Tit for Tat and the Diplomat

It’s been a pretty dismal decade for international disarmament and arms control diplomacy. The review meeting of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in May 2005 failed to agree on any meaningful steps to curb and roll back the spread of nukes. India and Pakistan – and now Iran and North Korea – pose challenges to the existing nuclear order that may stretch it beyond breaking point. The nuclear test ban flounders in limbo although a fragile moratorium holds pending its entry into force. The treaty banning biological weapons still lacks a verification regime although it did manage to get through its review meeting in late 2006 without breaking up in disarray like in 2001. And, although talks there have gained a new lease of life there this year, efforts to commence negotiations on screening fissile material production, or prevent an arms race in outer space, remain stillborn after almost a decade of talks in the fading splendour of the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.

Explanations for these failures usually revolve around ‘political will’ and geopolitics, characterizations that are generally valid. But they don’t convey the full picture.

A missing element is how the multilateral system itself works or, rather, fails to work. Multilateral diplomats aren’t merely the messengers of governments. Their perceptions and skills matter to the success or failure of international diplomacy (just think of John Bolton). The problem is that, as the examples above show, diplomatic “business as usual” seems maladapted to solving contemporary challenges, or of adopting new ways of doing things that will better achieve international security objectives.

The accuracy of negotiators’ perceptions or the relevance of their skills to multilateral arms control processes has received scant attention until now. One reason why is that they regard diplomatic negotiation as a black art. To this way of thinking, intuition and persuasion are unknowable x factors, opaque to rational analysis or double-checking. They’re seen as the advantage a good negotiator has over a mediocre one, and a source of professional mystique to boot.

“Trust us – we don’t understand how we do what we do, but we know what we’re doing.” It’s a risky premise when the stakes for humanity’s welfare are so high and depend as heavily as they do on cooperative activity across cultural and political divides.

It’s also a view that’s mistaken. Intuitions are important in the hothouse of multilateral negotiating. But advances in understanding human nature based on the natural and behavioural sciences show that some intuitions can be wrong – even when they feel right. If negotiators don’t recognise this, they increase their chances of failure.


John Borrie