Great Negotiations
Agreements that Changed the Modern World
Fredrik Stanton
WESTHOLME
Yardley
Frontispiece: Ralph Bunche at the United Nations Security Council session in Paris, October 19, 1948. (United Nations)
Copyright © 2010 Fredrik Stanton
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Contents
Introduction
1 Franklin at the French Court, 1778
2 The Louisiana Purchase, 1803
3 The Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815
4 The Portsmouth Treaty, 1905
5 The Paris Peace Conference, 1919
6 The Egyptian-Israeli Armistice Agreement, 1949
7 The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962
8 The Reykjavik Summit, 1986
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
Words, as much as weapons, shape history. Whether to avert, assist, or secure the resolution of a conflict, in the modern age diplomacy has had great triumphs and bitter failures, from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which narrowly spared humanity from nuclear Armageddon, to the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, which created problems that still confront us today.
In negotiations, great opportunity lies alongside the potential for disaster, and the rules are often written as the action takes place. Every successful negotiation is a triumph of reason over force, and a confirmation that conflict is not an inevitable outcome of a clash of interests. These unique moments provide individuals, armed only with cunning, determination, and personal charisma, an opportunity to leave an immediate and lasting mark on the fates of nations. German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz described warfare as “politics by other means,” and in the same vein negotiations can be perceived as war by other means. Looking at the powerful role great negotiations have played in the course of history and how they still affect our lives helps us understand policy alternatives available today and informs our choices for the future.
When it works, it seems like magic—the ability to reconcile opposing elements, or to create a situation that leaves both sides better off than before. Major negotiations, which Winston Churchill called “conversations of silk and steel,” are made of contradictions: confrontation and collaboration, conflict and seduction. The stakes are high, the margin for error is small, and the clock is ticking. With lives and nations’ fates in the balance, participants must use perseverance, creativity, bluff, and the ability to capitalize on the unexpected to overcome obstacles to agreement, which may include their adversary, the strategic environment, and even the demands of their own side.
Not surprisingly, in addition to inspiring stories of nobility and sacrifice, one finds colorful figures and a full array of treachery, blackmail, betrayal, and assassination. The characters’ weaknesses, as well as their strengths, make each negotiation a fascinating insight into cardinal moments in history.
Despite their challenges, the negotiators accomplished amazing victories. The Louisiana Purchase turned a potential war into an opportunity for one of history’s greatest acquisitions. In securing the Treaty of Portsmouth, Theodore Roosevelt helped save a quarter-million lives and prevented a world war. Kennedy and Khrushchev successfully navigated a crisis that insiders had given a 50 percent chance of leading to nuclear holocaust.
Europe, Asia, and the Middle East have been fundamentally changed by decisions made at the negotiating table. America has as well. Its birth, growth, and emergence as a world power were driven to a large extent by negotiating successes, and for all its military might, the United States has gained more from negotiations than from all of its wars combined.
Essential to the colonies’ success in the American Revolution was the support they received from France as a direct result of Benjamin Franklin’s negotiations in Paris. France’s coming to America’s aid turned the tide against the British and paved the way for the colonists’ victory over what was then the greatest empire on earth.
Twenty-five years later, the young American republic pulled off what has been described as the best real estate deal in history. By manipulating the strategic tension between France and England, American envoys James Monroe and Robert Livingston were able to convince Napoleon to sell all eight hundred thousand square miles of the Louisiana Territory to the United States for fifteen million dollars. The Louisiana Purchase sent the nation down a new, entirely unexpected path, and turned the collection of former colonies into a continental power. The transaction nearly doubled the size of the United States, making it one of the largest nations in the world.
In 1814, Napoleon’s adventures (partly financed by his sale of the Louisiana Territory to the United States) led to France’s defeat by the great powers and his exile to Elba. The Congress of Vienna was intended to be a dictation of terms, but by driving a wedge between the victorious powers and exploiting their differences, Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, was able to gain a seat at the table and ensure that despite its military defeat France’s interests were protected as Europe was redrawn. The resulting agreement restructured Europe, restored the power of monarchy, and established a framework that provided a durable peace in Europe for almost a century.
In the summer of 1905, Theodore Roosevelt invited Japanese and Russian representatives to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in an attempt to broker a peace between them and end the Russo-Japanese War. Although Russia had suffered serious setbacks and the war was costing both parties dearly, neither side was exhausted, and influential elements in each country pressed to continue fighting. After tortuous negotiations, an agreement was reached only after the Russian negotiator disobeyed direct instructions to break off the talks and presented terms he was not authorized to give. The resulting peace irretrievably altered the balance of power in the Far East and raised America’s status as an emerging great power on the world diplomatic stage.
In January 1919, diplomats met at Versailles to negotiate an end to World War I, which had bled Europe dry with over forty million casualties. The war’s cost in life and treasure had raised the stakes for all sides, and the results were both sweeping and tragically flawed. The outcome reordered Europe and the Middle East, eliminated the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires, and planted the seeds of conflict on two continents.
Sometimes a first, tentative step toward peace becomes a lasting accomplishment in its own right, as in the Egyptian-Israeli armistice accords. In late 1948, Ralph Bunche took over as United Nations mediator in Palestine. The previous mediator, Bunche’s colleague and friend, had just been assassinated. The parties were at war, and none of their representatives would look at, speak to, or shake hands with each other. Through meticulous diplomacy over a period of several months, Bunche was able to bring all sides to agreement, securing an armistice that ended the crisis. For his efforts, Bunche became the first black American and the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Sometimes it is enough to avoid catastrophe, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kennedy
and Khrushchev navigated a way through the crisis and averted a nuclear war that could have destroyed mankind. In the depths of the Cold War, with the balance of power teetering between the two superpowers, American intelligence discovered a clandestine attempt by the Soviet Union to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. If successful, the United States would have been placed in immediate jeopardy, and it was prepared to go to war to prevent it. Over the course of thirteen days, President Kennedy and his advisers found an accommodation with Premier Khrushchev that averted the threat and avoided a global nuclear war.
In 1986, at the high-water mark of the Cold War, President Reagan met with Soviet leader Gorbachev in a summit in Iceland. That two-day meeting led to the first arms-control agreement to reduce nuclear weapons and marked the turning point in the conflict between the superpowers.
By averting wars or restructuring continents, each of these negotiations has had a profound and enduring impact on history. While they addressed different situations and problems, all of the figures faced the common challenge of bringing home a deal on the best terms against competing forces. As a result, one finds strategic patterns, as well as the recurring elements of persistence and the ability to capitalize on the unexpected. These examples provide timely evidence of how people have used reason and persuasion to avoid violence and prevail over adversity and can do so again. Negotiating, always at the heart of diplomacy, remains one of the indispensable tools of statecraft. The better we understand what has worked in the past and which mistakes to avoid, the less often states may find the need to resort to violence to settle differences.
Chapter 1
Franklin at the French Court
1778
When the United States declared independence in July 1776, the Continental Army suffered from a shortage of weapons and gunpowder, and the Continental Congress struggled to feed, clothe, and supply thousands of troops in the face of a British trade ban and naval blockade. General George Washington’s forces had less than five rounds of ammunition per soldier. “This was kept secret even from our people,” Benjamin Franklin confided in a letter to a friend. “The world wondered that we so seldom fired a cannon. We could not afford it.”1
Congress naturally turned to France, England’s traditional adversary for hundreds of years, which had already covertly provided money and supplies, as a possible ally against Britain. Supporting the American Revolution offered France an opportunity to settle old scores, punish its historic enemy, and, by depriving England of a principal source of its wealth and power, restore the balance of power in Europe in France’s favor. America’s vast reserves of timber, furs, and raw materials fueled the British economy, and former British prime minister Lord wealth, the nerve of our strength, the nursery and basis of our naval power.”2
In late September 1776, Congress appointed a commission of three prominent Americans, Arthur Lee, Silas Deane, and Franklin, to travel to Paris to persuade the French monarchy to join America in the conflict against Britain. Franklin, a former member of the Continental Congress and one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, already enjoyed fame as a printer, author, inventor, and scientist, and his successful experiments on the nature of lightning had made him an international celebrity. French philosopher Voltaire called him “a man of genius, a first name in science, a successor to Newton and Galileo.”3 Deane, a Connecticut merchant who had also served in the Continental Congress, and Lee, a doctor and lawyer from a prominent Virginia family, were already in Europe. Franklin left Philadelphia on October 27, 1776, with his two grandsons, six-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache and seventeen-year-old Temple Franklin, who would be his personal secretary. They traveled aboard the Reprisal, a sixteen-gun sloop carrying a cargo of thirty-five barrels of indigo. Despite several close calls with British cruisers during the passage, the Reprisal slipped through the British fleet and captured two British merchant ships off the French coast. Franklin’s rough, thirty-day trip across the frigid North Atlantic “almost demolished me,”4 he wrote. Franklin called the Reprisal “a miserable vessel, improper for those northern seas,”5 and the poor food aboard left him too feeble on his arrival to stand. “Our voyage,” Franklin wrote John Hancock, president of the Congress, “though not long was rough, and I feel myself weakened by it, but I now recover strength daily, and in a few days shall be able to undertake the journey to Paris.”6
Franklin reached the French capital on December 21 where he joined Deane, and Lee arrived the following day. After a rest in Paris he settled into a villa on an eighteen-acre estate in the village of Passy, half a mile outside of Paris. Franklin and the Americans held a weak hand. General Washington’s force of five thousand men was outnumbered six to one, and Franklin reached Paris the same day as news of Washington’s defeats in New York and New Jersey. On the continent, few expected the rebellion would be able to last the year. While supportive of the colonists, France was deeply in debt, and King Louis XVI and his ministers had no interest in provoking a war with England. Furthermore, as a monarchy, France was reluctant to openly support colonists in rebellion against their king. “The spirit of revolt, wherever it appears, is always a dangerous example,” French Foreign Minister Charles Gravier, the Comte de Vergennes, wrote. “Moral maladies, just as physical maladies, can prove contagious. Because of this consideration, we should prevent the spirit of independence . . . from spreading over that hemisphere.”7
The American commissioners requested a meeting with Vergennes two weeks after their arrival. Although he refused them an official audience, he received them as private citizens, while assuring the British ambassador to France, Viscount Stormont, that there was no cause for alarm. “A minister’s residence,” Vergennes told Stormont, “is like a church. Anyone can enter, although there is no guarantee he will be absolved.”8 Americans presented a proposal for a commercial treaty offering preferential trade with North America. Vergennes received them respectfully but told them that as things stood, France would remain neutral, although he sympathized with the rebels and would support them unofficially so far as he could, including greater help with covert supplies.
The modesty of their request puzzled Vergennes, and he wondered whether the American commissioners “might be hiding something in their pockets.”9 “I don’t know whether Mr. Franklin told me everything,” Vergennes confided to France’s ambassador in Madrid, the Comte de Montmorin, “but what he told me is not very interesting with regard to the situation of his country. The ostensible object of his mission, the only one which he has revealed to me, is a treaty of commerce which he desires to conclude with us; he even left me an outline. . . . Its modesty causes surprise, because they do not demand anything which they do not already enjoy, at least from our side. If it is modesty or fear to be a burden to those powers on whose interest they hope to be able to rely, then these sentiments are very laudable; but could it not be possible that this reserve is the result of a more political consideration?”10 He suspected that Franklin intended to create an open rupture between Spain and France on the one hand and England on the other, over the profitable trade with the American colonies that England had jealously guarded as its own monopoly. Vergennes wrote that he had no interest in war with England, and Franklin reported to Congress, “The cry of this nation is for us, but the court, it is thought, views an approaching war with reluctance.”11
The American commissioners followed up with a second memorandum a week later that took a more direct approach, asking for eight fully manned ships of the line, thirty thousand muskets and bayonets, a large quantity of gunpowder and brass artillery pieces, and a formal alliance against England. In exchange they offered protection for French and Spanish colonies in the West Indies and access to America’s large and growing commerce. The Americans warned that “if the Commerce of America is much longer obstructed, the Party who dislikes the War will be so strengthened as to compel the rest to an accommodation with Britain.” The commissioners concluded: “North America now offers to France and Spain her a
mity and commerce. She is also ready to guarantee in the firmest manner to those nations all their present possessions in the West Indies, as well as those they shall acquire from the enemy in a war that may be consequential of such assistance as she requests. The interest of the three nations is the same. The opportunity of cementing them, and of securing all the advantages of that commerce, which in time will be immense, now presents itself. If neglected, it may never again return. We cannot help suggesting that a considerable delay may be attended with fatal consequences.”12
Vergennes replied that if France granted their request it would “compromise her openly” and serve as a “legitimate motive of war.”13 France would provide covert aid, but nothing that could provoke Britain or jeopardize France’s neutrality. He would not rule out the possibility of another war between France and England, but France, he maintained, “must await, not force, events.”14 Vergennes wrote Montmorin that he had no interest in an American alliance, but the Americans could prove useful should war erupt between Britain and France, so he would leave the door open for future negotiation. Vergennes softened his rejection with two million livres in covert support, although the gift was so secret that not even Congress could know that the aid came from the French treasury.
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