AMERICAN SHORTCOMINGS IN NEGOTIATING WITH

COMMUNIST POWERS

By

Fred Charles Iklé

The ability of the United States to negotiate with Communist governments is of great importance, even though new agreements are likely to be few and far between. Negotiations will shape the scope and content of strategic arms limitations (if any explicit agreements materialize), they will influence the implementation of existing arms control treaties (such as the nuclear test ban and the non-proliferation treaty), and they will determine our long-term relationships with China and the Soviet Union as well as the possibility of an agreed settlement to end the fighting in Indochina.

The opportunities for American diplomacy are circumscribed to a large extent by the depth of conflict and the restricted common interest between the United States and the principal Communist powers, as well as by the manner in which Communist governments tend to conduct their diplomacy. Yet, some leeway is left for American diplomacy to manage negotiations more or less skillfully, even though the objectives and tactics of our opponents create enormous difficulties. Or to put it differently, the external constraints-inhibiting as they are do not preclude that some changes in the American approach could bring better results.

The manner in which we negotiate with Communist powers is conditioned by many factors, such as the training and style of American officials, the way in which our government is organized (permitting many agencies to operate like independent fiefs), and the influence of our news media (with their narrow focus on today's events and high tolerance for inaccuracy). None of these internal factors can easily be changed at will, but some improvement might result from a better understanding of how they influence and constrain our conduct of negotiations.

EXCESSIVE ATTENTION TO EPHEMERAL RHETORIC

The resources of the United States Government are limited, in terms of intellectual energy and attention that senior officials can bring to bear on a subject, in terms of man-hours the bureaucracy can devote to an issue, and of course in terms of budget dollars. Hence, any suggestion that our government should do more of some particular activity ought to be coupled with the realization that another activity will have to be reduced. At least this is true at a time when there are strong pressures to curb the size of the federal budget and the number

NOTE. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author. They should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of the RAND Corporation.

of government employees. Accordingly, it may be more constructive first to suggest possible savings before recommending new efforts. Savings in this context mean primarily time and energy expended by government officials.

A type of activity that could stand trimming in our conduct of negotiations is the effort devoted to the interpretation or analysis of the opponent's spoken and written word. As a target of our attention, the opponent's verbal output should be contrasted with underlying forces that motivate his government (as well as the forces that do motivate, or ought to motivate our own government). These more basic forces include the domestic interaction and competition between officials and their agencies, military estimates and calculations that influence top decisionmakers, and economic pressures and incentives. By contrast, the written and spoken word in negotiations with Communist countries consists largely of repetitious rhetoric.

It is perhaps necessary that our delegations at diplomatic conferences cable all this verbiage back to the State Department, and that the State Department, in turn, send copies of it to other government agencies. It seems less necessary, however, for dozens of people within the United States Government to pore over these words and to exchange memoranda back and forth as to what this or that sentence might mean and whether or not some subtle change in the opponent's position might be read between the lines of hour-long speeches.

Two factors might explain why the State Department and other agencies bestow so much tender care and scrutiny on all the written and spoken words that Communist countries tend to inject into negotiations. First, there is a widespread notion that Communist governments announce important changes in their negotiating position through subtle modifications in rhetoric or through slight nuances in the wording of their proposals. It is not clear why this notion has gained such currency. A study would show that changes in Soviet negotiating positions, particularly important ones, were announced to us almost always loudly and clearly and usually in quite short statements, while the undulations in wording and daily rhetoric were misleading as often-or perhaps more often-than serving as harbingers of new Communist positions.

For instance, in the Korean war, when the Communists were ready to begin armistice negotiations, Soviet Ambassador Jacob Malik clearly and simply said so in the United Nations, and there were no precursors to his announcement to be discovered between the lines of Soviet or North Korean propaganda statements. Indeed, prior to the Communist proposal for armistice talks, all the rhetoric and verbiage from China and North Korea pointed in the opposite direction: the North Koreans and Chinese kept demanding the total withdrawal of U.N. forces from all of Korea and the ouster of the South Korean Government. Our officials could learn nothing relevant to the armistice talks by reading Kim Il Sung's demands for "the complete liberation of all territory of our motherland" and the "complete destruction of the American aggressors and the remainder of the Syngman Rhee puppet forces."

It is true that Malik's initial armistice proposal left unclear whether other Communist demands (such as on Formosa and China's seat in the United Nations) were still linked to it. But this ambiguity was not resolved through some subtle exegesis of Communist rhetoric, but

only through additional, rather clear-cut statements from the Communist side.

Again, after two years of these armistice talks at Panmunjom when the Communist side in the Korean war was finally ready to end the fighting, they said so unmistakably; whereas most of their prior rhetoric added little to our information about the Communist position. Similarly, when the Soviet Government was willing to finalize and sign the Austrian State Treaty, it communicated this change in its position to the Western powers and to the world, swiftly and clearly. A second reason why such disproportionate attention is being paid to words and rhetoric may be the specialization of the State Department the agency within our government that normally plays the key role in negotiations. What is the "commodity" that the State Department can dispose of? When this question was recently raised by a high ranking Albanian on a state visit in Washington, he was told: "Several government departments contribute to our foreign policy. Treasury and Commerce are concerned with the exchange of monies and goods with foreign countries, the Government Accounting Office sees to it that these monies and goods aren't pilfered (at least not by U.S. officials), Agriculture tries to dispose of surplus foods, and Defense is in charge of the deployment and operations of our military forces abroad." "And the State Department?" "State is in charge of the exchange of words with foreign governments."

It would, of course, be inaccurate to say all that is left for the State Department is the government-to-government traffic in words. The planning of foreign policy is predominantly (though not exclusively) the concern of the State Department. It is a fact, however, that the enormous volume of cables to and from the State Department deals largely with the verbal output of other governments, on-the-record and off-the-record remarks in conferences, and reports on foreign news media. Moreover, a large fraction of internal State Department memoranda are likewise devoted to the verbal output, particularly in negotiations with Communist countries.

One would like to see the results of a time-study as to how the State Department's staff allocates its working hours. What percentage is focussed on words as such? (E.g., on such questions as: Does the recent Soviet proposal show some flexibility? Did the Polish Foreign Minister by saying "cannot" instead of "will not", indicate that our proposal was unacceptable? Is last week's editorial in People's Daily milder in tone?) By contrast, what percentage of working time is devoted to incentives and more basic forces (which may or may not be reflected in these words)? For instance: military pressures (have the troops on the Sino-Soviet border increased?); internal motivations and conflicts within the opponent's bureaucracy (is the Polish Army facing a budget cut and putting pressure on the Foreign Ministry?); and economic incentives (is China stepping up its purchases from Western Europe?). An important qualification must be added here. The point about exaggerated attention to rhetoric does not apply to negotiations. between Communist governments nor to discussions within Communist governments. For these domains it does pay to look for slight changes in language and to search out the hidden meaning of Aesopian expressions. Furthermore, the fact that paying attention to words shows rapidly diminishing returns does not mean that one can afford en

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tirely to ignore what Soviet or other Communist diplomats have to say. It goes without saying that our diplomats must listen carefully to their interlocutors and report the essence back to the State Department. Also, a few specialists within the United States Government might usefully search for signals and clues in all the many words that keep pouring in during prolonged negotiations. But these tasks should not become the preoccupation of many people, and above all, they should not be mistaken as the essence in the management of negotiations.

PETTIFOGGERY

Related to the excessive attention to ephemeral rhetoric is the tendency to get lost in tactical detail. The way in which negotiations with Communist powers are managed within the American Government permits small tactical moves to develop a life of their own. If this drift goes on unchecked, small tactics will displace the very objective of the agreement that is under negotiation. A great many capable officials are then forced-or will force themselves-to labor intensively on these details like pettifogging lawyers.

An episode in the test ban conference illustrates how the concentration on tactical detail can divert the United States Government from the main purpose of negotiations. The test ban talks lasted about five years, over four of which were taken up by the question of an international inspection system for detecting underground tests (the Soviets wanted underground tests to be prohibited along with atmospheric ones). The characteristics and organization of this inspection system remained the stumbling block to agreement. While the Soviets had initially consented to accept a verification system based on scientific requirements, they objected to almost any form of neutral or United States inspection within their borders. In face of this resistance, the American negotiating tactics became more and more involved, with one tactical scheme chasing another until the American negotiators kept meeting each other at the back door, instead of confronting the Soviet opponent.

The story is an intricate one with many steps: (1) The United States took the position that an inspection system based on "scientific" requirements ought to be agreed on, in the hope that the Soviet Government would somehow be forced to accept what our scientists could prove to be scientifically correct. (How could Moscow be so uncouth as to disagree with scientific truth?) (2) Hence, the test ban negotiations were started with the Experts Talks, a conference that was to settle, in the spirit of an academic seminar between Eastern and Western scientists, what sort of an inspection system was "needed". (3) After these Experts Talks had produced an agreement on an inspection system, if only in sketchy outline, the U.S. Government discovered to its dismay that more recent technical data necessitated a revision of this system. (4) The Soviets, trying to minimize any inspection, refused to go along with this revision. (5) In the hope of convincing the Soviets, the American negotiators proposed a joint Russian-American research program to get at the bottom of this alleged dispute. (Did the American negotiators really expect to change. the Soviet position through research findings, or were they trying to gain a better rhetorical argument?) (6) At last, after prolonged haggling, the Soviets agreed to some undefined "joint" research program.

(7) But now, in the American opinion, this research program necessitated tests with actual nuclear weapons, to discover what kind of seismic signals they would generate. (8) At the same time, however, the United States still felt committed to continue the voluntary moratorium on nuclear weapons tests which had been in effect almost since the negotiations began. (9) Given its adherence to this moratorium, the U.S. Government therefore decided that it should obtain Soviet consent to the use of nuclear devices in the seismic research program, lest it be accused of breaking the moratorium. (It may be recalled that Khrushchev defiantly broke this moratorium a year later anyhow.) (10) At this juncture, the U.S. negotiators thought they might obtain such Soviet consent if they could only demonstrate to Soviet technicians that the weapons to be used were actually old ones. (11) Yet, showing to Soviet officials the weapons to be used for seismic tests would have violated the Atomic Energy Act, as long as the design of these weapons constituted classified information. (12) The solution to all this? The design of these nuclear devices was to be declassified.

In July 1960, the Committee of Principals, the high ranking American group in charge of the test ban negotiations, actually labored on the twelfth link of this chain.1 Soon thereafter the Soviet Government lost all interest in this "joint" seismic research program and hence, the elaborate American scheme never came to fruition. This was probably fortunate, for the declassification of nuclear weaponseven if only long enough to be shown to Soviet representativesmight have reduced inhibitions against nuclear proliferation to other countries (while the results of the research program would scarcely have changed the Soviet position on inspection). Yet, to strengthen these inhibitions was precisely one of the principal purposes of the test ban treaty. Having established the principle of declassifying primitive weapons designs, other countries in other situations or international bodies might have exerted pressures to turn this principle into a more general practice. The power of such pressures is amply shown by the efforts to broaden the so-called peaceful uses of atomic energy and to promote the Plowshare program (the use of nuclear explosives for excavations).

In an earlier episode in the test ban negotiations, the United States Government likewise pursued subsidiary tactical aspects, at the expense of the more fundamental objective of curbing nuclear proliferation. And in this instance the consequences were far more serious. In 1958, when the test ban negotiations started, the United Kingdom was the only country, apart from the Soviet Union and the United States, that had tested nuclear weapons. At that time, the U.S. Government felt it was important that the United Kingdom participate in the test ban talks. Perhaps this conclusion was reached as if it was a matter of course, without scrutinizing the underlying assumptions. At any rate, the British Government took full advantage of this American desire to have them included by arguing they could not agree to stop testing unless they received American assistance for their weapons development so that they would not be left behind in nuclear technology. Secretary Dulles seemed to accept this argument and urged Congress, for this reason, to revise the Atomic

1 Harold K. Jacobson and Eric Stein, Diplomats, Scientists and Politicians (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966) p. 265.