military is, and it is great. So, for example, in former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, using a lot of sports analogies, said, when you get into the ring, everyone has a great plan until the other guy hits you in the nose.
And that’s what happens on the battlefield. It never goes exactly as planned. So in Kosovo, As I mentioned, we were bombing for 77 straight days to get Milosevic, the head of the Soviet, to negotiate and pay them. One of those days, we mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. Certainly it was a mistake.
The Chinese to this day, no one there, I’m thinking we did it on purpose. So you have to build in the fact that there’s going to be those areas. Next, I’ve already mentioned decisive force. If you’re going to intervene, do it with decisive force. Don’t try to play games with a light footprint. And last, and equally important, is good intelligence.
So let me use some examples of bad intelligence and how important it is. You may remember, and your listeners and viewers may remember, that the ostensible reason for going into Iraq in the second Iraq war to oppose Saddam Hussein was that he had weapons of mass destruction. He got in and there were none.
Well, I found out that a CIA agent felt that they’re worthy and that it’s called impolite. He testified in Congress on that. I found out in my research and my interviews, there actually were weapons of mass destruction. Saddam did have them, but he had already destroyed them before we invaded in compliance with UN mandates.
Well, why didn’t he say so and save his own life and his regime and thousands of American and Iraqi soldiers? Because he was afraid if he did, it would embolden his domestic opponents and encourage Iran, this arch enemy, to invade. I was party to one of the worst intelligence failures in American history.
So let’s put ourselves back in 1978-79. The Shah of Iran There’s our guy in the middle. Six presidents. We had put him back on his throne at 53. Six presidents gave him an open shopping list of whatever arms he wanted. Eight weeks before he was forcibly deposed by the Iranian radical Islamic revolution.
Eight weeks, the CIA reported, I’ve got the document and declassified and used it in my book. They said that Iran was in neither a revolutionary nor pre revolutionary state. Now, a president can’t make sound decisions when that’s the intelligence of him. In addition, the CIA did not remarkably know that our principal ally had incurable cancer at a price when you don’t have the right intelligence.
And more recently, Gaza. So Ambassador Dennis Ross and I co chair a think tank in Jerusalem. And we were briefed by two Israeli generals. And they said that Gaza was one of our worst intelligence failures in Israeli history. We did not know, they said, that Hamas had transformed himself from being a terrorist group into what they called a terrorist army.
Fully trained, organized by battalions, fully armed, and yes, they said we knew there were some tunnels from Egypt into Gaza. We didn’t know there were up to 300 miles of tunnels, some as deep as a 25-story building, and you can’t build a tunnel that deep. For the pick and axe so Israel paid a horrible price for that intelligence player. So you must have good intelligence when you go into a war.
AD :
You know, Stu, so much of what you’ve discussed involves multi-party and multilateral negotiations in the last part of your book specifically talks about multilateral negotiations with regards to international trade and climate change.
What can you tell us about? You know, how these examples regarding the, just tell us about the challenges of negotiating abroad while having to simultaneously maintain that internal support at home.
The Intricacies Of Trade Negotiations & Climate Diplomacy [16:57]
SE :
Thank you. So I interviewed among the 130, all but one of the special trade representatives. Republican and Democrat. And trade is unique because it has so many domestic political implications. Closing plants, competition from China, cheap labor, all of those things have to be taken into account. And in the Constitution of the United States, the Congress is given the power to regulate trade, not the president. So the Congress delegates certain power to the president.
But they have and keep a very real rope tied to the executive branch. So if you’re going to start a negotiation on a multilateral agreement, like the European or the Doha Round, you first have to get authorization from Congress. And they set out certain parameters of what they expect. And then built into the negotiating posture are domestic constituencies.
There’s a labor advisory committee, there’s a business advisory committee, there’s an environmental advisory committee. So it’s highly political, and you simply have to negotiate internally, domestically, as much as you have to negotiate with your foreign partners. So it’s harder for us than it is for others who don’t have that complex situation.
With respect to climate change, when I did Kyoto, before I left for Kyoto, representing over a dozen agencies in the US and a hundred persons, delegation with 190 countries who were dealing with it. I had to get a consensus within the Clinton administration of what my mandate was. What could I accept? What was the bottom line? And there, there was a deep split between the economic side of the administration, the Treasury Department, the Council of Economic Advisers, who were concerned that if we took too great a commitment, to reduce our greenhouse gases, it would have a negative economic against the environmental people who had just the opposite view, including Vice President Gore, that technology will catch up with whatever we do. It won’t be that cost.
And then when I went to Kyoto, I got into the real negotiations because the mandate I had was only to keep our emissions by 1990 at 1979 levels, 78 and seven or more levels. But in the end, I had to go to 7% reduction over the whole negotiating group, but I never did that without, even though there was a 13-hour time difference, without calling the White House, Gene Sperling, who was the head of the National Economic Council, Deputy Secretary of State to Jim Steinberg also involved.
He was in the White House actually at that time. So I didn’t take any step without the political blessing at home and telling them what the realities were on the ground here. So there has to be that combination. It’s very difficult when you’re dealing with multilateral negotiations. I want to mention one other thing when I talk about a skill. And it’s one that I want to emphasize that it may surprise you. I talked at the very beginning about having a determination to succeed, but you can’t show that you have a greater urge to an agreement than your opponent, or the leverage shifts to him.
So I’ll give you an example like Kyoto, both of creativity and not seeming we wanted something more. I come into negotiations and the European Union had a completely unreasonable proposal, but 15% from emissions. And do it all by heavy regulation. And we had already had experience, and actually the, the George H.W. Bush administration, of using the market, so called credits, fishing credits, are much cheaper than regulation.
And the EU wouldn’t bend on their figures alone. So what I did, is we created something we called the Umbrella Group. I didn’t want to take the EU on alone. I needed allies. So the Umbrella Group included Japan, which was the host government. Russia, New Zealand, Australia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, countries like that.
So I had a coalition to go against the EU. I was not just laying bare alone. And that really helped turn the tide. But even there, we come now to the last day, we’re in the last plenary session, it’s already gone a half a day over the limit. The air conditioning was turned off, the translators had left. You can hear the banging of the hammer for the next exhibit in Kyoto Hall.
And they start to do the alphabet voting, starting with A and going to Z, Angola to Zambia. And they get to you, United States, and with 190 countries involved, sitting in this giant, I stand up and I say, United States votes no. Well, I’m sitting next to the British, because it was the United Kingdom, and he said, What the hell are you doing?
Well, I was under that we would not agree to the deeper cuts going to 7%. They’ve gotten the EU down to 15%. We were at 7%, they were at 8%. Unless we could do it by market mechanisms, not heavy regulation. And it sent a shockwave through the whole room. Chairman, Argentine diplomat, very good, got John Prescott, the deputy prime minister of the UK, who head the EU delegation, and myself into the so called Green Room, and there we find a solution by using ambiguous language, like Kissinger used in the Shanghai communique, only one China, well, Taiwan thought they were the one China, Beijing thought they were the one China.
What we did is we said, this goal should be achieved by regulatory measures. Supplemented by market mechanism, but we interpret supplemented meaning it could be fully supplemented. They interpret it to mean you started with regulatory measures and then you can add to it. So sometimes you need to have that kind of ambiguity to get over the hump, but you also have to show a determination not to be pushed around. If you don’t get what you want and be willing to take the heat of saying no.
NM :
Yeah, for sure. So the purpose, sir, of the NEGOTIATEx podcast is to elevate our listeners ability to influence through intentionality and discipline as we get ready to wrap up. I’m wondering if we might ask you to share a personal anecdote of a challenging situation. Don’t know if you just did that one that you successfully navigated and how someone listening today might apply the same approach to become more effective in their daily negotiations.
The Impact Of Domestic Strength & Personal Relationships in Diplomacy [23:06]
SE :
Well, first of all, I want to leave with this message and that is. Tony Blinken’s message to me in his interview, we can only be as effective diplomatically abroad as we are strong at home militarily, economically, and politically. And if we’re divided politically, not just on domestic issues, but in our negotiations, as we are, for example, over the future of Ukraine, the other side can take advantage.
Now, in terms of my personal situation, I want to talk about personal relationships and how important they are. And that is my negotiating partner, and I’m looking at him in a Picture right here in my den with Count Lambsdorff, Chancellor Schroeder, and myself in Berlin, signing an agreement, reaching an agreement for the slave labor of these Germans, to pay five billion dollars to Holocaust survivors and to non Jewish forced laborers, Poland, Czech Republic, and others. It was exceedingly difficult. It would not have happened had I not developed a genuine friendship with Count Mansfield. He was already, I was then in my 50s, he was in his 70s, he was an elder statesman.
I had known him from the Carter administration when he was economic minister. What I learned from doing a background check on him is that he had a deep feeling about Germany’s and Nazi Germany’s responsibility for the murder of six million Jews and millions of others during World War II and a deep commitment to, in effect, find ways to deal with the injustices by doing what I called in my book, imperfect justice.
It was something very deep in me. And so I was not just pushing against a stone wall. I had somebody who was working with me to convince the German companies and Chancellor Schroeder to put in extra money. Nobody thought we were going to get 5 billion. It was 10 billion Deutschmarks at the inaugural. And it was because of that relationship that I developed with Count Lanzroth and his courage and his strong feeling of Germany’s moral responsibility that we succeeded.
AD :
Well, I just want to say thank you. It has been a joy to discuss your book. I want to encourage folks to go get The Art of Diplomacy and just expand your understanding of the power of the negotiation skills that Ambassador Eisenstadt has shared with us today. Sir, thank you. Thanks for taking the time. Thanks for the incredible walk back through history and the application to where we find ourselves today. Really appreciate it, sir.
SE :
Thanks for your excellent questions and preparation. It’s an honor and thank you for your own service in Afghanistan and Iraq.
NM :
Well, that is it for us on today’s podcast. If you haven’t already, please rate, review and subscribe to the NEGOTIATEx podcast, and we’ll see you in the next episode.
