EVEN A BLIND PIG:

REVIEW: of Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World's Toughest Post-Cold War Conflicts by Michael Watkins and Susan Rosegrant (Brothers Judd, 12/12/01)

The biggest problem...is that if you apply the first of the authors' own core concepts (diagnosing structure) to their chosen four examples you see that the breakthrough generally occurred prior to, or at, the moment negotiations started.  Thus, the actual content of the Oslo Accords was pretty much insignificant; what really mattered was the implicit admission by the parties that Israel and a Palestinian state were each realities that the other side needed to cope with.  Even today, with the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians at its all time nadir, they are relatively close to a final accord.  Israel will eventually declare a Palestinian state unilaterally and the Palestinians will be forced to accept the boundaries that Israel imposes.  The breakthrough occurred with Oslo when the two sides, just by entering negotiations, acknowledged each others existence as a political fact.

Similarly, when the United States sat down to discuss nuclear proliferation with the North Koreans, the real drama was over and North Korea had won.  That this was true is revealed in a chart that the authors include which analyzes the interests of the two parties :

United States

*Preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons
*Preventing an arms race in Asia
*Undermining the DPRK (Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea)

North Korea

*Ensuring security by acquiring nuclear weapons
*Bolstering a failing economy
*Winning international recognition

It is obvious that North Korea could effectively achieve its aims regardless of what the final agreement actually required.  They were bargaining with the U.S. as an equal, would certainly get some aid and would save money by not having to build nuclear weapons, and they would essentially make the U.S. the guarantor of their security, however unwitting or unwilling, because, having negotiated the agreement, there was no way the U.S. was going to turn around and topple the DPRK.  And so, what did the U.S. stand to get out of the negotiation?  Well, even if we realized all our goals, we'd still have strengthened one of the most loathsome regimes on the planet, left them free to pursue an unlimited conventional arms buildup, and, just as in Iraq, could have little way of knowing whether they'd truly given up their nuclear arms program.  Here again, we see that the details of the negotiation didn't much matter; the structure had already determined the results.

Well, that holds up pretty well, if we say so ourselves.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 17, 2002 2:49 PM