In my recent terse post at Outside the Beltway on the North Korean plan to restart their nuclear reactor in response to a perceived lack of good faith on the part of the United States in the negotiations about the North Korean nuclear development program an implied question on the value of negotiations came out in the comments that I thought I might respond to here in longer format than is really appropriate for a comments section.
I suspect that my views on negotiating differ from nearly everybody’s. I think that negotiating is nearly always valuable even when the positions of the interlocutors are, in fact, at odds. In such circumstances negotiating can establish relationships, identify common interests, establish what the parties’ objectives are, and, possibly, point the way to a process by which both sides can arrive at positions that are mutually more tolerable than the starting position.
Negotiating doesn’t have magical power, however. It is neither an end in itself nor should negotiating be mistaken for progress. It’s important to recognize when one side or the other is just temporizing or trying to strengthen its hand in some way, i.e. when simply by negotiating one side achieves its objectives while the other side doesn’t. The alternatives then are to walk away from the negotations or, better, to change the terms or context of the negotiations.
Consequently, I think that we should negotiate with the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans, and the Cubans. Even if the ideal outcome for any of those parties is a zero-sum one, i.e. if they win, we lose, that doesn’t need to be the result of our negotiations.
However, negotiating takes patience, wit, savvy, and both the willingness and ability to risk and trade. Sometimes I think it’s in those last that we fall short.
