33strats-ch21-negotiate-while-advancing

NEGOTIATE WHILE ADVANCING THE DIPLOMATIC-WAR STRATEGY People will always try to take from you in negotiation what they could not get from you in battle or direct confrontation. They will even use appeals to fairness and morality as a cover to advance their position. Do not be taken in: negotiation is about maneuvering for power or placement, and you must always put yourself in the kind of strong position that makes it impossible for the other side to nibble away at you during your talks. Before and during negotiations, you must keep advancing, creating relentless pressure and compelling the other side to settle on your terms. The more you take, the more you can give back in meaningless concessions. Create a reputation for being tough and uncompromising, so that people are back on their heels before they even meet you. WAR BY OTHER MEANS After Athens was finally defeated by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War of 404 B.C., the great city-state fell into steady decline. In the decades that followed, many citizens, including the great orator Demosthenes, began to dream of a revival of the once dominant Athens. In 359 B.C. the king of Macedonia, Perdiccas, was killed in battle, and a power struggle emerged for his succession. The Athenians saw Macedonia as a barbaric land to the north, its only importance its proximity to Athenian outposts that helped secure their supplies of corn from Asia and of gold from local mines. One such outpost was the city of Amphipolis, a former Athenian colony, which, however, had lately fallen into Macedonian hands. A plan emerged among the politicians of Athens to support one of the claimants to the Macedonian throne (a man named Argaeus) with ships and soldiers. If he won, he would be indebted to Athens and would return to them the valuable city of Amphipolis. Unfortunately, the Athenians backed the wrong horse: Perdiccas’s twenty- four-year-old brother, Philip, easily defeated Argaeus in battle and became king. To the Athenians’ surprise, however, Philip did not push his advantage but stepped back, renouncing all claim to Amphipolis and making the city independent. He also released without ransom all the Athenian soldiers he had captured in battle. He even discussed forming an alliance with Athens, his recent enemy, and in secret negotiations proposed to reconquer Amphipolis in a few years and deliver it to Athens in exchange for another city still under Athenian control, an offer too good to refuse. The Athenian delegates at the talks reported that Philip was an amiable sort and that beneath his rude exterior he was clearly an admirer of Athenian culture- -indeed, he invited Athens’s most renowned philosophers and artists to reside in his capital. Overnight, it seemed, the Athenians had gained an important ally to the north. Philip set about fighting barbaric tribes on other borders, and peace ruled between the two powers. A few years later, as Athens was racked by an internal power struggle of its own, Philip marched on and captured Amphipolis. Following their agreement, the Athenians dispatched envoys to negotiate, only to find, to their surprise, that Philip no longer offered them the city but merely made vague promises for the future. Distracted by their problems at home, the envoys had no choice but to accept this. Now, with Amphipolis securely under his control, Philip had unlimited access to the gold mines and rich forests in the area. It seemed that he had been playing them all along. Now Demosthenes came forward to rail against the duplicitous Philip and warn of the danger he posed to all of Greece. Urging the citizens of Athens to raise an army to meet the threat, the orator recalled their victories in the past over other tyrants. Nothing happened then, but a few years later, when Philip maneuvered to take the pass at Thermopylae–the narrow gateway that controlled movement from central to southern Greece–Athens indeed sent an army to defend it. Philip retreated, and the Athenians congratulated themselves on their victory. In the years to come, the Athenians watched warily as Philip extended his domain to the north, the east, and well into central Greece. Then, in 346 B.C., he suddenly proposed to negotiate a treaty with Athens. He had proved he could not be trusted, of course, and many of the city’s politicians had sworn never to deal with him again, but the alternative was to risk war with Macedonia at a time when Athens was ill prepared for it. And Philip seemed absolutely sincere in his desire for a solid alliance, which, at the very least, would buy Athens a period of peace. So, despite their reservations, the Athenians sent ambassadors to Macedonia to sign a treaty called the Peace of Philocrates. By this agreement Athens relinquished its rights to Amphipolis and in exchange received promises of security for its remaining outposts in the north. The ambassadors left satisfied, but on the way home they received news that Philip had marched on and taken Thermopylae. Challenged to explain himself, Philip responded that he had acted to secure his interests in central Greece from a temporary threat by a rival power, and he quickly abandoned the pass. But the Athenians had had enough–they had been humiliated. Time and time again, Philip had used negotiations and treaties to cover nefarious advances. He was not honorable. He might have abandoned Thermopylae, but it did not matter: he was always taking control over larger territories, then making himself look conciliatory by giving some of his acquisitions back–but only some, and he often retook the conceded lands later anyway. The net effect was inevitably to enlarge his domain. Mixing war with deceptive diplomacy, he had slowly made Macedonia the dominant power in Greece. Demosthenes and his followers were now on the ascendant. The Peace of Philocrates was obviously a disgrace, and everyone involved in it was thrown out of office. The Athenians began to make trouble in the country to the east of Amphipolis, trying to secure more outposts there, even provoking quarrels with Macedonia. In 338 B.C. they engaged in an alliance with Thebes to prepare for a great war against Philip. The two allies met the Macedonians in battle at Chaeronea, in central Greece–but Philip won the battle decisively, his son Alexander playing a key role. Now the Athenians were in panic: barbarians from the north were about to descend on their city and burn it to the ground. And yet again they were proved wrong. In a most generous peace offer, Philip promised not to invade Athenian lands. In exchange he would take over the disputed outposts in the east, and Athens would become an ally of Macedonia. As proof of his word, Philip released his Athenian prisoners from the recent war without asking for payment of any ransom. He also had his son Alexander lead a delegation to Athens bearing the ashes of all the Athenian soldiers who had died at Chaeronea. Overwhelmed with gratitude, the Athenians granted citizenship to both Alexander and his father and erected a statue of Philip in their agora. Lord Aberdeen, the British ambassador to Austria, proved even easier to deal with. Only twenty-nine years old, barely able to speak French, he was not a match for a diplomat of Metternich’s subtlety. His stiffness and self- confidence only played into Metternich’s hands. “Metternich is extremely attentive to Lord Aberdeen,” reported Cathcart. The results were not long delayed. Metternich had once described the diplomat’s task as the art of seeming a dupe, without being one, and he practised it to the fullest on the high-minded Aberdeen. “Do not think Metternich such a formidable personage…,” Aberdeen wrote to Castlereagh. “Living with him at all times…, is it possible I should not know him? If indeed he were the most subtle of mankind, he might certainly impose on one little used to deceive, but this is not his character. He is, I repeat it to you, not a very clever man. He is vain…but he is to be trusted….” For his mixture of condescension and gullibility, Aberdeen earned himself Metternich’s sarcastic epithet as the “dear simpleton of diplomacy.” A WORLD RESTORED, HENRY KISSINGER, 1957 Later that year Philip convened a congress of all the Greek city-states (except for Sparta, which refused to attend) to discuss an alliance to form what would be called the Hellenic League. For the first time, the Greek city-states were united in a single confederation. Soon after the terms of the alliance were agreed upon, Philip proposed a united war against the hated Persians. The proposal was happily accepted, with Athens leading the way. Somehow everyone had forgotten how dishonorable Philip had been; they only remembered the king who had recently been so generous. In 336 B.C., before the war against Persia got under way, Philip was assassinated. It would be his son Alexander who would lead the league into war and the creation of an empire. And through it all, Athens would remain Macedonia’s most loyal ally, its critical anchor of stability within the Hellenic League. Interpretation On one level, war is a relatively simple affair: you maneuver your army to defeat your enemy by killing enough of its soldiers, taking enough of its land, or making yourself secure enough to proclaim victory. You may have to retreat here and there, but your intention is eventually to advance as far as possible. Negotiation, on the other hand, is almost always awkward. On the one hand, you need both to secure your existing interests and to get as much on top of them as you can; on the other hand, you need to bargain in good faith, make concessions, and gain the opposing side’s trust. To mix these needs is an art, and an almost impossible one, for you can never be sure that the other side is acting in good faith. In this awkward realm between war and peace, it is easy to misread the opponent, leading to a settlement that is not in your long-term interest. Philip’s solution was to see negotiation not as separate from war but rather as an extension of it. Negotiation, like war, involved maneuver, strategy, and deception, and it required you to keep advancing, just as you would on the battlefield. It was this understanding of negotiation that led Philip to offer to leave Amphipolis independent while promising to take it for Athens later on, a promise he never meant to keep. This opening maneuver bought him friendship and time, and kept the pesky Athenians out of his hair while he dealt with his enemies elsewhere. The Peace of Philocrates similarly covered his moves in central Greece and kept the Athenians off balance. Having decided at some point that his ultimate goal was to unite all of Greece and lead it on a crusade against Persia, Philip determined that Athens–with its noble history–would have to function as a symbolic center of the Hellenic League. His generous peace terms were calculated to purchase the city’s loyalty. Philip never worried about breaking his word. Why should he sheepishly honor his agreements when he knew the Athenians would find some excuse later on to extend their outposts to the north at his expense? Trust is not a matter of ethics, it is another maneuver. Philip saw trust and friendship as qualities for sale. He would buy them from Athens later on, when he was powerful and had things to offer it in exchange. Like Philip, you must see any negotiating situation in which your vital interests are at stake as a realm of pure maneuver, warfare by other means. Earning people’s trust and confidence is not a moral issue but a strategic one: sometimes it is necessary, sometimes it isn’t. People will break their word if it serves their interests, and they will find any moral or legal excuse to justify their moves, sometimes to themselves as well as to others. Just as you must always put yourself in the strongest position before battle, so it is with negotiation. If you are weak, use negotiations to buy yourself time, to delay battle until you are ready; be conciliatory not to be nice but to maneuver. If you are strong, take as much as you can before and during negotiations–then later you can give back some of what you took, conceding the things you least value to make yourself look generous. Do not worry about your reputation or about creating distrust. It is amazing how quickly people will forget your broken promises when you are strong and in a position to offer them something in their self-interest. Therefore, a prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by so doing it would be against his interest…. If men were all good, this precept would not be a good one; but as they are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them. Nor have legitimate grounds ever failed a prince who wished to show colorable excuse for the nonfulfillment of his promise. –Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1469-1527) JADE FOR TILE Early in 1821 the Russian foreign minister, Capo d’Istria, heard news he had long been awaiting: a group of Greek patriots had begun a rebellion against the Turks (Greece was then part of the Ottoman Empire), aiming to throw them out and establish a liberal government. D’Istria, a Greek nobleman by birth, had long dreamed of involving Russia in Greek affairs. Russia was a growing military power; by supporting the revolution–assuming the rebels won–it would gain influence over an independent Greece and Mediterranean ports for its navy. The Russians also saw themselves as the protectors of the Greek Orthodox Church, and Czar Alexander I was a deeply religious man; leading a crusade against the Islamic Turks would satisfy his moral consciousness as well as Russian political interests. It was all too good to be true. Only one obstacle stood in d’Istria’s way: Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister. A few years earlier, Metternich had brought Russia into an alliance with Austria and Prussia called the Holy Alliance. Its goal was to protect these nations’ governments from the threat of revolution and to maintain peace in Europe after the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars. Metternich had befriended Alexander I. Sensing that the Russians might intervene in Greece, he had sent the czar hundreds of reports claiming that the revolution was part of a Europe-wide conspiracy to get rid of the continent’s monarchies. If Alexander came to Greece’s aid, he would be the revolutionaries’ dupe and would be violating the purpose of the Holy Alliance. D’Istria was no fool: he knew that what Metternich really wanted was to prevent Russia from expanding its influence in the Mediterranean, which would upset England and destabilize Europe, Metternich’s greatest fear. To d’Istria it was simple: he and Metternich were at war over who would have ultimate influence over the czar. And d’Istria had the advantage: he saw the czar often and could counteract Metternich’s persuasive powers through constant personal contact. The Turks inevitably moved to suppress the Greek rebellion, and as their atrocities against the Greeks mounted, it seemed almost certain that the czar would intervene. But in February 1822, as the revolution was reaching a boiling point, the czar made what in d’Istria’s eyes was a fatal mistake: he agreed to send an envoy to Vienna to discuss the crisis with Metternich. The prince loved to lure negotiators to Vienna, where he would charm them to death. D’Istria felt the situation slipping out of his hands. Now he had just one option: to choose the envoy who would go to Vienna and brief him in detail. D’Istria’s choice was a man called Taticheff, who had been Russia’s ambassador to Spain. Taticheff was a shrewd, experienced negotiator. Called in for a meeting shortly before he was to leave, he listened carefully as d’Istria laid out the dangers: Metternich would try to charm and seduce Taticheff; to prevent the czar from intervening, he would offer to negotiate a settlement between the Russians and Turks; and, of course, he would call for a European conference to discuss the issue. This last was Metternich’s favorite ploy: he was always able to dominate these conferences and somehow get what he wanted. Taticheff was not to fall under his spell. He was to give Metternich a note from d’Istria arguing that Russia had a right to come to the aid of fellow Christians suffering at the hands of the Turks. And on no account was he to agree to Russia’s participation in a conference. On the eve of his departure for Vienna, Taticheff was unexpectedly called in for a meeting with the czar himself. Alexander was nervous and conflicted. Unaware of d’Istria’s instructions, he told Taticheff to tell Metternich that he wanted both to act in accordance with the alliance and to meet his moral obligation in Greece. Taticheff decided he would have to delay giving this message as long as he could–it would make his work far too confusing. In his first meeting with Metternich in Vienna, Taticheff took measure of the Austrian minister. He saw him as rather vain, apparently more interested in fancy-dress balls and young girls than in Greece. Metternich seemed detached and somewhat ill-informed; the little he said about the situation in Greece betrayed confusion. Taticheff read d’Istria’s note to him, and, as if without thinking, Metternich asked if these were the czar’s instructions as well. Put on the spot, Taticheff could not lie. His hope now was that the czar’s rather contradictory instructions would further confuse the prince, letting Taticheff stay one step ahead. In the days to come, Taticheff had a splendid time in the delightful city of Vienna. Then he had another meeting with Metternich, who asked him if they could begin negotiations based on the instructions of the czar. Before Taticheff could think, Metternich next asked what Russia’s demands might be in this situation. That seemed fair, and Taticheff replied that the Russians wanted to make Greece a protectorate state, to get the alliance’s approval for Russian intervention in Greece, on and on. Metternich turned down every proposal, saying his government would never agree to such things, so Taticheff asked him to suggest alternate ideas. Instead Metternich launched into an abstract discussion of revolution, of the importance of the Holy Alliance, and other irrelevancies. Taticheff left confused and rather annoyed. He had wanted to stake out a position, but these discussions were informal and shapeless; feeling lost, he had been unable to steer them in the direction he wanted. A few days later, Metternich called Taticheff in again. He looked uncomfortable, even pained: the Turks, he said, had just sent him a note claiming that the Russians were behind the trouble in Greece and asking him to convey to the czar their determination to fight to the death to hold on to what was theirs. In solemn tones suggesting that he was angry at the Turks’ lack of diplomacy, Metternich said he thought it beneath his country’s dignity to pass this disgraceful message to the czar. He added that the Austrians considered Russia their staunchest ally and would support Russia’s conditions for resolving the crisis. Finally, if the Turks refused to concede, Austria would break off relations with them. Taticheff was quite moved by this sudden emotional display of solidarity. Perhaps the Russians had misread the prince–perhaps he was really on their side. Fearing that d’Istria would misunderstand, Taticheff reported this meeting to the czar alone. A few days later, Alexander responded that from now on, Taticheff was to report only to him; d’Istria was to be excluded from the negotiations. The pace of the meetings with Metternich picked up. Somehow the two men discussed only diplomatic solutions to the crisis; Russia’s right to intervene in Greece militarily was no longer mentioned. Finally, Metternich invited the czar to attend a conference on the question in Verona, Italy, a few months later. Here Russia would lead t