The Foreign Service Journal, June 2010

60 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 1 0 The Value of Jaw-Jaw Great Negotiations: Agreements that Changed the Modern World Fredrik Stanton, Westholme Publish- ing, 2010, $26, hardback, 297 pages. R EVIEWED BY P ATRICIA H. K USHLIS To state the theme of Great Negoti- ations in one sentence, one can do no better than Winston Churchill’s 1954 pronouncement: “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” Bearing this wisdom in mind, Fredrik Stanton doc- uments the critical role negotiations have played in shaping America’s fu- ture, as well as the world’s destiny, over the past two centuries. He does this through eight elegant, chronologically arranged chapters, be- ginning with Benjamin Franklin’s diplo- macy in Paris during the American Revolution and ending with the 1987 Reykjavik Summit. Other topics in- clude the Louisiana Purchase and the Portsmouth Treaty, through which Theodore Roosevelt engineered an end to the 1905 Japanese Russian War as a long-distance mediator. Each case study focuses on the con- text and dynamics of a negotiation and the importance of the individual par- ticipants, their connections and roles. As the book’s title suggests, all but one of these episodes represents a success. The exception is the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, amultilateral extravaganza, which the United States entered totally unprepared and at far too high a level. Stanton’s chapter delineates multiple reasons for this colossal failure, which helped set the stage for Hitler’s rise and World War II. Throughout Great Negotiations , Stanton reminds us that diplomacy and warfare represent different tracks of dis- pute settlement, and they often occur simultaneously on the world’s chess board. He also emphasizes the need for victors and vanquished to save face. To defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance,Washington secretly agreed to withdraw its aging arsenal of missiles based in northern Turkey and to stop threatening to invade Cuba. In return, Moscow agreed not to publicize that withdrawal, and brought its own mis- siles and bombers back home fromHa- vana. This diplomacy variety pack exam- ines many facets of the subject that lay people may not know about or appre- ciate: the importance of rhythm; the use of onsite and offsite mediators; leaks to the media; the role of unoffi- cial go-betweens (such as American journalist Charles Bartlett for President John F. Kennedy and ABC correspon- dent John Scali for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis); domestic constraints; the complexities and risks of multilat- eral versus bilateral negotiations; the need to explore options away from the cameras; real and self-imposed time constraints; and high-level involvement to break stalemates. Admittedly, America’s negotiating approach is usually far more pedestrian than the high-wire stories in this book, based as it is on a time-consuming com- mittee system that involves various gov- ernment agencies and, sometimes, nongovernmental organizations. Far more hours are spent negotiating across agency lines than across the negotiating table. Still, the process usually builds a stronger foundation for winning con- gressional approval of the treaty or agreement. If I still taught international politics, I would assign Stanton’s book to my students because it reads well and the negotiations are familiar to students of American history. And if I taught ne- gotiating strategy, I would use it be- Stanton reminds us that diplomacy and warfare represent different tracks of dispute settlement, and often occur simultaneously. B OOKS