Preface
1. Louis Harris, “Public’s Appraisal of Henry Kissinger Remains High,” Harris Poll press release, Aug. 19, 1974, http://media.theharrispoll.com/documents/Harris-Interactive-Poll-Research-PUBLICS-APPRAISAL-OF-HENRY-KISSINGER-REMAINS-HIGH-1974–08.pdf.
2. Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 549.
3. For a discussion, see Daniel Maliniak, Susan Peterson, Ryan Powers, and Michael J. Tierney, “The Best International Relations Schools in the World,” Foreign Policy, Feb. 2, 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/03/top-twenty-five-schools-international-relations/. For a breakdown of the survey data by gender, political affiliation, etc., see “Who Was the Most Effective U.S. Secretary of State in the Last 50 Years?” (bar graph), TRIP Faculty Survey in United States, TRIP, Sept. 9, 2014, https://trip.wm.edu/charts/#/bargraph/37/1282.
4. Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 764.
5. This is a strong claim, which obviously risks falsification should the book or set of articles we have somehow missed turn up. Of course, the more general books about Kissinger are useful for describing his many specific negotiations, often in detail. Yet we have been unable to find extended analyses specifically about this facet of Kissinger’s life and work in general. Kissinger himself, when asked, did not know of any such works. The closest treatments of Kissinger’s general approach that we have found were written by T. G. Otte and Walter Isaacson. See T. G. Otte, “Kissinger,” in Diplomatic Theory from Machiavelli to Kissinger, eds. Maurice Keens-Soper, G. R. Berridge, and T. G. Otte (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 195–202; and Isaacson, Kissinger. Both relatively brief accounts highlight several of Kissinger’s negotiating characteristics without developing an overall analysis of his strategy and tactics. For example, Otte describes distinctive elements of what he calls Kissinger’s approach to “diplomatic practice” as the use of “back channels,” secrecy, linkage, trading concessions, step-by-step shuttle diplomacy, building on interim agreements, and summitry—all informed by a historical understanding of one’s counterpart. Similarly, Walter Isaacson’s biography contains a section (pp. 550–59) on Kissinger’s “negotiating style” that describes his preference for reaching a target settlement directly, his emphasis on personal factors and relationships among leaders, his penchant for secrecy, statements intended to create desired impressions without actually lying, the value of “constructive ambiguity,” shuttle diplomacy, and so on. Apart from these concise descriptions, the many negotiation-focused analyses of Kissinger’s approach in particular cases have been quite useful for our purposes. Among the numerous sources we will cite throughout this book are Jeffrey Z. Rubin, Dynamics of Third Party Intervention: Kissinger in the Middle East (New York: Praeger, in cooperation with the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, 1981); Tad Szulc, “How Kissinger Did It: Behind the Vietnam Cease-Fire Agreement,” Foreign Policy 15 (Summer 1974); Edward R. F. Sheehan, “How Kissinger Did It: Step by Step in the Middle East,” Foreign Policy 22 (Spring 1976): 3–70; W. Quandt, “Kissinger and the Arab-Israeli Disengagement Negotiations,” Journal of International Affairs 9, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 33–48; Margaret MacMillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2007); and Janice Stein, “Structures, Strategies, and Tactics of Mediation: Kissinger and Carter in the Middle East,” Negotiation Journal 1, no. 4 (Oct. 1985): 331–47.
6. Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School, http://www.pon.harvard.edu/. Chaired by Professor James Sebenius since 2001, the Great Negotiator Award program honors men and women from around the world who have overcome significant barriers to reaching agreements that have achieved worthy purposes. This initiative is sponsored by the Program on Negotiation, an active consortium of Harvard, MIT, and Tufts; and, more recently, on Harvard’s Future of Diplomacy Project, https://www.belfercenter.org/project/future-diplomacy-project. Negotiation-oriented faculty from these universities do substantial advance research and case writing, bring the honoree to campus for at least a day of intensive videotaped interviews on his or her most challenging negotiations, and then extract his or her most valuable lessons in articles, course materials, and interactive video presentations. Since 2001, this project has honored the following people: Sen. George J. Mitchell, with special emphasis on his work in Northern Ireland leading to the Good Friday Agreement; Bruce Wasserstein, for his decades of financial dealmaking, with a special focus on his role at Lazard Asset Management; Special Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, in particular for her negotiations with China over intellectual property rights; Lakhdar Brahimi, special representative of the UN secretary-general, with special emphasis on his work to forge a post-conflict government in Afghanistan after 9/11; Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, for his negotiations leading to the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian War as well as his multiparty efforts to deal with unpaid U.S. dues to the United Nations; Colombian president and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Juan Santos, for his central role in forging an agreement between the government and the largest guerrilla group (the “FARC,” or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), apparently, as of late 2017, ending a fifty-plus-year civil war in Colombia that had defied countless prior negotiation attempts, killed more than 220,000 people, and internally displaced over 5 million; the Honorable Stuart Eizenstat, for his negotiations over restitution of Holocaust-era assets in Switzerland and other European countries; UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata, for her quiet negotiations on behalf of refugees and internally displaced persons in regions in places ranging from Iraq to the Balkans to Rwanda; the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude for their negotiations to erect massive, controversial installations, from Running Fence in California to The Gates in New York City’s Central Park, as well as wrapping Paris’s Pont Neuf and Berlin’s Reichstag; former Finnish president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari, in particular for his negotiation efforts leading to Kosovo’s independence and the resolution of a decades-long bloody conflict between the government of Indonesia and the province of Aceh; former U.S. secretary of state James Baker, for his negotiations leading to the reunification of Germany within NATO, actions to forge the Gulf War coalition to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, and diplomacy paving the road to the Madrid Conference; and Singapore’s UN ambassador Tommy Koh, for his work chairing the Law of the Sea Negotiations, the Rio Earth Summit, the United States–Singapore Free Trade Agreement, and a number of other initiatives.
7. Our American Secretaries of State Project will use these many hours of interviews to produce a book and documentary films that analyze the leadership and negotiation approaches of the different secretaries over four decades with respect to the Soviet Union/Russia, China, and the Middle East. Future of Diplomacy Project, “Special Initiative—American Secretaries of State,” Harvard Kennedy School American Secretaries of State website, http://www.belfercenter.org/american-secretaries-state/secretaries-state-interviews.
8. George P. Shultz, Ideas and Action: Featuring the 10 Commandments of Negotiation (Erie, PA: Free to Choose Press, 2010); and Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
9. Kissinger’s exact response: “When the various secretaries [of state] come here or when you put it together into a book, I don’t think Baker could use my approach. And I couldn’t use Baker’s approach. Baker is a very practical operator. And when you have a very concrete problem, you want Baker. And you don’t want to get between Baker and an objective. I have a more structural approach. The period in which I served happened to have profound structural issues. Shultz is somewhere in between. And I wouldn’t say that there is one absolute rule that you can apply in all conditions” (Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Henry A. Kissinger, interview by R. Nicholas Burns, Robert Mnookin, and James K. Sebenius, Nov. 6, 2014).
10. Subsequently, we read several more of Kissinger’s books and articles, along with invaluable additional sources, including the incomparable compilation by the Digital National Security Archive (DNSA), Kissinger Telephone Conversations: A Verbatim Record of U.S. Diplomacy, 1969–1977, George Washington University, Washington DC, http://proquest.libguides.com/dnsa/kissinger1, as well as numerous other sources that we later detail.
11. Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Europe After Napoleon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), pp. 287–89. Originally published as A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–22 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1957).
12. Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).
13. William Burr, The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top-Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New York: The New Press in conjunction with the National Security Archive, 1999); the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Yorba Linda, CA, https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/; the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum, Grand Rapids, MI, https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/contact.aspx; Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, U.S. Department of State (Government Printing Office: Washington, DC), https://history.state.gov/.
Introduction: Kissinger the Negotiator: A Story That Should Be Told
1. This is obviously a strong claim, which we discuss and justify in note 1 of the preface.
2. Although we initially thought we had originated this “zoom-out, zoom-in” terminology, others can appropriately claim credit. In particular, our Harvard Business School colleague Rosabeth Moss Kanter framed a major article in these terms; see her “‘Zoom In, Zoom Out,’” Harvard Business Review 89, no. 3 (2011): 112–16. Also in 2011, Jim Collins and Morten Hansen used this phrase, in their case, with respect to strategy. See Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen, Great by Choice (New York: Harper Business, 2011), pp. 113–21. And we suspect that we have omitted others who have used the phrase in other contexts.
3. Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: Penguin Press, 2011); and Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2014). For a full list of his books, articles, and speeches, see “Henry A. Kissinger,” http://henryakissinger.com/.
4. The “intense confrontation” spawned a debate in the New York Times of Feb. 13, 2016. See Niall Ferguson and Todd Gitlin, “Henry Kissinger: Sage or Pariah?” New York Times, Feb. 13, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/02/13/henry-kissinger-sage-or-pariah. Similarly, see the recent debate among ten historians, Nicholas Thompson et al., “Henry Kissinger: Good or Evil? 10 Historians Assess the Controversial Statesman’s Legacy,” Politico, Oct. 10, 2015, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/henry-kissinger-history-legacy-213237.
5. Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: Volume 1, 1923–1968: The Idealist (New York: Penguin Books, 2015); Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2015).
6. Beyond the books just mentioned, see biographical works such as Isaacson, Kissinger; Marvin L. Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974); Alistair Horne, Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009); Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). The “Introduction” to Ferguson’s Kissinger: The Idealist offers an entertaining and extensive tour d’horizon of writings about Kissinger. Complementing Ferguson’s “survey,” Alistair Horne offers a powerful “case for Henry Kissinger,” while referencing and quoting his various critics. See Alistair Horne, “The Case for Henry Kissinger,” Independent, Aug. 17, 2009, based on his 2009 book, Kissinger: 1973. Among the strongest critics are, for example, Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (New York: Verso, 2001); Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983); and William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).
7. As just noted, prominent detractors would include Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow; Hersh, The Price of Power; Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger; and Shawcross, Sideshow. Many highly critical chapters can be found in Walter Isaacson’s biography. More recent echoes of these analyses can be found in articles by critics such as Zack Beauchamp, “The Obama Administration Is Honoring Henry Kissinger Today. It Shouldn’t Be,” Vox, May 9, 2016, http://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11640562/kissinger-pentagon-award. Among his admirers, though hardly uncritical, would be Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: The Idealist; Horne, “The Case for Henry Kissinger”; Robert D. Kaplan, “Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism,” The Atlantic, June, 1999; Josef Joffe, “In Defense of Henry Kissinger,” Commentary, Dec. 1, 1992; President Obama’s secretary of state John Kerry stated, “And Henry Kissinger . . . literally wrote the book on diplomacy; the Secretary whose exploits and expertise gave us the vocabulary of modern diplomacy, the very words “shuttle diplomacy” and “strategic patience”; and whose special insight into history has been an invaluable gift to every secretary who sat in that office on mahogany row ever since the day that Henry left it.” John Kerry, “Remarks at the U.S. Diplomacy Center Groundbreaking Ceremony,” news release, Sept. 3, 2014, https://2009–2017.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2014/09/231318.htm.
8. James K. Sebenius, L. Alexander Green, and Eugene B. Kogan, “Henry A. Kissinger as Negotiator: Background and Key Accomplishments,” Working Paper, No. 15–040, 2014 (revised Dec. 2016), Harvard Business School, Boston, MA.
9. Ferguson, Kissinger: The Idealist, p. 2. In 1973, Kissinger was number one in Gallup’s “Most Admired Man” survey. Among secretaries of state, he alone appeared on Charlie Rose’s television show almost forty times (this is not to mention the cameos on Dynasty and The Colbert Report and his role as animated characters on The Simpsons and Family Guy).
10. For further details, see “Henry A. Kissinger: Biography,” at www.henryakissinger.com/biography.html.
11. For a complete listing, see “Henry A. Kissinger,” www.henrya kissinger.com.
12. Kissinger, A World Restored; and Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1957).
13. White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979).
14. Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Jussi M. Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 356.
15. Kissinger, On China. For further details, see “Henry A. Kissinger—Biography,” www.henryakissinger.com/biography.html.
16. In particular, this latest book explores the evolution, interaction, and possible futures of divergent conceptions of “world order.” These include the so-called Westphalian model, originating in Europe, of nominally equal sovereign states; the Chinese system envisioning the Middle Kingdon at its center, with outlying tributary states; an expansive Islamic idea of a world community, or ummah; and an American order heavily informed by the supposedly universal ideals articulated by Woodrow Wilson, an order that both dominates the world and is under siege from many quarters. See Kissinger, World Order.
17. For summaries of several of these episodes, see James K. Sebenius, R. Nicholas Burns, Robert H. Mnookin, and L. Alexander Green. “Henry Kissinger: Negotiating Black Majority Rule in Southern Africa,” Working Paper No. 17–051, Dec. 2016, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA. Of course, Kissinger himself offers detailed accounts of these and other negotiations in many works, especially Kissinger, White House Years; Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982); and Years of Renewal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), as do many of the biographies and other sources already cited.
18. White House Years, p. 685.
19. Ibid., p. 695.
20. Note that, throughout, we have replaced the older transliteration “Chou” with the pinyin “Zhou” and “Mao Tse-Tung” with the pinyin “Mao Zedong” in quoted material.
21. Alec Gallup (2006). The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 2005. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 315–18.
22. Bureau of the Census, “Vietnam Conflict—U.S. Military Forces in Vietnam and Casualties Incurred: 1961 to 1972,” Table 590, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1977 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1980), p. 369, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/seventies/resources/vietnam-war-military-statistics.
23. As quoted in Horne, Kissinger: 1973, p. 51.
24. For details, see A. B. Mutiti, “Rhodesia and Her Four Discriminatory Constitutions,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, No. 90 (2e Trimestre 1974): 261–75.
25. Below the surface of our narrative lurks a perennial methodological question often posed by international relations theorists, among other social scientists, who observe and analyze negotiations: Do, or even can, the actions of individual negotiators matter much to outcomes? Aren’t ultimate results really the produce of “structures” or “larger forces” (be they institutional, economic, cultural, historical, or whatever) inexorably working themselves out with human agency merely an “epiphenomena” or, more poetically, full of “sound and fury, signifying nothing”? A classic statement of this dilemma can be found in Alexander E. Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory,” International Organization 41, no. 3 (1987): 335–70. In our analysis, we sidestep this deep issue, simply aligning ourselves with the view that individual agency can matter a great deal to outcomes and in shaping structures, while, obviously, existing structures constrain and shape agency. See the next note for a discussion; Audie Klotz et al., “Moving Beyond the Agent–Structure Debate,” International Studies Review 8, no. 2 (2006): 355.
26. After all, for success in negotiation, each of us must necessarily act, as individuals and as members of teams, on the basis of our own interests and perceptions. It is therefore useful to view these events through Kissinger’s eyes—as we must view our negotiation challenges through our own eyes. Analyzing events from the perspective of one player inevitably risks selective and self-serving perception. Yet, to be effective as negotiators, for us as for Kissinger, we must strive not to be prisoners of myopic or distorted views. At a minimum, we must incorporate an understanding of the context within which the negotiation takes place, including the likely perceptions, actions, and reactions of other players. As we study and recount Kissinger’s dealings, we will keep these caveats in mind, often turning to other sources for corroboration of events.
27. For discussions of kinds of moves along with their psychological aspects, see, e.g., Leigh L. Thompson, The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator, 5th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2012); Margaret Ann Neale and Max H. Bazerman, Cognition and Rationality in Negotiation (New York: Free Press; Toronto, 1991).
28. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960); Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966); David A. Lax and James K. Sebenius, 3-D Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deals (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006). For the more technical foundations of negotiation analysis, including moves “away from the table,” see James K. Sebenius, “Negotiation Arithmetic: Adding and Subtracting Issues and Parties,” International Organization 37, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 281–316; James K. Sebenius, “International Negotiation Analysis,” in International Negotiation: Analysis, Approaches, Issues. 2nd ed. Ed. Victor Kremenyuk (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002), pp. 229–52. A number of illustrative case studies of such moves can be found in Michael Watkins and Susan Rosegrant, Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World’s Toughest Post-Cold War Conflicts (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2001).
Chapter 1: Crafting a Negotiating Strategy
1. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 903.
2. Elizabeth Knowles, Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 296.
3. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 1011.
4. The quoted phrase is from ibid., p. 961.
5. Time, “Poised Between Peace and War,” Oct. 11, 1976, p. 44.
6. Observer, “The Road to Zimbabwe,” Sept. 26, 1976, p. 8.
7. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 972.
8. Ibid., chaps. 26, 29, 30, 31, and 32.
9. We have drawn on far more detailed accounts of these remarkable negotiations, including Sebenius, Burns, Mnookin, and Green, “Henry Kissinger: Negotiating Black Majority Rule in Southern Africa”; Sue Onslow, “‘We Must Gain Time’: South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Kissinger Initiative of 1976,” South African Historical Journal 56, no. 1 (2006): 123–53; William L. Bishop, “Diplomacy in Black and White: America and the Search for Zimbabwean Independence, 1965–1980” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2012); Stephen Low, “The Zimbabwe Settlement, 1976–1979,” in International Mediation in Theory and Practice, eds. Saadia Touval and I. William Zartman (Washington, DC: Westview Press, 1985); Jamie Miller, An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and Its Search for Survival (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Andrew Novak, “Face-Saving Maneuvers and Strong Third-Party Mediation: The Lancaster House Conference on Zimbabwe-Rhodesia,” International Negotiation 14, no. 1 (2009): 149–74; and William E. Schaufele, “Interview with Ambassador William E. Schaufele Jr.,” Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Nov. 19, 1994. http://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Schaufele,%20William%20E.%20Jr.pdf; Ian Douglas Smith, Bitter Harvest (London: Blake, 2001); Isaacson, Kissinger; Authors’ interview with Ambassador Frank G. Wisner, May 5, 2016; Marianne Spiegel, “The Namibia Negotiations and the Problem of Neutrality,” in Touval and Zartman, eds., International Mediation in Theory and Practice; Mordechai Tamarkin, The Making of Zimbabwe: Decolonization in Regional and International Politics (Savage, MD: F. Cass, 1990); I. William Zartman, Ripe for Resolution: Conflict and Intervention in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow; Andy DeRoche, Kenneth Kaunda, the United States and Southern Africa (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
10. “A Dr. K. Offer They Could Not Refuse,” Time no. 108.14, Oct. 4, 1976, p. 43.
11. “Whites in Africa Fear Race War,” Morning Journal-Record, Feb. 28, 1976, p. 7.
12. George F. Kennan, “Black Rule in Rhodesia: Some Implications,” New York Times, May 2, 1976, p. E15.
13. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, pp. 917–18.
14. Anthony Lake, The “Tar Baby” Option: American Policy Toward Southern Rhodesia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).
15. Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 822.
16. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 925.
17. See, e.g., David R. Smock, “The Forgotten Rhodesians,” Foreign Affairs 47, no. 3 (1969): 532; Sue Onslow, “A Question of Timing: South Africa and Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence, 1964–65,” Cold War History 5, no. 2 (2005): 129–59; Luise White, Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
18. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 915.
19. Alan Cowell, “Ian Smith, Defiant and Steadfast Symbol of White Rule in Africa, Is Dead at 88,” New York Times, Nov. 21, 2007, p. A25.
20. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 975.
21. Hanes Walton, The African Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: A Documentary Analysis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 208.
22. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 918.
23. Lax and Sebenius, 3-D Negotiation, p. 21–34.
24. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, pp. 916–17.
25. Ibid., p. 917.
26. Gerald R. Ford, A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 380.
27. This simplified diagram leaves out many figures that, in a fuller account of these negotiations, would be seen to have roles. Such figures would include Abel Muzorewa, Jomo Kenyatta, and the heads of a number of African states and their foreign ministers.
28. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 918.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., pp. 918–19.
32. Ibid., p. 955. While part of the intended strategy, the French front receded in importance as the process unfolded.
33. Ibid., p. 921.
34. James K. Sebenius, “Beyond the Deal: Wage a ‘Negotiation Campaign,’” Negotiation Journal 13, no. 11 (2010): 1–4. For a fuller exposition in business contexts, see David A. Lax and James K. Sebenius, “Deal Making 2.0: A Guide to Complex Negotiations,” Harvard Business Review 90, no. 12 (November. 2012): 92–100.
35. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, 903, 74–75; Schaufele, “Interview with Ambassador William E. Schaufele Jr.,” p. 151.
36. Winston Lord, “Interview with Ambassador Winston Lord,” Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, April 28, 1998, http://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Lord,%20Winston.pdf.
37. Schaufele, “Interview with Ambassador William E. Schaufele Jr.”
38. William Rogers, “Interview with Under Secretary William D. Rogers,” Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, July 8, 1992, http://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Rogers,%20William%20D.toc.pdf; Schaufele, “Interview with Ambassador William E. Schaufele Jr.”
39. Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, interview with Ambassador Frank G. Wisner, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, March 22, 1998, http://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Wisner,%20Frank%20G.toc.pdf; Schaufele, “Interview with Ambassador William E. Schaufele Jr.”; Steven Low, “Interview with Stephen Low,” Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Dec. 5, 1997, http://adst.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Low-Stephen.-1997-.toc_1.pdf; William D. Rogers interview; Kissinger, Years of Renewal, pp. 995–96.
40. For example, “Comments on Draft National Intelligence Estimate on Rhodesia,” Memo, U.S. Department of State, Sept. 19, 1976; Donald B. Easum, “Nyerere and Obasanjo on Rhodesia, Report to Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, Nov. 23, 1976,” U.S. Department of State, 1976; U.S. Department of State. “Secretary’s Visit to Tanzania,” Memcon, Wikileaks cable 1976DARES01504_b, dated March 25, 1976. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1976DARES01504_b.html; Ian Douglas Smith, “Smith Speech,” Memcon. U.S. Department of State. Wikileaks Cable: 1976SECTO27255_b. Dated Sept. 21, 1976. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1976SECTO27255_b.html.
Chapter 2: From Strategy to Execution
1. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 914.
2. Ford, p. 380.
3. Miller, An African Volk, p. 219. Onslow, “‘We Must Gain Time,’” p. 130.
4. James Callaghan, “Rhodesia,” Debate on March 22, 1976, U.K. House of Commons, vol. 908 cc29–45, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1976/mar/22/rhodesia.
5. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 925.
6. Ibid., pp. 916 and 925.
7. Ibid., pp. 932–33.
8. Ibid., p. 932.
9. David Martin, “Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere Remembered,” undated blogpost, Southern Africa Research and Documentation Centre, http://www.sardc.net/en/mwalimu-julius-kambarage-nyerere-remembered-a-candle-on-kilimanjaro-by-david-martin/.
10. Herbert Howe, Dancing on Cobwebs: American Diplomatic Participation in the 1976 Rhodesian Peace Process, Pew Case Studies in International Affairs (Washington, DC: United States: Pew Charitable Trusts, 1988), p. 6.
11. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 931.
12. Ibid., p. 936.
13. Ibid.
14. .Ibid., p. 990.
15. Ibid., p. 992.
16. R. M. Kanter, “Zoom In, Zoom Out,” Harvard Business Review 89, no. 3 (2011): 112–16. See also Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen, Great by Choice (New York: Harper Business, 2011), pp. 113–21.
17. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XXVIII: Southern Africa, eds. Myra F. Burton and Edward C. Keefer (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2011), doc. 195. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969–76v28/d195; Michael T. Kaufman, “Chrome Ban Asked: Secretary, in Zambia, States Africa Policy and Promises Aid. Kissinger to Press Rhodesia on Rule by Black Majority,” New York Times, April 28, 1976, p. 1.
18. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations, Multinational Corporations and United States Foreign Policy, 93rd Congress, 1973, p. 77.
19. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XXXVIII, Part 1, Foundations of Foreign Policy, 1973–1976, eds. Kristine L. Ahlberg and Alexander Wieland (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2012), Document 77. https://history.state.gov/historical documents/frus1969–76v38p1/d77 [accessed Dec. 20, 2017].
20. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 939.
21. Kaufman, “Chrome Ban Asked.”
22. Ibid., p. 942.
23. For example, Kissinger forged a relationship with the president of the Côte d’Ivoire, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a former French senator who would act as a sounding board throughout the negotiations. See, e.g., “Message for President Houphouët-Boigny,” Wikileaks cable 1976SECTO27213_b, dated Sept. 20, 1976, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1976SECTO27213_b.html; also, Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 939.
24. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 943.
25. Ibid., pp. 946–47.
26. Ibid., p. 950.
27. Ibid., p. 952.
28. Ibid., pp. 953–54.
29. Ibid. Consistent with their support, the ministers agreed to provide only one channel for supplying weapons to the Rhodesian opposition, thereby limiting the ability of the Cubans to traffic arms through the region.
30. Marvin Kalb, First Line Report, CBS Radio, May 4, 1976.
31. Piero Gleijeses, “A Test of Wills: Jimmy Carter, South Africa, and the Independence of Namibia,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 5 (2010): 862.
32. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 940.
33. Ibid., p. 983.
34. Ibid., pp. 967–68.
35. Ibid., p. 983.
36. Walton, The African Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, pp. 71 and 73.
37. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, 921–22; Walton, The African Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 73.
38. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, pp. 921–22.
39. Ibid., p. 956.
40. Ibid., p. 961.
41. Ibid.
42. United Nations Security Council, Resolution 385, Adopted by the United Nations Security Council at Its 1885th Meeting, S/RES/385, 1885, Jan. 30, 1976.
43. Onslow, “‘We Must Gain Time,’” p. 131.
44. Onslow writes that the combined military demands of South West Africa and Rhodesia created “a growing security predicament” and substantial “potential dangers for South African national security.” Onslow, “‘We Must Gain Time,’” pp. 126–27. Also see pp. 29–30, 40–41.
45. Ibid., p. 140. During his Sept. 4, 1976, meeting with Kissinger, Vorster noted South Africa’s reliance on laborers from Mozambique, saying, “We employ hundreds of thousands of laborers from Mozambique, from Lesotho.” In U.S. Department of State, “Memcon with B. J. Vorster, Zurich, Switzerland,” Sept. 4, 1976, located in Kissinger Telephone Conversations, http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/1679067316?accountid=11311.
46. Onslow, “‘We Must Gain Time,’” pp. 129–30. Onslow quotes Vorster in an Aug. 3, 1976, cabinet meeting as having “concluded: ‘We receive icy winds, economically and politically, from the front. We must not become panic stricken, or take crisis decisions.’” See Onslow, “‘We Must Gain Time,’” p. 140. Miller, An African Volk, pp. 208–13 details increases in SADF [South African Defence Force] military spending in the aftermath of the Angola intervention.
47. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 958.
48. In Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 995. Kissinger notes that Kaunda was eager to see Nkomo’s ascent over that of Mugabe, who was referred to as one of “the boys with the guns.” The phrase is often attributed to Nyerere, who purportedly backed Mugabe. In a September 6, 1976, meeting with Callaghan and British foreign secretary Anthony Crosland, Kissinger characterized Vorster’s inclination to support Nkomo. Kissinger told the UK delegation that Vorster hoped that “Rhodesia will be a Zambia, not a Mozambique,” on his border. In U.S. Department of State, “Southern Africa,” Memcon, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London, Sept. 24, 1976, located in Kissinger Telephone Conversations. Kissinger concluded this conversation by noting that Vorster agreed that leadership by “Nkomo shouldn’t be made a precondition” of negotiations, but that Vorster still felt that “the blacks, when they come around to a negotiation, may come back to Nkomo.” Kissinger’s assessment, however, was that Nkomo had already “slipped.” U.S. Department of State, “Southern Africa,” Memcon, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London, Sept. 24, 1976, located in Kissinger Telephone Conversations.
49. Vorster’s détente initiative is described in detail in chapter 4 of Miller, An African Volk; Onslow, pp. 125–26 provides a brief summary of this initiative.
50. South Africa had launched a series of disastrous military incursions into Angola during the political instability that began with the departure of the Portuguese. By framing the Angola initiative as fundamentally anti-communist, Miller argues that the South Africans gave opponents the opportunity to do the same, and to leverage that opposition against an already isolated South Africa. This resulted in rising regional tensions that made “Vorster’s task in seeking a Rhodesian settlement . . . more difficult in 1976 than it had been in 1974–75.” Whereas a settlement could be looked upon as “an opportunity,” writes Miller, “By 1976, it was a necessity. He [Vorster] was caught between the urgency of producing a settlement before regional tensions escalated and the regional imperative of avoiding Smith’s replacement by radicals who might provide safe havens for revolutionary cadres bent on the Republic’s overthrow, or even invite military support on their behalf from extracontinental powers.” Miller, An African Volk, p. 223. More broadly, see Miller, chapters 5, 6, and 7.
51. It was the stated position of the South African government to remain neutral in the affairs of foreign nations. This was, of course, not the case in the covert invasion of Angola in 1975. However, South African public opinion and the stated public position of the government was such that an overt break with Smith would have been a shock. As such, Onslow notes that Vorster was “loathe” to be seen undermining the “official position” of the government by publicly breaking with Smith. See Onslow, “‘We Must Gain Time,’” pp. 128–30. Miller documents Vorster’s bind in detail in chapter 7 of An African Volk. In a September 4, 1976, meeting with Kissinger, Vorster described the Victoria Falls interaction [the location of key talks in Vorster’s détente initiative] with Smith as follows: “At the bridge, I spoke with Kaunda about his economic difficulties, his problems with getting his copper out. I said, ‘You know the only way you can get it out is over Rhodesian railways.’ He said, ‘Yes, I thought about it. Suppose I do, and use Smith’s railways, and at the last minute he cuts me off? I’ll be in a worse situation than before.’ So we went to Smith in the other coach. He said he would do it. I said, ‘The snag is his fear you might cut him off at an awkward moment. I tell you now—in front of Kaunda—that if you give an undertaking and ditch it, I’ll ditch you, and in public.’ You can ask Kaunda.” U.S. Department of State, “Memcon with B. J. Vorster.”
52. Miller, An African Volk, details the lengthy, fraught relationship between Vorster and Smith; for examples, see pp. 142, 148, 157, and, more broadly, pp. 119–61 and 225–59. Despite Vorster’s strong line against Smith at Victoria Falls, in the same September 4, 1976, conversation with Kissinger, he was more circumspect about his ability to publicly play a role in Smith’s undoing, telling Kissinger that “we cannot be seen to be deposing Ian Smith. The Rhodesians can depose him but not us.” U.S. Department of State, “Memcon with B. J. Vorster.”
53. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 964; “No NP [National Party] prime minister had ever met an American secretary of state.” Miller, An African Volk, p. 221.
54. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 964; Vorster’s acceptance of an offer to meet with Kissinger was by no means preordained. Vorster blamed Kissinger, in particular, for South Africa’s disastrous attempted military intervention in Angola the year before. Miller notes that the sense of betrayal was overstated by the South Africans, but also notes, by way of Vorster’s remarks to Newsweek at the time, that it was deeply felt. Vorster: “US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had urged the SADF [South African Defence Force] incursion into Angola and then failed to provide the necessary back-up.” Miller, An African Volk, pp. 201–2. As a result, he writes, “Vorster was skeptical about working with Washington again after Angola.” It was the combination of Kissinger and Ford’s overtures and meetings between Kissinger and South African ambassador Roelof “Pik” Botha that persuaded him to do so. Miller, An African Volk, p. 219.
55. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 966; Sue Onslow, “‘Noises Off’: South Africa and the Lancaster House Settlement 1979–1980,” Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no. 2 (2009): 490. Miller links rising domestic black opposition in South Africa to the failed Angola intervention, noting that South Africa’s efforts confirmed a growing sense among South African blacks that the South African government was not committed to any substantive reform. Miller, An African Volk, pp. 203–5.
56. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 969.
57. Ibid. p. 968.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., p. 959.
61. Ibid., p. 969.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., p. 959.
64. See Robert H. Mnookin, Scott R. Peppet, and Andrew S. Tulumello, Beyond Winning: Negotiating to Create Value in Deals and Disputes (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2000); For a fuller treatment, see Robert H. Mnookin, Scott R. Peppet, and Andrew S. Tulumello, “The Tension Between Empathy and Assertiveness,” Negotiation Journal 12, no. 3 (1996): 217–30.
65. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, pp. 970–72.
66. Onslow, “‘We Must Gain Time,’” p. 148.
67. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 973.
68. Ibid., p. 979.
69. Ibid., p. 980.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid., p. 985.
73. Ibid., pp. 986–87.
74. Ibid., p. 991.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., p. 992.
77. Onslow, “‘We Must Gain Time,’” p. 146.
78. Ibid., p. 142.
79. Ibid., p. 143.
80. Ibid., p. 128. Ian Douglas Smith, The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith (London: Blake Publishing Ltd, 1997), p. 196.
81. Onslow, “‘We Must Gain Time,’” p. 144; Henry Kamm, “Rhodesian Drama Engrosses South Africa,” New York Times, March 22, 1976, p. 3; Robin Wright, “Vorster and Smith Hold Talks on Kissinger’s Africa Shuttle,” Washington Post, Sept. 15, 1976, p. A10.
82. Smith, The Great Betrayal, pp. 198–99.
83. Ibid., p. 200.
84. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 998.
85. Smith, The Great Betrayal, pp. 201–2.
86. Ibid., pp. 203 and 207.
87. Ken Flower, Serving Secretly: An Intelligence Chief on Record: Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, 1964 to 1981 (London: J. Murray, 1987), p. 170.
88. See Mnookin, Peppet, and Tulumello, Beyond Winning: Negotiating to Create Value in Deals and Disputes; For a fuller treatment, see Mnookin, Peppet, and Tulumello, “The Tension between Empathy and Assertiveness.”
89. Smith, The Great Betrayal, pp. 207 and 209.
90. Smith, Bitter Harvest, pp. 202–3.
91. Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa, Rise Up and Walk: An Autobiography, ed. Norman E. Thomas (London: Evans Books, 1978), p. 208.
92. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, pp. 985–87.
93. Ibid., p. 1006.
94. Ibid., pp. 1007–8.
95. Ibid., p. 1011. For a detailed transcript of Kissinger’s presentation to the British cabinet, see U.S. Department of State, “Southern Africa,” Memcon, Number 10 Downing Street, London, Sept. 23, 1976, in Kissinger Telephone Conversations.
96. Ibid., p. 1011.
97. Smith, The Great Betrayal, p. 210.
98. Authors’ interview with Ambassador Frank G. Wisner, May 5, 2016.
99. For an elaboration, see Onslow, “‘We Must Gain Time,’” p. 123.
100. Flower, Serving Secretly, p. 152.
101. Muzorewa, Rise Up and Walk, p. 208.
102. Schaufele, “Interview Ambassador William E. Schaufele Jr.,” p. 177.
103. Henry Kissinger, personal communication with authors, Aug. 31, 2017.
104. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, pp. 1013–14.
105. James K. Sebenius, “Level Two Negotiations: Helping the Other Side Meet Its “Behind-the-Table” Challenges,” Negotiation Journal 29, no. 1 (2013): 7–21.
106. Robert H. Mnookin and Ehud Eiran, “Discord ‘Behind the Table’: The Internal Conflict Among Israeli Jews Concerning the Future of Settlements in the West Bank and Gaza,” Journal of Dispute Resolution 1 (2005): 11–44.
107. Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 691.
108. “Rhodesia’s Alternatives,” Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1976.
Chapter 3: The Outcome of the Southern African Campaign and Insights into Effective Negotiation
1. These sources are provided in notes 15–19 for this chapter.
2. Gleijeses, “A Test of Wills”; Sue Onslow, “South Africa and the Owen/Vance Plan of 1977,” South African Historical Journal 51, no. 1 (2004).
3. “Zimbabwe’s Landslide Leader,” Christian Science Monitor, March 5, 1980.
4. Dan Van Der Vat, “Ian Smith, 88, Politician,” Globe and Mail, Nov. 21, 2007.
5. Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Joshua Nkomo of Zimbabwe Is Dead at 62,” New York Times, July 2, 1999; Paul Jackson, “The Civil War Roots of Military Domination in Zimbabwe: The Integration Process Following the Rhodesian War and the Road to Zanla Dominance,” Civil Wars 13, no. 4 (2011): 385–89.
6. “List of Countries by Past and Projected Gdp (Nominal) Per Capita,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Countries_by_past_and_projected_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita &oldid=711796013.
7. Daniel Compagnon, A Predictable Tragedy: Robert Mugabe and the Collapse of Zimbabwe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 254–60; “Zimbabwe: Mugabe Booed over Economic Crisis,” Africa Research Bulletin: Economic, Financial and Technical Series 52, no. 8 (2015).
8. “Twilight in Pretoria,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 1989.
9. Kenneth R. Dombroski, “South Africa After Apartheid,” Journal of Democracy 17, no. 3 (2006): 43–57.
10. Gretchen Bauer, “Namibia in the First Decade of Independence: How Democratic?” Journal of Southern African Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 33–55; Robert Rotberg, “Namibia’s Nationhood,” Christian Science Monitor, March 20, 1990.
11. James Callaghan, “Leader’s Speech,” Labour Party Conference, Sept. 28, 1976, Blackpool. http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=174.
12. Onslow, “‘We Must Gain Time’”; also Bishop, “Diplomacy in Black and White”; Perhaps the harshest take on Kissinger’s negotiations in Southern Africa is that of Greg Grandin, who while conceding that “in order to preempt another triumph for Castro, Kissinger helped negotiate the surrender of Rhodesia’s white supremacist government,” he quickly asserted, “This about-face notwithstanding, the damage was done. Kissinger left behind him a terrorist infrastructure that would be rebooted by the New Right” (Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow, p. 122).
13. A concise summary of the various rationales for “failure” is in Watts; See, e.g., various assertions in Gleijeses; Low, “The Zimbabwe Settlement, 1976–1979”; Bishop; Tamarkin.
14. This claim recurs in writings about Kissinger’s tactics in these negotiations. For example, Onslow, in “‘We Must Gain Time,’” cites Kissinger’s “mendacity” (p. 148) and writes that he “deliberately deceived the Rhodesians” (p. 152). Or this: “Kissinger negotiated in Southern Africa with a sense of urgency but did so with a certain disregard for specific details that allowed him to deceive and to lie in order to obtain his stated objectives” (Arrigo Pallotti and Corrado Tornimbeni, State, Land and Democracy in Southern Africa [London: Routledge, 2015], pp. 107–8).
15. Low, “Interview with Stephen Low.”
16. Lord, “Interview with Ambassador Winston Lord.”
17. Jeffrey Davidow, A Peace in Southern Africa: The Lancaster House Conference on Rhodesia, 1979, Westview Special Studies on Africa (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), p. 21.
18. Authors’ interview with Ambassador Frank G. Wisner, May 5, 2016.
19. Schaufele recalled his earlier assessment (made prior to Kissinger’s Rhodesian initiative) “‘If we achieve majority rule in Rhodesia and the independence of Namibia, South Africa weakens itself, because it will have less protection, so to speak, from black power. Then we can go after apartheid.’” He later added that “if Namibia and Rhodesia both gained their independence and majority rule, South Africa may have opened the route to its own emancipation, so to speak. That’s what happened, essentially” (Schaufele, “Interview with Ambassador William E. Schaufele Jr.”).
20. Talleyrand’s maxim is widely cited, but with respect to Kissinger’s initiative in Southern Africa at the time, see C. L. Sulzberger, “Policy and Politicians,” New York Times, May 12, 1976, p. 41.
21. Isaacson, Kissinger, pp. 691–92.
22. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 1015.
23. Ibid., p. 918.
24. Schaufele, “Interview with William Schaufele Jr.,” pp. 170–71.
Chapter 4: Strategic: Big-Picture Negotiating
1. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
2. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 738.
3. For some of the press reaction to Kissinger’s 1970 statements foreshadowing his strategy, see Murrey Marder, “U.S. Seeking to Oust Soviet Units in Egypt: U.S. Seeks Soviet Pullback in Mideast,” Washington Post, July 3, 1970, pp. A1 and A4; or the op-ed “On ‘Expelling’ the Russians from the Mideast,” Washington Post, July 7, 1970, p. A14.
4. Kissinger, Diplomacy, pp. 738 and 740.
5. More specifically, an analysis in Security Studies “shows the strong role of detente on Soviet behavior during the 1973 Middle East crisis . . . Without the carrot of increased expected U.S.-Soviet trade, Moscow would have been more likely to have intervened actively in the Arab-Israeli dispute, and the probability of a dangerous superpower clash would have been that much greater.” Dale C. Copeland, “Trade Expectations and the Outbreak of Peace: Détente 1970–74 and the End of the Cold War, 1985–91,” Security Studies 9, nos. 1–2 (Autumn 1999–Winter 2000): 37.
6. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 31.
7. Ibid.
8. Jeffrey Goldberg, “World Chaos and World Order: Conversations with Henry Kissinger,” The Atlantic, Nov. 10, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/11/kissinger-order-and-chaos/506876/.
9. Horne, Kissinger: 1973, p. 30. Similarly, as his colleague Winston Lord observed, Kissinger was “a tremendous strategist and conceptual thinker. . . . He was also a terrific tactician in terms of implementing this strategy. He was a superb negotiator” (Lord, “Interview with Ambassador Winston Lord,” p. 97).
10. Henry Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), pp. 4–5.
11. Goldberg, “World Chaos and World Order.”
12. Henry Kissinger, “A Path out of the Middle East Collapse,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 16, 2015. https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-path-out-of-the-middle-east-collapse-1445037513.
13. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
14. Harold Saunders, cited in “On the Road Again—Kissinger’s Shuttle Diplomacy,” Moments in U.S. Diplomatic History, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, http://adst.org/2016/03/on-the-road-again-kissingers-shuttle-diplomacy/.
15. Ibid.
16. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.” An important summary of the opening to China, along with primary source documents and analysis can be found in Burr, The Kissinger Transcripts. A searchable database of the documents contained in that volume can be found at The Kissinger Telephone Conversations.
17. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 719.
18. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
19. Chapter 6 will explore this in more detail. But for the curious at this stage, here are some of the key conflicting views: Marvin and Bernard Kalb offered a positive assessment: “On June 15 [1972], President [Nikolai] Podgorny flew to Hanoi. The North Vietnamese, feeling betrayed by Russia’s hospitality to Nixon, were nevertheless dependent on Moscow as the chief supplier of their war matériel, and they listened carefully to Podgorny’s message. It was simple but fundamental: he suggested it was time to switch tactics, time for serious negotiations with the United States. The risk, he argued, would not be critical; after all, Nixon seemed serious about withdrawing, and the new U.S. position no longer demanded a North Vietnamese troop pullout from the south. . . . It was a new vocabulary for the Russians—the first time they had so openly committed their prestige to a resumption of negotiations. It clearly reflected the Soviet conclusion that the advantages of dealing with Washington on such matters as trade, credits, and SALT were important enough for Moscow to lend Nixon a hand in settling the Vietnam war” (Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, pp. 336–37). By contrast, Alistair Horne, in his generally admiring account of Kissinger’s diplomacy, indicates that “Both Nixon and Kissinger placed great hope in using their opening to China[,] as well as détente with Moscow, to put pressure on North Vietnam . . . As far as Vietnam was concerned, however, the success with either of these communist behemoths was sorely limited—the line being from Moscow and Beijing: ‘we won’t interfere with Vietnam’s affairs’; though the flow of Soviet arms was reduced” (Horne, Kissinger: 1973, p. 155). Winston Lord, who was directly involved in the negotiations with China, the Soviets, and the North Vietnamese, observed that “we thought that by our dealing with both giants in the Communist world we would have some psychological impact on Hanoi. This showed Hanoi that Moscow and Beijing cared more about their bilateral relations with the U.S. than they did about their relations with Hanoi. They wouldn’t snub Hanoi, but psychologically this would help to isolate Hanoi, e.g., holding summits in Beijing and Moscow while we had some of our meetings with Hanoi in the winter and spring of 1972, in the middle of Hanoi’s offensive in South Vietnam. Neither Moscow nor Beijing went so far as to cut off aid to North Vietnam or really lean on Hanoi. However, both Moscow and Beijing had a stake in our trying to get the Vietnam War behind us. . . . We believed that both Russia and China talked to Hanoi and suggested to North Vietnam that, in its own self-interest, they ought to settle for a military solution. . . . We were fairly confident that Moscow and Beijing made this kind of argument to Hanoi, in their own self-interests of moving ahead with us” (Lord, “Interview with Ambassador Winston Lord”). Similarly, see, e.g., chap. 19 of Isaacson, Kissinger.
20. For an extended analysis, see Sebenius, “Negotiation Arithmetic: Adding and Subtracting Issues and Parties,” pp. 281–316.
21. For an elaboration, see, e.g., chap. 15, Lax and Sebenius, 3-D Negotiation.
22. Saunders, in “On the Road Again.”
23. Stephen A. Walt, “The Credibility Addiction.” Foreign Policy, Jan. 26, 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/06/the-credibility-addiction -us-iraq-afghanistan-unwinnable-war/; Kissinger, White House Years, p. 228. For a fuller guide to the still-simmering debate over the importance of credibility in international relations and negotiations, start with its most famous exponent: Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict; and Schelling, Arms and Influence. Then consult Christopher Fettweiss, “Credibility and the War on Terror,” Political Science Quarterly 122, no. 4 (2007–2008); Robert J. McMahon, “Credibility and World Power: Exploring the Psychological Dimension in Postwar American Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 15 (Fall 1991).
24. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1304. Kissinger repeatedly returns to the argument that the U.S. support for South Vietnam was important for the maintenance of the American global credibility. See, e.g., Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 109, 292, 307, 311, 324, and 1038.
25. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
26. For a fuller discussion of the Syrian “red line” issue, both pro and con, see Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” The Atlantic, April 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/.
27. Philip Rucker, Sean Sullivan, and Paul Kane, “The Great Dealmaker? Lawmakers Find Trump to Be an Untrustworthy Negotiator,” Washington Post, Oct. 23, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-great-dealmaker-lawmakers-find-trump-to-be-an-untrustworthy-negotiator/2017/10/22/7709aea8-b5d4–11e7-be 94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html?utm_term=.208fb983dd4b. See also Jeffrey Frankel, “Deal-maker Trump Can’t Deal,” Views on the Economy and the World (blog), Aug. 28, 2017, https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/deal-maker-trump-cant-deal.
28. Goldberg, “World Chaos and World Order: Conversations with Henry Kissinger.”
29. James K. Sebenius, “Negotiating Lessons from the Browser Wars,” MIT Sloan Management Review 43, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 43–50.
Chapter 5: Realistic: Tracking the Deal/No-Deal Balance
1. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 709.
2. Ibid., p. 710.
3. Ibid., p. 714.
4. Robert H. Mnookin, Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
5. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
6. This is hopelessly oversimplified for international relations scholars, for whom neorealism might be a more apt term for what we are not describing when we use the term realistic. If you must, see David Allen Baldwin, Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
7. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 712.
8. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 130.
9. For a careful elaboration of the concept of interests in negotiation, see chap. 5, pp. 69–84, in Lax and Sebenius, 3-D Negotiation.
10. Niall Ferguson made the case that, for Henry Kissinger, being a “realist” need not in practice mean being “amoral,” the opposite of “idealist,” or indifferent to principle. For example, Kissinger variously argued that “South Vietnam’s right to self-determination was worth U.S. lives” and that the case for freedom should be intrinsic and not based on any material superiority of capitalism. Kissinger further held that an “idealistic” insistence on a pure form of morality can lead to inaction in the face of evil, whereas a realistic approach might more effectively challenge it. See, generally, Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: The Idealist, and his “The Meaning of Kissinger: A Realist Reconsidered,” Foreign Affairs 94, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 2015): 134–43.
11. Kissinger, World Order, p. 134.
12. This popular piece of jargon originates in Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton’s Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin Press, 1991). For greater analytic depth (and the much older pedigree of the concept in negotiation), see James K. Sebenius and David A. Lax, “The Power of Alternatives or the Limits to Negotiation,” Negotiation Journal 1, no. 2 (1985): 77–95. In essence, the orientation described in this paragraph reflects what philosophers would call a “consequentialist” approach that evaluates negotiations by their effects (in terms of the parties’ interests) on outcomes of concern, both for a deal or no deal (rather than on one’s views of the act of negotiation itself, whether theological, psychiatric, or realistic).
13. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
14. Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 568.
15. Perhaps the most glaring “failure” was the sustainability of the Paris Peace Accords to end the Vietnam War, which we analyze in chapter 6. Kissinger did not reach a SALT II agreement, for reasons related to our extended discussion of secrecy in chapter 13. He unsuccessfully sought Japanese concurrence with U.S. Middle East policy during the oil embargo after the 1973 Middle East War, an episode we briefly assess in chapter 9. The 1973 “Year of Europe” was, in theory, a set of initiatives that was supposed to lead to a comprehensive reformulation of NATO and economic arrangements between the United States and Western Europe. Ideally, this would have reduced the burdens of American military support, lowered trade tariffs, and articulated a clear mutual defense and cooperation strategy. Unfortunately, as Kissinger clearly acknowledged, as “mere” national security advisor, he was ill-placed to effectively negotiate with Europe’s top national leaders. Moreover, the intended scope of agreement was huge, and Kissinger was preoccupied in 1973 with developing the opening to China, encouraging détente and arms control with the Soviets, ending the Vietnam War, and dealing with the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. As a result, these talks received intermittent American emphasis. By the time Nixon began to face the endgame of Watergate, none of the four major European leaders with whom Kissinger negotiated remained in power.” See Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 128–95, 700–46; Isaacson, Kissinger, pp. 557–58; and “The Year of Europe? Foreign Affairs 52, no. 2 (Jan. 1974): 237–48.
16. This effort followed the breakaway from Pakistan of East Pakistan, later Bangladesh, with horrific human rights violations and hundreds of thousands of deaths in that country, largely caused by Pakistan’s military. The muted response of the United States, in part given Pakistan’s key role in the negotiations with China, heightened charges, especially against Kissinger, of callously elevating geopolitics over human rights. Indian military assistance to East Pakistan/Bangladesh led to India’s war with Islamabad. For a summary, see chap. 18 of Isaacson, Kissinger.
17. Warren H. Donnelly, “Pakistan’s Nuclear Activities: A Chronology of Four Eras,” in United States Congressional Research Service (Washington, DC: Environment and Natural Resources Policy Division/Library of Congress, 1987), p. 22.
18. Had the United States been on better terms with India at the time, it is at least conceivable, though a long shot, that it might have brokered an agreement between the two adversaries that would have prevented further proliferation.
19. United Nations, “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, March 5, 1970, New York, p. 21, http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/npt; William Burr, “The United States and Pakistan’s Quest for the Bomb,” in The Nuclear Vault Briefing Book 333, National Security Archive, George Washington University, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb333/.
20. The Economist, “The Spider’s Stratagem,” Jan. 3, 2008, http://www.economist.com/node/10424283.
21. Tariq Ali, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (New York: Scribner, 2008), pp. 110–13.
22. Peter Tzeng, “Nuclear Leverage: US Intervention in Sensitive Technology Transfers in the 1970s,” The Nonproliferation Review 20, no. 3 (2013): 479.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid, p. 480.
25. Shirin Tahir-Kheli, The United States and Pakistan: The Evolution of an Influence Relationship (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1982), p. 90.
26. Tariq Ali, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, p. 110. Among the innumerable references to this exchange, see Benazir Bhutto, Daughter of the East (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988), p. 86. Kissinger reportedly denies having said this; see Shahid-ur-Rahman, Long Road to Chagai (Islamabad: Print Wise, 1999): 101, quoted in Rizwana Karim Abbasi’s July 2010 doctoral thesis at the University of Leicester, “Understanding Pakistan’s Nuclear Behaviour (1950s–2010): Assessing the State Motivation and Its International Ramifications (a Three Models Approach),” at https://lra.le.ac.uk/bitstream/2381/27568/1/2010abbasirkdsocsci.pdf. However, Peter Tzeng, “Nuclear Leverage,” p. 480, cites related wording by Kissinger “in a meeting with Pakistani Ambassador Sahabzada Yaqub Khan on September 11. Secretary Kissinger emphasized that if Jimmy Carter won the upcoming election, then the new administration ‘would like nothing better than to make a horrible example of somebody[,]’” citing U.S. Department of State, “The Pakistan Nuclear Reprocessing Issue,” Folder: “Nodis Memcons Sept. 1976/2,” National Archives and Records Administration, U.S. Department of State, College Park, MD.
27. Wall Street Journal, “Kissinger Talks in Pakistan Again Show Problems of Curbing Nuclear-Arms Flow,” Aug. 10, 1976, p. 8.
28. Tzeng, “Nuclear Leverage,” pp. 480–81.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., p. 481.
31. For much greater analytic detail, see Eugene B. Kogan, “Coercing Allies: Why Friends Abandon Nuclear Plans,” PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2013.
32. Akhilesh Pillalamarri, “Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons Program: 5 Things You Need to Know,” The National Interest, April 21, 2015, http://nationalinterest.org/feature/pakistans-nuclear-weapons-program-5-things-you-need-know-12687?page=2.
33. Hussein had engaged in “as many as five hundred hours of secret talks with Israeli leaders” by 1974, according to Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 356; Under American pressure, Israel, too, had shown support for Jordan, massing troops along the Golan Heights and preparing to offer military support to Jordan in 1970, following the invasion of hundreds of Syrian tanks, which were ultimately repelled by the Jordanian army. Dennis Ross, Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015), pp. 115–18; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 847–48.
34. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 847–48.
35. Ibid., p. 847.
36. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 352. According to a 2017 survey, historians’ views of Kissinger’s approach to the Palestinians range widely. James R. Stocker summarizes it: On one end, some historians see the US contacts with the Palestinians as part of what might be called a policy of “ambiguous flexibility.” In order to avoid antagonising Arab states and their publics, the United States had to be seen as moving towards recognition of Palestinian rights. So contacts with the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization] might have pleased one side of the equation. However, Israel did not recognise the validity of Palestinian claims to territory under Israeli control, and wanted to keep the PLO out of any negotiations, even as they gained increasing legitimacy. Thus, Kissinger was forced to be circumspect about these contacts. At the same time, his policy was not intentionally designed to harm the Palestinians. Edward Sheehan, for instance, wrote that Kissinger “was not innately hostile to Palestinian aspirations, but he had little sympathy for their liberation movement.”
Steven Spiegel argues that Kissinger generally hoped to increase US influence through “interim agreements that skirted the fundamental questions,” such as the role of the Palestinians. For William Quandt and Kathleen Christison, this was in part because Kissinger was “blind” to the importance of the Palestinian issue.
At the other end of the scale, many assert that Kissinger did not just seek to ignore the Palestinians: he actively sought to help repress them. In this interpretation, which might be called “strategic delay,” contacts with the PLO placated Arab leaders, but more importantly, they bought time, excluding the PLO from peace negotiations indefinitely, in the hope that an alternative solution to the Palestinian issue might appear, such as Jordan agreeing to act as a representative of the Palestinian people. For Salim Yaqub, Kissinger’s policy was motivated by a desire “to shield Israel from pressure to withdraw from all or most of the territory it had occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.” Douglas Little argues that Kissinger and Nixon’s “disdain” for the Palestinian Fedayeen coloured their views. Paul Chamberlin maintains that US policy had a strong ideological component: Nixon and Kissinger sought to foster an anti-Palestinian coalition in the Middle East, comparing the Palestinian militants to “American student radicals” as “part of the same transnational challenge to order and state authority.” Jeremi Suri relates this issue to Kissinger’s ethnic background, claiming that his policy towards the Middle East was the product of a “well-considered worldview of a German Jew seeking to protect cherished values—and his heritage—from political extremes.” In these accounts, Kissinger seems irrevocably opposed to any diplomatic move towards the recognition of the Palestinian groups, especially the PLO.
Kissinger’s memoirs contain evidence that could support both of these interpretations (see James R. Stocker, “A Historical Inevitability? Kissinger and US Contacts with the Palestinians [1973–76],” The International History Review 39, no. 2 [2017]: 316–37).
37. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, pp. 352.
38. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 1141–42.
39. Ibid., p. 1138.
40. Ibid., pp. 358–59.
41. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 1139.
42. Ibid., p. 978.
43. Nathan Thrall, The Only Language They Understand (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017), p. 44. For Kissinger’s articulation of Middle East policy regarding the PLO, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, and Syria in the days following the Syrian-Israeli Disengagement Accords, see U.S. Department of State, “Meeting with Moshe Dayan and Ambassador Simcha Dinitz,” Memcon, U.S. Department of State, June 8, 1974, in Kissinger Telephone Conversations.
44. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 1139.
45. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 358.
46. Gerald R. Ford and King Hussein, “Joint Statement Following Discussions with King Hussein of Jordan,” news release, Aug. 18, 1974, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=4454.
47. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 361.
48. “Israeli Parliament Approves Pact over Right-Wing Bloc Objections,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1974, p. 26.
49. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 1139–40.
50. Clinton Bailey, Jordan’s Palestinian Challenge, 1948–1983: A Political History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 71–72.
51. L. Carl Brown, “The Endgame,” in The October War, ed. Richard B. Parker (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), pp. 234–35.
52. Edward R. F. Sheehan, “How Kissinger Did It: Step by Step in the Middle East,” Foreign Policy 22 (Spring, 1976): 47.
53. In Years of Upheaval (p. 1141), Kissinger states, “Torn between our analysis and objective conditions, I played for time, keeping both the Egyptian and Jordanian options open—finally committing to neither—hoping that circumstance might resolve our perplexities.” Others allege a Machiavellian calculation in which Kissinger schemed to undermine the Jordanian option.” See Avi Shlaim, Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), pp. 376–80.
54. The preceding paragraph draws from Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 383.
55. Kathleen Christison says that “Kissinger repeatedly indicates, moreover, that he believed that including the Palestinians would complicate matters. Against the judgment of most of his Middle East ambassadors, he concluded that engaging the PLO in the peace process would radicalize the process because the Palestinians, he shuddered, would ‘raise all the issues the Israelis can’t handle’ (p. 1053). This memoir, more than many similar self-serving political reminiscences, is a testament to political myopia and the persistence of a mind-set even in the face of evidence that contradicts it.” Kathleen Christison, “Kissinger: Years of Renewal (Review),” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 1 (1999/2000), http://www.palestine-studies.org/jps/fulltext/40756. Similarly, Hanhimäki has argued, “Kissinger’s failure to take action on the issue of the Palestinians ‘would continue to mar any efforts at a comprehensive solution to one of the world’s most volatile areas.” See Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect, p. 331.
Chapter 6: Game Changing: Shaping the Deal/No-Deal Balance
1. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
2. Of course, much academic writing on negotiation is perfectly consistent with Kissinger’s view, most notably the standard prescriptive advice to build up one’s no-deal options, or BATNA, “best alternative to a negotiated agreement.” For the acronym, see Fisher, Ury, and Patton, Getting to Yes. For negotiation analytic work that addresses these issues, see, e.g., Lax and Sebenius, 3-D Negotiation; and David A. Lax and James K. Sebenius, “3-D Negotiation: Playing the Whole Game,” Harvard Business Review 81, no. 11 (2003). Beyond negotiation, scholarship consistent with Kissinger’s approach can be found in the work of international relations researchers on “coercive diplomacy” and other eclectic scholars loosely grouped together as “negotiation analysis.” See G. A. Craig and A. L. George, Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Problems of Our Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict; and Schelling, Arms and Influence.
3. See, e.g., Thompson, The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator; Neale and Bazerman, Cognition and Rationality in Negotiation.
4. Jeffrey Z. Rubin, “Editor’s Introduction,” Negotiation Journal 1, no. 1 (1985): 5.
5. Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice, p. 170.
6. Henry A. Kissinger, “U.S. Naval Academy Forrestal Lecture,” Annapolis, MD, 2007, Speeches and Public Statements, http://www.henryakissinger.com/speeches/041107.html.
7. Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice, p. 170.
8. Kissinger, On China, pp. 221–22.
9. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger”
10. Ibid., p. 10.
11. Goldberg, “World Chaos and World Order: Conversations with Henry Kissinger.”
12. In 2017, filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick produced a widely acclaimed, eighteen-hour public television series on this war, which attests to its continuous importance and the fascination it still holds for an American (Vietnamese and other) audience. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War, documentary, PBS, Walpole, NH: Florentine Films, 2017. A sampling would include: Fredrik Logevall’s Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), and his Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972); Michael Maclear, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War (New York: Methuen, 1981); Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1984); Michael Lind, The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America’s Most Disastrous Military Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1999).
13. Throughout this chapter, we provide explicit sources for many of the dates of events associated with the Vietnam War. Where we do not cite sources, we generally rely on the detailed timeline of the war put together by Philip Gavin, “United States in Vietnam, 1945–1975: Comprehensive Timelines with Quotes and Analysis,” http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/vietnam/index.html; or see Philip Gavin, The Fall of Vietnam, World History Series (New York: Lucent Press, 2003).
14. A divided, and thus dependent, Vietnam was arguably in China’s interest. See, Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 635. For example, historian Adam Ulam argues that “For China . . . the [1954 Geneva] settlement represented an unqualified diplomatic success. Continued fighting would have meant the probability of American bases and soldiers on China’s frontiers. Now there would be a Communist buffer state, and the very incompleteness of Ho Chi Minh’s success would make him more dependent on China than would otherwise be the case.” See Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–67 (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 553.
15. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 639.
16. Ibid., p. 653. Kennedy authorized sending 500 troops and advisors to Vietnam in May 1961, increasing the American presence to 900 advisors.
17. Fox Butterfield, “Nguyen Van Thieu Is Dead at 76; Last President of South Vietnam,” New York Times, Oct. 1, 2001, p. A1.
18. Jeffrey Record, The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998).
19. A number of scholars argue that the Johnson administration used the Gulf of Tonkin incident, whatever actually occurred, as a pretext for unleashing the war in Indochina. See, e.g., Edwin Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). For a review of the issues of fact, law, and policy relating to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and its subsequent application to the president’s power to make war in Vietnam, see William W. Van Alstyne, “Congress, the President, and the Power to Declare War: A Requiem for Vietnam,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 121, no. 1 (1972): 1–28. The controversy over this incident continued decades after the war ended; see, e.g., Scott Shane, “Vietnam Study, Casting Doubts, Remains Secret,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 2005, p. A1.
20. “Deployment of a limited but significant Soviet military presence into North Vietnam has unquestionably sharpened the already bitter Sino-Soviet competition for influence in Hanoi . . . has put Hanoi in a better position to take an independent stance and to play one Communist partner off against the other” (Central Intelligence Agency, “Status of Soviet and Chinese Military Aid to North Vietnam,” Special Report, Sept. 1965, p. 5, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000652931.pdf). Evidence of the Sino-Soviet tension on this issue can be seen by way of several incidents. China unenthusiastically agreed to allow the Soviet aid to be transported by rail through Chinese territory. See Brantly Womack, China and Vietnam: The Politics of Asymmetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 177. For example, Adam Ulam references an instance in 1965 wherein Beijing declined Moscow’s request to allow four thousand Soviet troops to pass through Chinese territory and to establish air bases in China in order to transport war suppliies for the North Vietnamese. See Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, p. 705. Many other disputes between the two Communist giants took place over supplies to North Vietnam. For example, the Chinese refused a Soviet request for an “air corridor” across China to supply the North. For details, see Central Intelligence Agency, “The Sino-Soviet Dispute on Aid to North Vietnam (1965–1968), Sept. 30 1968 [formerly top secret, released in May 2007], Directorate of Intelligence, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/esau-37.pdf.
21. Michael Lee Lanning and Dan Cragg, Inside the VC and the NVA: The Real Story of North Vietnam’s Armed Forces (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1992), p. 119.
22. Womack, China and Vietnam, p. 176.
23. Lanning and Cragg, Inside the VC and the NVA, p. 119; Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, p. 699; William H. Mott IV, Soviet Military Assistance: An Empirical Perspective (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), p. 239.
24. For details and further sources, see, e.g., Nicholas Khoo, “Breaking the Ring of Encirclement: The Sino-Soviet Rift and Chinese Policy Toward Vietnam, 1964–1968,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, Winter 2010, pp. 3–42.
25. Mott IV, Soviet Military Assistance, p. 239.
26. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, p. 741.
27. Womack, China and Vietnam, p. 177; Mott IV, Soviet Military Assistance, p. 240.
28. Throughout the conflict, the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments insisted that the Vietcong were simply a tool of the North, while the Communists and many antiwar activists treated the Vietcong as a purely indigenous insurgency.
29. Arthur J. Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 636.
30. Alan Taylor, “The Vietnam War, Part I: Early Years and Escalation,” The Atlantic, March 30, 2015.
31. Bureau of the Census, “Vietnam Conflict—U.S. Military Forces in Vietnam and Casualties Incurred: 1961 to 1973 Figure No. 428.”
32. James H. Willbanks, cited in “Tet 1968: Turning Point,” May 15, 2012, FootNotes, Foreign Policy Research Institute, http://www.fpri.org/article/2012/05/tet-1968-the-turning-point/.
33. Joseph A. Fry, “Unpopular Messengers: Student Opposition to the Vietnam War,” in The War that Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War, ed. David L. Anderson and John Ernst (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 2007), p. 227.
34. While not directly pertinent to an analysis of Kissinger’s approach to these negotiations, it is worth noting that a Jan. 2, 2017, article in the New York Times described recently uncovered documents that appear to confirm a long-held suspicion of Richard Nixon’s involvement. Many people believe that then-candidate Nixon attempted to disrupt and derail negotiations led by President Lyndon Johnson to end the Vietnam War in the run-up to the 1968 presidential elections. Specifically, Nixon appears to have maintained a secret channel of communication to the South Vietnam regime in order to persuade its leaders to resist Johnson’s peace negotiations in the expectation of a better deal under a Nixon administration. See Peter Baker, “Nixon Tried to Spoil Johnson’s Vietnam Peace Talks in ’68, Notes Show,” New York Times, Jan. 2, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/us/politics/nixon-tried-to-spoil-johnsons-vietnam-peace-talks-in-68-notes-show.html?mcubz=2&_r=0; Philip Habib, who was involved in the Johnson-era talks, offers more details. See Philip Habib, “Cursed Is the Peacemaker,” Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, http://adst.org/oral-history/fascinating-figures/philip-habib-cursed-is-the-peacemaker/; Kissinger, however, was an advisor to Nixon’s Republican rival, Nelson Rockefeller, until August of that year. He was not a formal member of Nixon’s team until after the November election. Normally among Kissinger’s most fierce detractors, sociologist Todd Gitlin, in reviewing Niall Ferguson’s recent Kissinger biography, noted that “Ferguson also, to my eyes, makes mincemeat of the charge that Kissinger, by relaying inside information about the 1968 Paris negotiations that Lyndon Johnson was sponsoring, helped sabotage those talks and therefore to elect Richard Nixon.” See Todd Gitlin, “The Servile Fanatic: Niall Ferguson’s Grotesque but Telling New Biography of Henry Kissinger,” Tablet, Oct. 28, 2015, http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/194356/niall-ferguson-henry-kissinger. For Niall Ferguson’s analysis, see Ferguson, Kissinger: The Idealist, pp. 791–97.
35. Richard M. Nixon, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida.” American Presidency Project, Aug. 8, 1968. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25968.
36. Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), p. 349.
37. Written in 1968 but published in January 1969; the source is Henry Kissinger, “The Viet Nam Negotiations,” Foreign Affairs 47, no. 2 (1969): 216.
38. On the importance of credibility of security commitments to Kissinger, see White House Years, p. 1304; Kissinger repeatedly returns to the argument that the U.S. support for South Vietnam was important for the maintenance of the American global credibility. See, e.g., pp. 109, 292, 1038; Of course, as we indicated in chapter 5, the scholarly debate over the importance of credibility in international relations and negotiations continues. See Fettweiss, “Credibility and the War on Terror”; McMahon, “Credibility and World Power”; Walt, “The Credibility Addiction.”
39. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1304.
40. Ibid., p. 259. Nguyen Van Thieu, Nguyen Cao Ky, and Tran Van Huong were, respectively, South Vietnam’s president, vice president, and prime minister.
41. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1030–31.
42. Ibid., p. 282; In fact, Le Duc Tho made repeatedly clear that “even if we [the U.S.] withdrew, Hanoi would stop fighting only if there were a political settlement” that included the overthrow of the Thieu government. See Kissinger, White House Years, p. 444.
43. North Vietnamese foreign minister Nguyen Co Thach declared, “The breakthrough point for the negotiation and leading to ceasefire, it was in the beginning of October 1972. On October the 8th, ’72, Le Duc Tho put a very new proposal. That means we have dropped the demand for the dissolution of the Thieu government.” See Thach, “Interview with Nguyen Co Thach.”
44. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 237.
45. For simplicity, we often loosely combine the North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces in the discussion. However, there were two types of Communist forces fighting in South Vietnam: first, Vietcong insurgents and some regulars, directed in part by Hanoi since May 1959, and second, regular North Vietnamese troops first deployed in September 1964. Kissinger first raised the issue for mutual (U.S. and North Vietnamese) withdrawal from South Vietnam during his April 4, 1970, meeting with Le Duc Tho. It was understood that the Vietcong would remain within South Vietnam, whose government would have to confront this force. As early as September 1965, Kissinger noted that the “only outcome is [a] limited one . . . in which VC have some kind of role.” In any event, Kissinger assessed that “in many areas government survives only by means of a tacit agreement with the Vietcong whereby both sides coexist without getting into each other’s way.” See Ferguson, Kissinger: The Idealist, pp. 683 and 63. “In some areas the civil government was in cahoots with the Vietcong,” Kissinger pointedly observed (Ferguson, Kissinger: The Idealist, p. 668).
46. Richard M. Nixon, “Address to the Nation on Vietnam,” American Presidency Project, Nov. 3, 1969, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2303.
47. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 258–59; Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 468.
48. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 437.
49. Ibid., pp. 440–48, esp., p. 445. Kissinger’s suggested sixteen-month schedule seemed to contradict an earlier proposal by Nixon: “The North Vietnamese said it was unacceptable because it differed from the proposal of twelve months in the President’s November 3 speech. (I had used sixteen months because it was the only precise schedule that existed in the Pentagon and reflected the technical assessment of how long it would take us to withdraw our 400,000 remaining men and their equipment.) When I explained that the schedule was illustrative only and that the deadline would of course be made to coincide with Presidential pronouncements, it was rejected because Hanoi supported the ‘correct and logical’ deadline of six months put forward by the NLF” (White House Years, p. 445). Seeking to induce Hanoi to compromise, Kissinger told Le Duc Tho that the United States did not require the North Vietnamese to withdraw their troops publicly—that is, the United States would not make an effort to humiliate Hanoi. See Kissinger, White House Years, p. 443. Yet Hanoi repeatedly denied having troops within South Vietnam. See Szulc, “How Kissinger Did It,” p. 25.
50. For an account of these and related events, see Isaacson, Kissinger, pp. 269–70.
51. U.S. Department of Defense, “‘Casualty Status’: U.S. Military Operations 2003 to Present,” Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, https://www.defense.gov/casualty.pdf.
52. For a summary of poll results on whether it was a mistake to send U.S. troops to Vietnam, see William L. Lunch and Peter W. Sperlich, “American Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam,” Western Political Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1979): 25. See the whole article (pp. 21–44) for a much fuller discussion. Even though most Americans judged the war to be a mistake, support for “the way President Nixon is handling the Vietnam situation” was at 50 percent in the wake of the Cambodian invasion. See Andrew Z. Katz, “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: The Nixon Administration and the Pursuit of Peace with Honor in Vietnam,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1997): 500–501.
53. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 291.
54. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 689.
55. “Vietnam Conflict—U.S. Military Forces in Vietnam and Casualties Incurred: 1961 to 1973 Figure No. 428.”
56. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 275.
57. Ibid., p. 444.
58. Ibid., p. 275.
59. Vernon A. Walters, The Mighty and the Meek: Dispatches from the Front Line of Diplomacy (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2001), p. 518. (Cited in Horne, Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year, p. 51.)
60. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 260.
61. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 86.
62. See Sebenius, “Beyond the Deal,” p. 2; Lax and Sebenius, “Deal Making 2.0.”
63. Of course, actions associated with some of these fronts built on aspects of the negotiations begun under President Johnson.
64. Of course, how the war would have ended in this hypothetical case, and its battlefield consequences, would have depended on unknowable North and South Vietnamese responses—vis-à-vis each other and departing American forces.
65. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 436.
66. We will later return to the prospects for successful Vietnamization.
67. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1108.
68. Ibid., pp. 976 and 1018.
69. Robert B. Semple Jr., “Nixon Urges Supervised Truce in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and a Wider Peace Conference,” New York Times, Oct. 8, 1970, p. 1.
70. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 980–81.
71. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 86. When leaving office, President Dwight Eisenhower warned President John Kennedy that the situation in Laos was “the most important problem facing the U.S.” Quoted in Ferguson, Kissinger: The Idealist, p. 585.
72. See the review by Col. Thomas E. Hanson, “A Raid Too Far: Operation Lam Son 719 and Vietnamization in Laos and Invasion of Laos, 1971,” Military Review (2015): 124–26.
73. Rachel Halliburton, “Henry Kissinger’s World Order: The Outer Edge of What Is Possible,” Independent, Sept. 26, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/henry-kissingers-world-order-the-outer-edge-of-what-is-possible-9752563.html.
74. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 172, also p. 58; Ferguson, Kissinger: The Idealist, pp. 36–37; Kissinger, White House Years, p. 486; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 35.
75. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 262 and 311.
76. Ibid., p. 1017; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume VII, Vietnam, July 1970–January 1972. Ed. David Goldman and Erin Maha. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010. Doc. 207. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969–76v07/d207. This concession was not made public; nor was its precise relation to Nixon’s putatively temporary offer of a year earlier.
77. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1035.
78. Ibid., p. 441.
79. Ibid., p. 442.
80. Ibid., p. 1100.
81. Kissinger notes that the Cambodia and Laos operations in 1970 and 1971, respectively, aimed to disrupt the timetable of this offensive. White House Years, p. 1099.
82. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1101.
83. Ibid., p. 1103.
84. Ibid., pp. 1043–44. This was, Kissinger noted, an improvement by one month on the last secret offer Nixon had made to Le Duc Tho.
85. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1043–6.
86. Ibid., p. 1045.
87. Ibid., p. 1109.
88. Ibid., p. 1306.
89. Ibid., p. 1178. “A blockade [by intercepting ships, as opposed to mines], in contrast, would produce daily confrontations with the Soviets. Every time a ship was stopped we would see a repetition of the drama of the Cuban missile crisis; our challenge and the Soviet reaction to it would have to be acted out over and over again, probably on television. The danger of some slip or of a pretext for serious incident would be too great.” See Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1179.
90. Lewis Sorley, “Courage and Blood: South Vietnam’s Repulse of the 1972 Easter Offensive,” Parameters 29 (1999): 38–56.
91. Apart from Lewis Sorely’s assessment (ibid.) of how the offensive was blunted by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces, see also the text and extensive notes in Robert A. Pape Jr., “Coercive Air Power in the Vietnam War,” International Security 15, no. 2 (Fall 1990): 103–46.
92. Katz, “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy,” p. 498.
93. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1190.
94. Hence Kissinger writes about the “ideological truce” and “ideological armistice” with China. See Kissinger, On China, pp. 270 and 284. As he wrote in 1966, “Tactical intransigence and ideological vitality should not be confused with structural rigidity.” Quoted in Ferguson, Kissinger: The Idealist, p. 726; Kissinger “began to discern that, despite its obviously revolutionary character, the People’s Republic of China could also be brought into the pale of the balance of power” (Ferguson, Kissinger: The Idealist, p. 704).
95. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 167.
96. Central Intelligence Agency, “The Evolution of Soviet Policy in the Sino-Soviet Border Dispute,” April 28, 1970, (declassified May 2007), pp. 31–38; “Strategic Survey: The Sino-Soviet Dispute,” International Institute for Strategic Studies 70, no. 1 (1969): 100–102.
97. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 171.
98. Kissinger, On China, p. 218.
99. This information and quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., p. 219.
100. Ibid., p. 250.
101. Thach, “Interview with Nguyen Co Thach.” The exact question he was asked was “Could you be a little more precise about how the Chinese changed their position after Kissinger’s trip in July of 1971? Did they stop sending aid or did they put pressure on you to negotiate?”
102. As just indicated, North Vietnamese foreign minister Nguyen Co Thach alluded to the importance of Chinese pressure on North Vietnam after Kissinger’s 1971 visit. Kissinger argues that linkage played an important role in restraining Beijing’s reactions to the American actions against North Vietnam: “Peking . . . demonstrated that it had its priorities straight. In a conversation with me in New York on May 16 [1972], UN Ambassador Huang Hua repeated the official line that China stood behind its friends. But he did not demur when I pointed out that we had warned Peking at least half a dozen times of our determination to react strongly if Hanoi sought to impose a military solution. Nor did our actions in Vietnam prevent Huang Hua from encouraging a visit by me to Peking in June. We had not only achieved a free hand in Vietnam; we would be able to continue at the same time the construction of the larger design of our foreign policy.” See, Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1197. It was “certainly true,” Kissinger recently clarified, that China did not assist the United States in the actual negotiations with the North Vietnamese, but Beijing’s contribution was to “isolate Hanoi”: “China played a role in the atmosphere that was created—not in pressing them [Hanoi] on specific points.” See The Week That Changed the World, dir. Michael Trinklein, YouTube (2012), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHAPj9O5c0.
103. Kissinger, Diplomacy, pp. 730–31.
104. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1116, and also p. 13. Kissinger elaborated on this logic of isolating an adversary by comparing it to chess: “One elementary lesson for students of chess is that, in choosing among moves, one can do worse than to count the number of squares dominated by each choice. Generally, the more squares a player dominates, the greater his options and the more constrained become those of his opponent. Similarly, in diplomacy, the more options one side has, the fewer will be available to the other side and the more careful it will have to be in pursuing its objectives. Indeed, such a state of affairs may in time provide an incentive for the adversary to seek to end his adversarial role.” See Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 719. Or, as Kissinger put it elsewhere, “the demonstration of options is almost always an asset.” See Kissinger, White House Years, p. 725. He echoed this in his interview with Harvard’s American Secretaries of State Project, when discussing the triangular relationship he devised between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China: “the mere existence of these American options gave us a bargaining weapon.” See Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
105. Kissinger uses the term stake on a number of occasions when discussing the dynamics of combining pressure and incentives in devising détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China. For example, see Kissinger, Diplomacy, pp. 714 and 740; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 192, 1164–65, 1200; Kissinger tried to remain on guard against permitting the U.S. interest in détente and rapprochement to be used by Moscow and Beijing as levers to rein in American policy in Vietnam. America would not “permit itself to become emotionally dependent on relations with the Soviet Union.” See Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 712.
106. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 528–34. Background: This was the case because, after World War II, the four Allied powers (the United States, Soviet Union, France, and Britain) maintained military control over Germany. As a democratic West German state emerged alongside a pro-Communist, Soviet-backed East German state, tensions had mounted between the two, with the status of Berlin as its focus. For a fuller analysis see, David M. Keithly, Breakthrough in the Ostpolitik: The 1971 Quadripartite Agreement (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986). The three non-Soviet powers retained military control over West Berlin, while the Soviets walled off East Berlin. West Berliners were not recognized as citizens of the Bonn-based Federal Republic of Germany (“West Germany”); see Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 529–34, 824. Throughout the 1960s, with Berlin surrounded by East German territory and supported by vulnerable supply lines from the West, the West Germans and Allies refused to settle significant territorial disputes and wartime claims with the Soviets. Without a settlement, the Soviets’ ability to trade, especially with West Europeans, was severely restricted.
107. West Germany and USSR (Treaty of Moscow, Aug. 1970); West Germany and Poland (Treaty of Warsaw, Dec. 1970); United States, Soviet Union, France, and United Kingdom (Four Power Agreement, Sept. 1971); United States, Soviet Union, France, and United Kingdom (Transit Agreement, May 1972); West Germany and East Germany (Basic Treaty, Dec. 1972); West Germany and Czechoslovakia (Treaty of Prague, Dec. 1973). See “Germany, a Country Study,” 1996, Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
108. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 737. Also see Kissinger, White House Years, p. 533. Initially skeptical of Brandt’s initiative, Nixon and Kissinger came to see his diplomacy as advantageous by linking Brandt’s negotiations to the separate U.S.-Soviet negotiations over Berlin (see Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 530–34), as well as creating additional linkage with Soviet policy in Vietnam. Kissinger wrote, “Nixon and his advisers . . . came to accept Ostpolitik as necessary even while they believed that Brandt—unlike Adenauer—never had an emotional attachment to the Atlantic Alliance” (Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 735).
109. In that memo, Hal Sonnenfeldt framed the issue explicitly: “[W]e need to be clear about the extent to which we wish to make what happens in Vietnam, and the Soviet role with regard to it, a determinant of what happens next in US-Soviet relations . . . we need to be clear about the extent to which our substantive positions on other issues should be influenced by whatever the Soviets may do for us regarding Vietnam.” See Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XIV: Soviet Union October 1971–May 1972, eds. David C. Geyer, Nina D. Howland, Kent Sieg, and Edward C. Keefer (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 2006): Document 125, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969–76v14/d125.
110. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XL, Germany and Berlin, 1969–1972, eds. David C. Geyer and Edward C. Keefer (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 2008), “356. Editorial Note,” https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969 –76v40/d356.
111. In particular, see pp. 25–39 of Dale C. Copeland, “Trade Expectations and the Outbreak of Peace: Détente 1970–74 and the End of the Cold War, 1985–91,” Security Studies 9, nos. 1–2 (Autumn 1999–Winter 2000).
112. Ibid, pp. 29–31.
113. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1114, 1150.
114. Ibid., p. 1117.
115. Ibid., p. 1189.
116. Kissinger later explained the actual timing of this concession: “With respect to leaving North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam, that proposal was already implicit in October 1970, when we offered a cease-fire in place. That was not coupled with any proposal for the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops. It was made explicit in our secret proposal of May 1971. It was publicly repeated in January, I believe, 1972[,] in the sense that our peace program did not call for the withdrawal of the troops, and only called for a cease-fire so that we did not make an additional concession on the presence of the North Vietnamese troops in October 1972.” For a discussion, see Szulc, “How Kissinger Did It,” pp. 36–37.
117. However, knowing how keen Nixon was on the summit, the Soviets could hold hostage the prospect of the summit in return for reduced U.S. demands for pressure by Moscow on Hanoi. Both sides could play the linkage game with an event (the summit) that both wanted. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1145. This point about which way linkage between Vietnam and the summit actually functioned is extensively discussed in chapter 19 of Isaacson, Kissinger.
118. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1120.
119. Ibid., p. 1135.
120. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, pp. 336–37.
121. For example, journalist Alistair Horne, in his generally admiring account of Kissinger’s diplomacy, indicated that “Both Nixon and Kissinger placed great hope in using their opening to China[,] as well as détente with Moscow, to put pressure on North Vietnam . . . As far as Vietnam was concerned, however, the success with either of these communist behemoths was sorely limited—the line being from Moscow and Beijing: ‘we won’t interfere with Vietnam’s affairs’; though the flow of Soviet arms was reduced.” See Horne, Kissinger: 1973, p. 155. Winston Lord, who was directly involved in the negotiations with China, the Soviets, and the North Vietnamese, observed that “we thought that by our dealing with both giants in the Communist world we would have some psychological impact on Hanoi. This showed Hanoi that Moscow and Beijing cared more about their bilateral relations with the U.S. than they did about their relations with Hanoi. They wouldn’t snub Hanoi, but psychologically this would help to isolate Hanoi, e.g. holding summits in Beijing and Moscow while we had some of our meetings with Hanoi in the winter and spring of 1972, in the middle of Hanoi’s offensive in South Vietnam. Neither Moscow nor Beijing went so far as to cut off aid to North Vietnam or really lean on Hanoi. However, both Moscow and Beijing had a stake in our trying to get the Vietnam War behind us. . . . We believed that both Russia and China talked to Hanoi and suggested to North Vietnam that, in its own self-interest, they ought to settle for a military solution” (Lord, “Interview with Ambassador Winston Lord,” p. 271).
122. Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 422. Anatoly Dobrynin provides additional evidence on the Soviet decision not to cancel the 1972 Moscow Summit in view of the mining and bombing of Haiphong harbor: “the agreements with the Federal Republic of Germany were to be ratified several days before Nixon’s arrival, and a cancellation of the summit could exacerbate relations and block ratification, giving weight to the arguments to the ultraright in West Germany who opposed the agreements. Moscow was fully aware of this. Moreover, it also realized that refusing to receive Nixon would complicate our relations with the American administration for a long period, putting off the summit indefinitely, jeopardizing the ABM and SALT agreements, and promoting another round of the arms race.” See Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (1962—1986) (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 248.
123. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1345 and also see p. 17.
124. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.” However, this was strictly a private reaction: “negotiators must not betray emotion; it becomes a weapon in the hands of the other side.” See Kissinger, White House Years, p. 659. Furthermore, as the negotiations were nearing conclusion in January 1973, Kissinger confided in Nixon: “The slightest hint of eagerness could prove suicidal.” See Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1464 and also p. 438, on the dangers of giving an “unnecessary impression of eagerness” in a negotiation.
125. Nixon and Kissinger originally raised the possibility of high-level U.S.-North Vietnam contacts with Thieu during a meeting at Midway Atoll in the Pacific on June 8, 1969. “Thieu agreed,” Kissinger remembered, “provided he was informed about any political discussions.” See Kissinger, White House Years, p. 274. Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s military aide, also briefed Thieu on July 3, 1972. See Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1310. While keeping Thieu generally informed, Kissinger clearly preferred to keep Thieu away from the specifics of the negotiation because of the need to dissociate the military (withdrawal) and political (structure of South Vietnamese government) aspects of the negotiation. Writing in 1969, Kissinger had stated, “The United States . . . should concentrate on the subject of the mutual withdrawal of external forces and avoid negotiating about the internal structure of South Viet Nam for as long as possible. . . . The participation of Saigon and the NLF [in earlier negotiations] raised issues . . . that would have been better deferred; it made discussion of the internal structure of South Viet Nam hard to avoid.” See Kissinger, “The Viet Nam Negotiations,” p. 232.
126. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 282.
127. The issue of who told what to whom and when has been the subject of conflicting accounts; see e.g., Isaacson, Kissinger, or chaps. 31 and 32 of Kissinger, White House Years.
128. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1319, 1327.
129. The threats were communicated on Oct. 22, 24, 28, Nov. 10, 29, Dec. 17, 1972, and Jan. 5, 16, 17, and 20, 1973. See ibid., pp. 1382, 1396, 1402, 1412, 1426, 1459, 1462, 1469–70.
130. The assurances were communicated on Oct. 19, 24, 28, Nov. 14, 29, 1972, and Jan. 5, 14, and 21, 1973. See Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1369, 1396, 1402, 1412, 1426, 1462, 1470. “American air power was thus always seen as an essential deterrent to the resumption of all-out war. Nixon gave assurances on this score to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to persuade Thieu to accept the Paris Agreement” (Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 303).
131. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
132. Ibid.
133. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1411.
134. In Kissinger’s words,
“We failed early enough to grasp that Thieu’s real objection was not to the terms but the fact of any compromise. Conflict between us and Thieu was built into the termination of the war on any terms less than Hanoi’s total surrender. By definition[,] sovereignty cannot be divided. Any outcome that left Thieu in less than total control of his entire territory was therefore for him a setback. He might not be able to change the balance of power on the ground, but this was a far cry from accepting it as a legal obligation. He had gone along with various compromise offers suggesting the contrary, not out of conviction, but as the price for continued American support. We had sustained our backing for Saigon in America by a series of proposals—all of which he had accepted—designed to prove our willingness to walk the extra mile. But the cumulative impact of these proposals—cease-fire in place, new elections, American withdrawal—all amounted to giving Saigon a legal status different from Hanoi’s. This is what rankled deeply” (Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1393).
This was the same situation as before 1968 when, as Clark Clifford, Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense, said, “The South Vietnamese did not want to end the war—not while they were protected by over five hundred thousand American troops and a gold flow of money.” Quoted in Douglas Brinkley, Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War (New York: William Morrow, 2004), p. 131. Or, as Kissinger assessed during his own negotiations with Thieu in 1972, the South Vietnamese “were not satisfied with survival; they wanted a guarantee that they would prevail.” See Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1323–24. Yet this stood in direct opposition to the U.S. objectives: “We had to fight the war and simultaneously strengthen the South Vietnamese to survive without us—in other words, to make ourselves dispensable” (White House Years, p. 232). Indeed, Kissinger argued in that same work that “we had no duty to them to guarantee them a total victory that we were unable to define, whose achievement required an open-ended commitment extending over many years more, and that we had publicly forsworn for the past three years” (p. 1349).
In the following passages, Kissinger reflects on the barriers to a negotiated agreement between the two Vietnams, and the cultural differences that prevented the United States from promptly grasping the seriousness of these obstacles:
“Our constant search for some compromise formula illuminated the cultural gap between us and the Vietnamese because the very concept of compromise was alien to both Vietnamese parties.
We had no way of understanding the primeval hatred that animated the two sides. They had fought each other for a generation. They had assassinated each other’s officials, tortured each other’s prisoners. The chasm of distrust and mutually inflicted suffering was unbridgeable by goodwill or the sort of compromise formulas toward which Americans incline. Each Vietnamese party saw in a settlement the starting point of a new struggle sometime in the not too distant future. Every deliberately vague formula I put forward was tested by each side to determine to what extent it represented an opportunity to inflict a humiliation on the despised opponent. And both sides were marvelously subtle and ingenious in changing phraseology to score such victories, particularly in the Vietnamese language with its finely shaded meanings quite beyond our grasp” (Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1325).
135. Thach, “Interview with Nguyen Co Thach.”
136. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1416–22, 1428–43.
137. “I had come to Paris on December 4 with instructions from Nixon to settle. Le Duc Tho had kept me there ten days, our longest negotiating session ever, and each day we seemed farther away from an agreement. . . . Each day several issues that we thought had been settled in the agreement emerged again in loaded North Vietnamese drafts of either the understandings or the protocols. Le Duc Tho would then yield on most of these in a long day of negotiation, but made sure that enough were left over, or new ones reopened, to prevent a conclusion. . . . This was the insoluble problem over which we began the Christmas bombing five days later.” See Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1444–45.
138. For an overview, see Stephen E. Ambrose, “The Christmas Bombing,” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History 4 (Winter 1992): 8–17. The efficacy of this campaign, along with that of earlier air campaigns, in terms of the negotiating objectives, was carefully evaluated by Robert A. Pape, Jr., and found to be generally effective. See Pape, “Coercive Air Power in the Vietnam War,” pp. 103–46. The specific reference behind this efficacy claim in the text is at p. 141; see also Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1448, 1459. The destructive capacity of this bombing campaign (called Operation Linebacker II) was larger than that of all the bombs used against North Vietnam from 1969 to 1971. At the time, Vietnam veteran John Kerry was “flabbergasted” (in the words of historian Douglas Brinkley) by the “monstrous brutality” of the bombing campaign, and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield called the attacks a “Stone Age tactic.” See Brinkley, Tour of Duty, pp. 425–28. Kissinger offers a very different view of the actual bombing and its effects on the negotiations. See White House Years, pp. 1446–57.
139. For specifics of the changes, see Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1461–62. Douglas Brinkley agrees that the “Christmas bombings had worked” in forcing Hanoi to negotiate at least some changes. See Brinkley, Tour of Duty, p. 427.
140. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1469–70. One of Nixon’s brutal letters to Thieu reflects the strain between the two nominal allies: On Jan. 16, 1973, he wrote, “I have therefore irrevocably decided to proceed to initial the Agreement on Jan. 23, 1973, and to sign it on Jan. 27, 1973, in Paris. I will do so, if necessary, alone. In that case I shall have to explain publicly that your Government obstructs peace. The result will be an inevitable and immediate termination of U.S. economic and military assistance which cannot be forestalled by a change of personnel in your government.” Quoted in Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1469.
141. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
142. See, for example, Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States in Vietnam, 1950–1975, 5th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2014), p. 334, and Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, p. 468.
143. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
144. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 696.
145. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 327; In the same work, Kissinger notes, “I was fighting a desperate but losing struggle against the Pentagon’s desire to redeploy air and naval forces out of Southeast Asia in order to devote scarce funds to the procurement of new weapons” (p. 329).
146. Lunch and Sperlich, “American Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam,” p. 25.
147. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 546.
148. Horne, “The Case for Henry Kissinger.”
149. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
150. Kissinger, “U.S. Naval Academy Forrestal Lecture.”
151. Goldberg, “World Chaos and World Order.”
152. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1102.
153. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
154. Rachel Halliburton, “Henry Kissinger’s World Order.”
155. Morton A. Kaplan and Abram Chayes, Vietnam Settlement: Why 1973, Not 1969?, Rational Debate Series (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1987).
156. For example, Roger Morris, then of the National Security Council, resigned over the Cambodia invasion of April 1970, indicating that the invasion was a “betrayal of the president’s pledge to seek an honorable and just peace in Vietnam. I knew that that peace was within our grasp. I was intimately involved in the negotiations. I knew that the other side was ready to agree, that we were ready to agree, and that the Cambodian invasion really destroyed all of that. Devastated it for years to come. And literally cost tens of thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives.” From BBC4, “The Trials of Henry Kissinger,” YouTube. https://youtu.be/DwGtctUYhRI; or, in the view of the BBC’s David Taylor, “Once in office [Nixon] escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia, with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives—quite apart from the lives of the Laotians, Cambodians and Vietnamese caught up in the new offensives—before finally settling for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968.” David Taylor, “The Lyndon Johnson Tapes: Richard Nixon’s ‘Treason,’” BBC News Magazine (2013). Published electronically March 22, 2013,. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21768668.
157. Kissinger continues “Not even the strongest critics in the mainstream of American life recommended immediate withdrawal in 1969 . . . Above all, Hanoi had made clear repeatedly that the war could not be ended—or our prisoners released—even by our unilateral withdrawal.” Kissinger, White House Years, p. 286.
158. Colin L. Powell and Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 149.
159. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 286.
160. “[E]very poll showed that unilateral withdrawal was rejected by crushing majorities. The public was as ambivalent as the government planners: It wanted us to get out of Vietnam and yet it did not want defeat.” Kissinger, White House Years, p. 286.
161. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 286. As we’ve just noted, Kissinger made this point even more emphatically elsewhere in his writing: “Peking had no interest in a demonstration that the United States was prepared to dump its friends,” Kissinger stated, “in its long-range perspective of seeking a counterweight to the Soviet Union, Peking in fact had a stake in our reputation for reliability.” Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1304.
162. As previously mentioned in note 43 for this chapter, Kissinger repeatedly returns to the argument that the U.S. support for South Vietnam was important for the maintenance of American global credibility. See, for example, Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 109, 292, and 1038. As we indicate in chapter 4, the debate over the importance of credibility in international relations and negotiations continues; for examples, see Fettweiss; McMahon; Walt.
163. For the importance of the Vietnamization program along with its military and political components, see, e.g., Gregory A. Daddis, “American Military Strategy in the Vietnam War, 1965–1973,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
164. Nixon, RN, p. 349; Kissinger, “The Viet Nam Negotiations,” p. 216; With respect to policymakers’ understanding of the constraints on what U.S. power could achieve, see Lawrence W. Serewicz, America at the Brink of Empire: Rusk, Kissinger, and the Vietnam War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), p. 10.
165. See, e.g., Eugene McCarthy, “Topics: The Failure of Vietnamization by Any Name,” New York Times, Aug. 1, 1970. A major offensive test of the Vietnamization strategy, a ground invasion of Laos in 1971 by Vietnamese troops, suggested the weaknesses of this approach. See the review by Hanson, “A Raid Too Far”; or, later, see Scott Sigmund Gartner, “Differing Evaluations of Vietnamization,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 2 (1998).
166. Kissinger, “Interview with Henry Kissinger, April 17, 1982,” Vietnam: A Television History, WGBH (1982), https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth-oai:dv141j297.
167. As we’ve just noted, after the Paris Agreement was signed in January 1973, a Gallup poll reported that an overwhelming 79 percent of the public opposed the reintervention of American military troops in Vietnam even “if North Vietnam were to try to take over South Vietnam” (Lunch and Sperlich, “American Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam,” p. 25).
168. The classic works on this topic are Schelling’s, The Strategy of Conflict and Arms and Influence. Substantial advances were made in Robert J. Art and Patrick M. Cronin, The United States and Coercive Diplomacy (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2003); George Alexander and William Simons, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy, 2nd Rev. Ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); Paul Gordon Lauren, Gordon A. Craig, and Alexander L. George, Force and the Limits of Military Might (New York: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 2002); Lawrence Freedman, ed. Strategic Coercion: Concepts and Cases (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
169. Pape, “Coercive Air Power in the Vietnam War.”
170. CNN, “Vietnam War: Fast Facts,” July 1, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/01/world/vietnam-war-fast-facts/.
171. Of course, the strategy and tactics used in the application of force are as important as its total magnitude. For a summary, see, e.g., Daddis, “American Military Strategy in the Vietnam War, 1965–1973.”
172. For the classic treatment of the ethics of the use of force, see Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 5th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2015). For a complementary discussion, see the special section on “Just War and Its Critics,” Ethics and International Affairs 27, no. 1 (2013): 1–114. See also David P. Fidler, “Just and Unjust Wars: The Uses of Coercion,” Daedalus 145 (2016): 37–49. A helpful legal treatment of these issues can be found in Michael W. Reisman, “Criteria for the Lawful Use of Force in International Law,” Yale Journal of International Law 279 (1985), http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/739. For an accessible introduction to key principles of international law and the use of force, see, e.g., Christine Gray, International Law and the Use of Force (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). For help in thinking through a wider set of ethical issues in negotiation, an excellent compendium of articles was edited by Carrie Menkel-Meadow and Michael Wheeler, eds., What’s Fair? Ethics for Negotiators (Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2010).
173. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 48.
174. Interested readers may wish to review prominent arguments against his use of force in Indochina and on the implications for American foreign policy. For prominent critiques of the Nixon administration’s Cambodia policies, see Hersh, The Price of Power; Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Probably the most influential critique of the Nixon administration’s Cambodia policy has been Shawcross (about which, see below within this note). Walter Isaacson has a more moderate, but still critical view: “Although the North Vietnamese had violated Cambodia’s neutrality, their camps had not yet disrupted the lives of the Cambodian peasants and fishermen. But that delicate balance began to falter when the American bombing campaign caused the communist camps to disperse over a larger area. The bombing may not have been the main cause of Cambodia’s plunge toward chaos a year later, but it did not make Sihanouk’s balancing act any easier.” See Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 177. Judging far more harshly than Isaacson, Greg Grandin says, “Kissinger didn’t create the Khmer Rouge, but his mad and illegal bombing of Cambodia created the conditions where the most genocidal, militant faction of a broad and diverse insurgency could seize control of first the insurgency and then the state.” See Greg Grandin, “Henry Kissinger’s ‘Mad and Illegal’ Bombing: What You Need to Know About His Real History—and Why the Sanders/Clinton Exchange Matters,” Salon, Feb. 12, 2016, http://www.salon.com/2016/02/12/henry_kissingers_mad_and_illegal_bombing_what_you_need_to_know_about_his_real_history_and_why_the_sandersclinton_exchange_matters/. Similarly, see Todd Gitlin, “Kissinger Was a Courtier to Atrocity,” New York Times, Feb. 13, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/02/13/henry-kissinger-sage-or-pariah/kissinger-was-a-courtier-to-atrocity?mcubz=2. Unsurprisingly, among the most extensive explanations and justifications of Kissinger’s actions can be found in the three volumes of his memoirs: Kissinger, White House Years; Years of Upheaval; and Years of Renewal. A number of pros and cons of Kissinger’s record in Vietnam and beyond are summarized in Thompson, Henry Kissinger: Good or Evil?; While we have cited numerous critics, Kissinger’s actions in Indochina also find strong support in many quarters. For examples, see Robert D. Kaplan, “In Defense of Henry Kissinger,” Atlantic, May 2013; Joffe, “In Defense of Henry Kissinger”; Robert D. Blackwill, “In Defense of Kissinger,” National Interest (Jan.–Feb. 2014), http://nationalinterest.org/article/defense-kissinger-9642; Niall Ferguson, “The Kissinger Diaries: What He Really Thought About Vietnam,” Politico, Oct. 10, 2015, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/henry-kissinger-vietnam-diaries-213236; Kaplan, “Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism.” Indeed, some initially harsh critics later became ambivalent. For example, William Shawcross’s highly influential 1979 book, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, found particular fault with Kissinger’s actions, as well as those of the Nixon administration and the South Vietnamese regime. In that book, Shawcross singled them out for what he saw as their disproportionate responsibility for later atrocities in Cambodia. In 1995, however, Shawcross substantially moderated his earlier critique. He noted that his initial analysis was unbalanced, and specifically that he had not sufficiently taken into account the brutality of the North Vietnamese regime. He said, “Indeed those of us who opposed the American war in Indo-China should be extremely humble in the face of the appalling aftermath: a form of genocide in Cambodia and horrific tyranny in both Vietnam and Laos. Looking back on my own coverage for the Sunday Times of the South Vietnamese war effort of 1970–75, I think I concentrated too easily on the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese and their American allies, was too ignorant of the inhuman Hanoi regime, and far too willing to believe that a victory by the communists would provide a better future. But after the communist victory came the refugees to Thailand and the floods of boat people desperately seeking to escape the Cambodian killing fields and the Vietnamese gulags. Their eloquent testimony should have put paid to all illusions” (William Shawcross, “Shrugging Off Genocide,” Times [London], Dec. 19, 1994, p. 16).
Chapter 7: Multiparty Dexterity: Orchestrating Complex Negotiations
1. Richard E. Neustadt, Alliance Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 5.
2. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 972.
3. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 728.
4. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 764–65.
5. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 729.
6. Kissinger, “The White Revolutionary: Reflections on Bismarck,” pp. 912–13.
7. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 764–65.
8. Ibid., p. 132.
9. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 731.
10. Kissinger, On China, p. 237.
11. Ibid., p. 238.
12. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 772.
13. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 685.
14. Ibid., p. 166.
15. “Strategic Survey: The Sino-Soviet Dispute.”
16. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger”; Kissinger, On China, p. 220.
17. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 723.
18. Ibid., p. 223.
19. Kissinger, On China, pp. 225–26.
20. Ibid., pp. 230–31.
21. Ibid., pp. 233–34.
22. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 740.
23. Kissinger, On China, p. 249.
24. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 765.
25. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 150.
26. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 758–59.
27. Ibid.; Diplomacy, p. 728.
28. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1084–87.
29. Kissinger, On China, p. 271.
30. Ibid., p. 270.
31. Kissinger, Diplomacy, pp. 730–31.
32. Ibid.
33. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 766–67.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., pp. 177–78.
36. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 730.
37. Evelyn Goh, Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 231. Or, in a standard text: “President Nixon and National Security Assistant Henry Kissinger opted for triangular diplomacy. They would play the ‘China card’ to win concessions from Moscow and the ‘Soviet card’ to influence China” (Walter Clemens, Dynamics of International Relations [London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004], p. 254).
38. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., p. 5.
41. Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 166.
42. Ibid.
43. See Sebenius, “Beyond the Deal.”
44. James K. Sebenius, “Sequencing to Build Coalitions: With Whom Should I Talk First?” in Wise Choices: Decisions, Games, and Negotiations, eds. Richard Zeckhauser, Ralph Keeney, and James Sebenius (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996). See also chapter 7 in Lax and Sebenius, 3-D Negotiation.
45. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 231.
46. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 616.
47. Ibid., pp. 263–64.
48. Ibid., p. 1028.
49. Ibid.
50. Henry Kissinger, “Kissinger Memorandum: ‘To Isolate the Palestinians’: Meeting with Jewish Leaders,” Memcon, June 15, 1975, New York, http://www.merip.org/mer/mer96/kissinger-memorandum-isolate-palestinians.
51. Ibid.
Chapter 8: Introduction to Kissinger’s Interpersonal Approach and Tactics
1. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 733.
2. Golda Meir, My Life (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), p. 442.
3. Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy: Abridged Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), pp. 44–45.
4. Fred Iklé, How Nations Negotiate (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).
5. Kissinger, On China, pp. 247–48.
Chapter 9: Reading Counterparts
1. Lord, “Interview with Ambassador Winston Lord,” p. 97.
2. Stanley Hoffmann, “The Case of Dr. Kissinger,” New York Review of Books, Dec. 6, 1979, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/12/06/the-case-of-dr-kissinger/.
3. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 727.
4. Ibid.
5. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 1099.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 140.
8. Henry A. Kissinger, “Memorandum to the President: Leonid Brezhnev: The Man and His Style,” U.S. Department of State, Gerald Ford Presidential Library, 1974, https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/exhibits/vladivostok/brezhnev.pdf.
9. Ibid.
10. For a number of references to such manuals, plus suggested correctives, see, e.g., James K. Sebenius, “The Hidden Challenge of Cross-Border Negotiations,” Harvard Business Review 80, no. 3 (2002); “Assess, Don’t Assume, Part I: Etiquette and National Culture in Negotiation,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 10–048, Dec. 2009; “Assess, Don’t Assume, Part II: Negotiating Implications of Cross-Border Differences in Decision Making, Governance, and Political Economy,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, no. 10–050, Dec. 2009.
11. Henry A. Kissinger, “Memo from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, U.S. Department of State, Feb. 19, 1972, pp. 672–77.
12. Ibid., p. 673.
13. Ibid., pp. 674–75.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., pp. 675–76.
16. Ibid., pp. 675–77.
17. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1056.
18. Ibid., p. 1138.
19. Ibid., p. 370.
20. Ibid., pp. 27, 28.
21. Ibid., p. 33.
22. Ibid.
23. Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), pp. 394–95.
24. Ibid., pp. 710 and 745–46.
25. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 647–48.
26. Ibid., pp. 1061, 1065–66.
27. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1051.
28. William C. Kirby, “A Note on the 40th Anniversary of Nixon’s Visit to China,” Cross Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 2 (March 2012); Kissinger, “Memorandum to the President: Leonid Brezhnev.”
29. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1051.
30. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 735.
31. Henry A. Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), pp. 121–22.
32. Ibid., p. 122.
33. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 387.
34. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
35. Lord, “Interview with Ambassador Winston Lord,” pp. 97–98.
36. Hoffmann, “The Case of Dr. Kissinger.”
Chapter 10: Relationships and Rapport
1. For example, he and President “Nixon relied neither on personal relations nor on the conversion of the Soviets but on a balancing of incentives as a way of making the Kremlin more malleable.” Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 730. His colleague Winston Lord noted that Kissinger was “never naive enough to base his negotiating style on personal likes or dislikes. He did this in terms of national self-interest” (Lord, “Interview with Ambassador Winston Lord”).
2. Henry A. Kissinger and Hillary Clinton, interview by Jon Meacham, Jan. 4, 2009.
3. Ibid.
4. His colleague Winston Lord, after noting that Kissinger took national interest as primary, nonetheless stated that “around the edges you can build up trust in some cases that help you get through some difficult points” (Lord, “Interview with Ambassador Winston Lord”).
5. Niall Ferguson, “The Secret to Henry Kissinger’s Success,” Politico, January 20, 2018, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/20/henry-kissinger-networking-216482; and Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from Freemasons to Facebook, New York: Penguin, 2017.
6. Ibid.
7. John D. Montgomery, “The Education of Henry Kissinger,” Journal of International Affairs 29, no. 1 (1975): 5.
8. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
9. Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp. 200–201.
10. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1216.
11. Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp. 200–201.
12. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
13. Jon Meacham. “Hillary Clinton, Kissinger on Sec. of State Job.”
14. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 26.
15. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 230.
16. Kissinger, “Transcript of the American Secretaries of State Project: Henry A. Kissinger.”
17. Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 557.
18. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 792.
19. Edward Heath, The Course of My Life: My Autobiography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998), p. 244.
20. Lord, “Interview with Ambassador Winston Lord,” p. 87.
21. Halliburton, “Henry Kissinger’s World Order.”
22. Isaacson, Kissinger, pp. 553–56.
23. Ibid., p. 554.
24. Ibid., p. 553.
25. Ibid., pp. 553, 554.
26. Lord, “Interview with Ambassador Winston Lord,” p. 87.
27. Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 554.
28. Isaacson explained more fully that “a study of [Kissinger’s] words—even the transcripts of relatively unguarded conversations—shows him phrasing his remarks carefully so as not to contradict directly what he was telling someone else. He would withhold information and even allow a listener to be misled—which comes close to the definition of deceit. But he seldom resorted to unadorned lying in his negotiating efforts” (Kissinger, p. 554).
29. James Callaghan, Time and Chance (London: Collins, 1987), pp. 358–59.
30. Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp. 200–201.
31. Meir, My Life, p. 442.
32. Smith, The Great Betrayal, pp. 203–4.
33. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 791.
34. Ferguson, “The Secret to Kissinger’s Success.”
35. Ferguson, The Square and the Tower.
Chapter 11: Proposals, Concessions, and “Constructive Ambiguity”
1. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 214.
2. Ibid.
3. Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice, p. 205.
4. Kissinger, On China, pp. 270–71.
5. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 969.
6. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 214.
7. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 791.
8. Kissinger, On China, pp. 270–71.
9. Ibid., pp. 221–22.
10. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 727.
11. There can be exceptions to this nominally general advice. For example, a haggling style may be useful to persuade key members of Congress or a skeptical ally that you have held out for the best possible deal.
12. Kissinger, White House Years, 436–37.
13. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 685.
14. Ibid., p. 286.
15. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 783.
16. Ibid. Kissinger acknowledged that “In fairness I must say that I adapted it from a State Department planning document for negotiations, which aborted in the Fifties” (p. 783).
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., pp. 767, 769.
20. Ibid., p. 770.
21. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 641–42.
22. Ibid.
23. James Fallows, “Elliott Abrams on Hypocrisy,” The Atlantic, Sept. 19, 2011.
24. Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 556.
25. Khaled Elgindy, “When Ambiguity Is Destructive,” Jan. 22, 2014, Brookings (blog), https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/when-ambiguity-is-destructive/.
26. Shultz, Ideas and Action, p. 100.
27. The term originates in the work of Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict.
28. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 753.
29. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 825.
Chapter 12: Persistence, Momentum, and Shuttle Diplomacy
1. Heath, The Course of My Life, p. 244.
2. Yitzhak Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs (Berkeley: University of California, 1996), pp. 272–74.
3. Saunders, “On the Road Again.”
4. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 406.
5. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 803.
6. Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 546. Isaacson also noted that “The first known use of shuttle in this context was in a New York Times story, Jan. 11, 1974, by Bernard Gwertzman, which referred to Kissinger’s ‘unorthodox bit of shuttle diplomacy’” (p. 813).
7. The following is a small set of examples of such proposals, recommending shuttles for, respectively, Secretaries of State John Kerry, Warren Christopher, and James Baker: Bruce van Voorst, “Silent Shuttle,” Foreign Policy, July 26, 2013, http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/26/silent-shuttle/; Anthony Lewis, “A Christopher Shuttle?” New York Times, Dec. 3, 1993, A33; and “The Baker Shuttle,” Washington Post, May 14, 1991, A18.
8. Much of this and the previous paragraph is paraphrased, directly quoted from, or inspired by David A. Hoffmann, “Mediation and the Art of Shuttle Diplomacy,” Negotiation Journal 27, no. 3 (2011): 268–70.
9. In legal disputes, some mediators essentially engage in shuttle diplomacy and separate the disputants while others primarily ask that the parties and mediators work in the same room. Proponents of each method claim benefits. Compare G. Friedman and Jack Himmelstein, Challenging Conflict: Mediation Through Understanding (Chicago: American Bar Association, 2008), which emphasizes the benefits of having disputants work together; and Hoffmann, “Mediation and the Art of Shuttle Diplomancy,” emphasizing the advantages of a mediator caucusing separately with disputants.
10. Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 559.
11. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 390.
12. van Voorst, “Silent Shuttle.”
13. Quoted in Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 559.
14. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, pp. 406–7.
15. See, e.g., ibid., pp. 394–95.
Chapter 13: Secrecy, Centralization, and a Dominant Personal Role
1. Attributed to Cardinal Jules Mazarin (passage translated by James K. Sebenius), Bréviaire des politiciens (1684; Paris: Arlèa, 1996).
2. François de Callières, De la manière de négocier avec les souverains, ed. Alain Pekar Lempereur (passage translated by James K. Sebenius) (1716; Geneva: Droz, 2002), p. 69. Other historical observations on secrecy in diplomacy can be found in Aurélien Colson, “The Ambassador, Between Light and Shade: The Emergence of Secrecy as the Norm for International Negotiation,” 2007, ESSEC Business School, Institute for Research and Education on Negotiation, No. DR07023.
3. Lord, “Interview with Ambassador Winston Lord,” pp. 98–99.
4. Kissinger, On China, p. 236.
5. A detailed account of these actions from Kissinger’s point of view can be found in White House Years.
6. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 138.
7. Ibid., p. 1125.
8. Ibid., p. 684.
9. Ibid., p. 686.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p. 805.
12. Ibid.
13. Raymond L. Garthoff, “Negotiating SALT,” The Wilson Quarterly 1, no. 5 (1977).
14. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 147.
15. Gerard C. Smith, Doubletalk: The Story of the First Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1980), p. 1.
16. Ibid., p. 466.
17. Ibid., p. 235.
18. Ibid., p. 466.
19. Smith noted that this problem could be exacerbated when back-channel negotiations sometimes used only Soviet interpreters. “[I]n the absence of an American interpreter’s verbatim notes, one cannot prepare the fullest possible record of negotiating exchanges. In a number of cases, no record was made available to SALT officials as to what transpired in the back channel . . . unavailability of significant portions of the record can be a substantial handicap” (Doubletalk, p. 467). Of course, better use of interpreters can be remedied; it is not an inherent flaw in secret negotiations, unless truly discreet interpreters cannot be found.
20. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 865.
21. Stanley Hoffmann, “The Case of Dr. Kissinger.”
22. William P. Bundy, A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 128.
23. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 831–32.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., p. 816.
26. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 224–25.
27. Kissinger, White House Years.
28. Ibid., p. 1025.
29. Ibid. He went on, however, to state that “There is no doubt that in 1971 secrecy enabled Hanoi to whipsaw us; the question whether more openness would have stopped this or produced an even earlier stalemate must remain in the realm of conjecture” (p. 1020).
30. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 805.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., pp. 1229–30.
33. Smith, Doubletalk, p. 235.
34. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 264.
35. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 762.
36. Ibid.
37. Horne, Kissinger: 1973, p. 112.
38. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 282.
39. There are many, more detailed, accounts of who told what to whom than are relevant here; see, e.g., chap. 20 of Isaacson, Kissinger; or chaps. 31 and 32 of Kissinger, White House Years.
40. Der Spiegel, “The Americans Betrayed Us: Interview with Nguyen Van Thieu” 50, no. 33, Dec. 10, 1979, pp. 197–213, https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/20035c62-a1c8–44ab-9721–273749085ae4/publishable_en.pdf.
41. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1393.
42. Fisher, Ury, and Patton, Getting to Yes, p. 36.
43. Stanley Hoffmann, “The Case of Dr. Kissinger.”
44. Isaacson, Kissinger, pp. 762–63.
45. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 822.
46. Ibid., p. 806.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., p. 822.
Conclusion: Key Lessons on Negotiation from Henry Kissinger
1. See especially Robert H. Mnookin, Scott R. Peppet, and Andrew S. Tulumello, Beyond Winning: Negotiating to Create Value in Deals and Disputes (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2000); as well as David A. Lax and James K. Sebenius, The Manager as Negotiator: Bargaining for Cooperation and Competitive Gain (New York: Free Press, 1986); Lax and Sebenius, 3-D Negotiation.
2. Throughout this book, we have paid very close attention to what Kissinger actually does in negotiation as well as the words he uses to describe his views on the subject. Where we have judged it to be more useful, we have often couched our analysis in our own terms, rather than Kissinger’s. For example, though he never employed phrases such as “deal/no-deal balance,” “negotiation campaign,” or “empathy and assertiveness,” we believe they accurately characterize important elements of his approach. In crystallizing this chapter’s advice, we continue to use our own terms where they seem to communicate an idea best.
3. Herb Cohen, You Can Negotiate Anything (New York: Bantam, 1982).
4. Henry Kissinger, White House Years.
5. Ibid., p. 31.
6. Ibid., pp. 177–78.
7. “Ian Smith, News Conference, October 25, 1976.”
8. Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 690.
9. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 783. Kissinger acknowledged that “In fairness I must say that I adapted it from a State Department planning document for negotiations, which aborted in the Fifties.”
10. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 753.
11. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 825.
12. Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web.