PW Beyond the Book
Stuart E. Eizenstat, former policy adviser in the Clinton administration and author of The Art of Diplomacy: How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements that Changed the World (Rowman & Littlefield, May), spoke with PW about why effective diplomacy is essential in our evolving new world order.
Your book recounts the United States’ most significant and consequential negotiations over the past 50 years. Why is it so critical for people to understand the nuts and bolts of how these negotiations come about?”
We live in a time of global turmoil and conflict that has profoundly challenged the world order that the United States helped create after World War II, and reinforced after the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. To successfully deal with these issues and avoid endless conflict, diplomacy is critical. My book explains to readers how U.S. diplomacy, backed by expert negotiators, can succeed and make the world a better place. It provides a quick history lesson but also a recognition of the qualities that successful U.S. negotiators must possess to reach agreements between countries with profoundly different goals.
You personally interviewed more than 125 U.S. and international leaders for this book, including two presidents, eight U.S. secretaries of state, and prime ministers from multiple countries. What was the most common through line that you heard about what makes international negotiations succeed or fail?
The most important ingredients for success were the ability of the negotiators to be fully prepared on the details of the issues, to know their own bottom-line objectives, and, significantly, the ability to listen to the other side and understand their requirements for success—to put themselves in their opponent’s shoes.
We are in a moment of profound turmoil. What is the most important lesson that history can teach us in terms of using diplomacy to bring stability to the world in the years and decades ahead?
The United States must be fully engaged in international diplomacy to deal with conflicts that threaten our national interests as a global power, with maximum bipartisan support at home; relying upon our allies to assist us; maintaining preeminence in our economic and military power; effectively using our soft power commitments to democracy, international economic assistance, the rule of law, and human rights; and employing military power only when it can be effectively used to achieve clear, realistic political goals that cannot be reached by other means. Retreating into a latter-day isolationism, as in the 1930s, will create a vacuum that will lead to an even more unstable, lawless world.