In the wake of that recent Ten Commandments-in-classrooms ruling in Louisiana, here’s a quick story about why the separation of church and state is so fundamental to our nation.

Back in October of 1951, President Truman nominated General Mark W. Clark to be the first United States ambassador to Vatican City, thereby recognizing the Papal States as a government deserving diplomatic relations with the US. Truman knew the decision would cause an uproar among American Protestants, so he made the announcement in the waning hours of the Eighty-second Congress—thereby keeping the Senate from voting to confirm the nomination until the following year. In the meantime, he planned to give General Clark a recess appointment.

Indeed, the blowback from the great majority of non-Catholic Americans was instantaneous and overwhelming. In a mocking column for The Atlantic, Paul Blanshard called it gross religious discrimination: “Why send an ambassador to the international headquarters of one religion and not to the headquarters of others? If this is not favoritism, why not send an ambassador at the same time to Mecca, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, to the primarily Protestant World Council of Churches? Why single out the Vatican for specie I prestige?”

Truman withdrew the nomination three days later.

Today’s interview celebrates Stuart Eizenstat’s brilliant career as one of America’s top negotiators. Stuart’s The Art of Diplomacy was reviewed by Willem Marx in Foreword’s May/June issue leading to the following conversation.

As an experienced negotiator and master of American foreign policy, I really wonder how you conducted your research for this book and how much of the information you already had in mind. Were there any negotiations you had to leave out? Any that you were surprised to ultimately include?

For the negotiations in which I directly participated, such as the Kyoto Climate Change negotiations, the Holocaust negotiations, and parts of the Middle East and trade negotiations, I had my own notes and recollections. However, even for those, this was only a fraction of the information I needed. With the exception of the Holocaust negotiations, I wanted to give a history of all the key climate change negotiations, all of the important Middle East negotiations up to the current Gaza war, and the historical scope of American trade agreements and the political currents that have led to a more protectionist trade policy.

But for all of the other chapters in the book—from German reunification to Iran, from the Good Friday Agreement to the wars in southwest Africa and the resolution of the Colombia civil war, from the two Balkan wars, Afghanistan, the two Iraq wars, and Libya—I needed to conduct original research.

In addition to reading books and articles, I decided that I wanted to write a more personal accounting of the negotiations and wars which supplemented them, by conducting over 130 interviews of the key figures in the United States and abroad, including the diplomats, generals, and political leaders who made these agreements possible. I wanted to put readers in the room with the key figures to feel they were part of the history, to observe the pressures on the negotiators. I included numerous anecdotes to enliven the book.

I included all the historic agreements I thought were worthy of discussion. The Gaza War came very late in the book, and I included it, but not in the detail it deserves. But the biggest surprises were the following:

• Realizing as I conducted the extensive interviews, several more than once (eg, Kissinger and Tony Blair), that there were common skills that the leading negotiators brought to their task, which I include in the chapters, but summarize in the conclusion.

• Perhaps the biggest surprises were the lessons that came from my interviews of leading military figures, from Generals General Petraeus, Douglas Lute, Wesley Clark, George Joulwan, and Admiral James Stavridis, and the national security officials and secretaries of state (almost everyone from Kissinger up to Pompeo) and defense who were leaders in the major wars of our lifetime. For example, these included the lessons from President George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser Steve Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reflecting on mistakes made in the Iraq War. For example, the need to have a political plan for an achievable political goal in place before the first bullet is shot and to build the military strategy around that, rather than the other way around, as the US frequently does. From General Petraeus, the key lessons were to understand the history, culture, and internal politics of the countries we invade to further our foreign policy goals, which we did not have in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• I also believe my book sheds new light on the controversy over Saddam Hussein’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The key finding from my interviews was that Saddam had actually destroyed his WMD in accordance with UN Resolutions, but was unwilling to admit it, for fear it would weaken him with his domestic opponents and army and with his archenemy Iran. As a result, he lost his own life, and thousands of American and Iraqis were killed or injured.

I’m fascinated by the crucial role personalities and personal relationships play in so many of the deals described in The Art of Diplomacy. Do you see the exponential rise of digital technology and AI encroaching on this interpersonal aspect of diplomacy?

In all of the successful negotiations I describe in my book, establishing trust with your negotiating partners through personal relationships were critical. This is exemplified by George Mitchell in the Good Friday Agreement by his patience and evenhandedness in dealing with the Unionist and Nationalist leaders and in meeting with them personally outside the negotiating room; in James Baker flying Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze to his second home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and spending several days together establishing a special bond; in the relationship of trust Jimmy Carter built-up with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat before and during the Camp David negotiations; in the Kissinger-Chou Enlai relationship of trust which permitted the breakthrough in the opening to China; in Bernie Aronson breaking down the distrust of the FARC guerilla group toward the US, in part by his personal gesture in visiting an ailing FARC leader in the hospital; in the relationship I built with Count Otto Lambsdorff in the German slave labor negotiations and with Deputy Prime Minister [of the UK] John Prescott with offline meetings during the Kyoto Protocol climate change negotiations.

While digital technology and Artificial Intelligence will have profound impacts, I do not believe they will replace the need for personal, human contacts to establish relations of trust. However, in the wrong hands, AI could be used by parties who do not want a successful negotiated outcome to a dispute, by planted false stories and images. This must be avoided as much as possible.

Your experience helming US negotiations at the Kyoto Protocol reveals how many prongs and unexpected variables arise within international diplomacy. In reading it, I was surprised to see consensus finally achieved through the inclusion of malleable language in the treaty that allowed each delegation to claim their desired outcome without extracting the binding concessions they wanted from others. Are there downsides to such an ambiguous compromise? Where is the line between diplomatic deferral and success?

Ambiguous language is often necessary to allow all parties to a dispute to declare victory. At the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming, the use of the term “supplement” regulations to achieve emissions reductions allowed the European Union and the United States to declare victory. In UN Resolution 242 helping to end the 1967 Six Day War, land for peace, the use of the term “territories” was also important for both the Israeli and Arab nations to be satisfied. Closely related is the need in many agreements to defer the most contentious issues, such as the final status of Northern Ireland and the deaccession of arms by the militias. In all of these cases and others like them, the hope is that over time, the mutual confidence created will allow the ambiguities to be worked out and the issues which are to be deferred to be addressed at a later time.

But there are downsides. By using ambiguous language to paper over differences, it can indefinitely postpone the resolution of fundamental issues if the malleable language is not clarified. Examples are the use of the term “full autonomy” for the Palestinians in the Camp David Accords and Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. Because the political will has not existed to better define this and to take it to its next logical step, which is a Palestinian State alongside the Jewish State of Israel, the controversy continues to rage.

However, this is more because of fundamental differences between the Palestinians and Israelis over mutual claims to the same land as it is to ambiguous language. The longer key issues are deferred, the more likely it will be that the initial success will not be consummated. I believe to this day that if Jimmy Carter had been reelected in 1980, he was so committed to a successful outcome in the next phase involving the Palestinians, that we would have a much greater likelihood of resolving the Palestinian dispute.

As in the miscommunication and near conflagration following the Serbian ceasefire, when Russian troops violated their agreements by preempting NATO and sweeping into Kosovo, it seems that many crucial foreign policy decisions are made by nonprofessional negotiators. Although the outcome was good in that particular instance, are there ways to hedge against potentially devastating blunders by inexperienced operators?

The Kosovo agreement was at risk because of Russian troops led by officers who were not party to the negotiated agreement. In the heat of battle, this is a risk. The most important lesson is that the experienced, professional negotiators who reach an agreement must be called upon for their implementation. The lack of implementation of agreements can be fatal.

At the end of the book, you lay out a few avenues for resolving the war in Gaza that erupted on October 7, 2023. Do you see the fact of ongoing conflict today, so many months later, as, at least partially, a failure of negotiation? At a diplomatic level, what, if anything, might have been done differently since October to end the fighting?

Gaza presents a situation in which military force must be combined with political negotiations from the outset of the war. Hamas must be disabled as a fighting and governing force, although it will be difficult to totally eliminate them. It is impossible to negotiate with a governing force deeply committed to a country’s total eradication, as Hamas is to Israel’s extinction. However, there were failures of intelligence and negotiation:

• The Israeli government systemically weakened the already weak and corrupt, but more moderate Palestinian Authority, while allowing Qatar to finance them and Iran to arm them. They tried to “domesticate” Hamas by allowing 18,000 Gazans to work in Israel daily.

• The Israeli government failed to learn from the mistakes we the United States made in Iraq and Afghanistan, by not having a postwar political plan and wartime humanitarian plan in place before they commenced negotiations. General Petraeus turned around the Iraq war by a policy of clear, hold, and build. The last component was to show the Iraqi civilians that the US was committed to defeat the radicals but to [also] build a better life for the non-combatants.

• Their failure of intelligence was profound, not simply on the day of the attack, October 7, but by failing to understand that Hamas in a few years had morphed from a terrorist group to a full-blown terrorist army with over 30,000 well-trained, well-armed, and disciplined soldiers buried in over 300 miles of tunnels, some up to 80 meters deep.

• The war in Gaza cannot be resolved by military means alone. It will require a diplomatic solution, as well. This must be done by Israel becoming a part of a coalition of moderate Sunni Arab countries—with most of whom Israel already has peace agreements—along with the US and European Union, to combat the Iranian-led radical Axis of Evil. For this positive coalition to be created, there will have to be difficult negotiations to have some timetable for a demilitarized, non-violent Palestinian state. The Biden administrations’ three phase program, which the Israeli war cabinet seems to have adopted, would be the beginning of the negotiated process.

In writing The Art of Diplomacy, how much of your intention was to educate future negotiators and how much was to inform the ordinary citizens for whom the inner workings of diplomacy are normally hidden? Does an informed public have a meaningful role in international diplomacy?

I wrote this book both to inform citizens of the inner workings of normally hidden international negotiations, and to educate future negotiators. I believe it is very important for an informed public, which must be the backbone of a democracy, to understand international diplomacy so they can be part of the necessary support to diplomatic agreements, without which they cannot be sustainable. That is why I have written the book, as former Secretary of State James Baker put it, to put the readers in the room with the negotiators, to de-mystify international negotiations, along with interesting stories and anecdotes.

Willem Marx
June 28, 2024

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