1
A Theory of Wartime Negotiations
On July 14, 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry announced at a press conference the formation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA—a sweeping agreement devised by the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council, Germany, and Iran to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions in exchange for significant sanctions relief. Many policy experts and politicians hailed the JCPOA as a critical tool to prevent yet another war in the Middle East.1 Characterizing the gravity of this accomplishment within the context of his personal life, Kerry ended his statements by talking about his service in the Vietnam War. He remarked, “I learned in war the price that is paid when diplomacy fails… . I know that war is the failure of diplomacy and the failure of leaders to make alternative decisions.”2
Kerry is by no means the first or only person to claim that wars begin when diplomacy fails. In his iconic (and inescapable) volume On War, Carl von Clausewitz famously states that “war is merely the continuation of policy by other means”—those other means being necessary when diplomacy falls short.3 The notion is so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that a version of it is uttered by Captain Kathryn Janeway on an episode of the television show Star Trek: Voyager: “When diplomacy fails, there’s only one alternative: violence.”4
The introduction to this book described a puzzling inconsistency within current treatments of conflict: crisis diplomacy is viewed as a highly calculated and manipulable form of communication, but diplomacy is sapped of strategic value once bloodshed begins. The high levels of variation we see in the timing and success rates of negotiation suggest that far more remains to be learned about diplomacy and its relationship with conflict. Against that backdrop, this chapter establishes a theory of wartime negotiations that helps to explain when negotiations are likely to occur, as well as what consequences they have for the future trajectory of conflict.
I begin with a discussion of how to define negotiations. I then explain the importance of a concept in the study of negotiations known as the reversion outcome—more commonly called the best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA). The reversion outcome refers to the best result a negotiator can hope to realize if negotiations do not reach a mutually acceptable agreement. The notion of a reversion outcome is not unfamiliar in the field of international relations, but as I will suggest, it does not play an explicit part in many existing theories of conflict.
With those ideas established, I enumerate the specific costs and benefits that shape belligerents’ calculations regarding wartime diplomacy. Importantly, I argue that the primary costs and benefits of negotiating during war are related to the concept of the reversion outcome. A critical cost to starting negotiations is that they can signal weakness to the enemy and one’s own constituency. This, in turn, worsens the range of outcomes a belligerent can obtain when negotiations fail, since abortive talks are likely to be followed by an emboldened enemy or political punishment.
My examination of the benefits to talking while fighting introduces two separate modes of negotiation, which I call sincere and insincere. Negotiations that are conducted sincerely embody the traditional understanding of negotiation, which implies a good-faith effort at reaching agreement by all sides. Actors talk because they would like to avoid the reversion outcome associated with the continuation of war. Negotiations that are pursued for insincere ends, on the other hand, reflect a form of bargaining where at least one actor engages in talks for reasons unrelated to and perhaps antithetical to agreement. Importantly, diplomacy that is used insincerely can be exploited to improve one’s ability to prosecute a war after talks fail. Insincere negotiations help to augment a party’s reversion outcome, and they can reshape conflicts in ways that current theories would not necessarily anticipate.
Two key factors help to explain the specific balance of costs and benefits that belligerents perceive when considering when and how to negotiate during war: the level of latent diplomatic pressure that can be activated and placed on belligerents by third parties, and the degree of information culled from fighting. Different configurations of each of these two dimensions help to explain not only how frequently belligerents would come to the table during war but also whether these talks would lead to the settlement or exacerbation of conflict. The chapter ends with an enumeration of the core testable implications that arise from my theory.
Defining Negotiations
Intuitively, negotiation is a process through which divergent positions are discussed in hopes of producing a common agreement. This book adopts a more formal definition adapted from Fred Iklé’s book on international diplomacy, How Nations Negotiate. Negotiation is a process of direct or mediated communication between official representatives of the active disputants, where explicit proposals are put forward with the ostensible aim of reaching a mutually acceptable agreement.5 This description shares similarities with most definitions of the word and is not limited to a wartime context.
There are several constituent and purposeful parts of this definition worth discussing individually. First, negotiations can be direct or mediated. They can proceed between two parties in isolation, or they can involve a third party that facilitates discussion by either being in the same room as all the disputants or traveling back and forth between them. Negotiation with active but nonbinding participation by a third party is mediation.
Second, official and accredited representatives conduct negotiations.6 Everyday citizens from different countries speak with each other all the time, but we obviously do not consider their communication to be diplomacy. Perhaps more conspicuously, celebrities receive attention for meeting with government officials; consider Dennis Rodman’s basketball-related interactions with Kim Jong-un in North Korea or Angelina Jolie serving as goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The burgeoning prominence of celebrities in international affairs is certainly a worthwhile topic to explore.7 Nonetheless, many aspects of international relations—and, in particular, conflict resolution—remain the domain of state leaders, officials, diplomats, and other individuals vested with direct authority to speak on behalf of a government or organization.
Third, negotiations involve explicit and verbal or written proposals. Actors must discuss substantive ideas regarding how to deal with a disagreement. This does not imply that actors must agree on these proposals, but it does mean that incidental small talk between representatives in the halls or corners of the United Nations, for example, is too casual to be considered negotiation. Acts of tacit bargaining where parties seek to influence one another through nonverbal behavior, such as troop movements or other physical maneuvers,8 are important phenomena in international affairs, and they are clearly acts of communication designed to influence behavior, but they do not satisfy my definition of negotiation.
Fourth, the word ostensible, which seems innocuous, in fact represents a significant corrective to many seminal definitions of negotiation, which often presuppose that negotiations occur with genuine “interests in reaching agreement,” as Ariel Rubinstein puts it.9 As I explain later in this chapter and in others, negotiations often take place even when belligerents have no desire to realize any agreement with their opponent. The notion that wartime diplomacy is often used to moderate and reshape the trajectory of war, and that the strategy to this behavior can be systematically explained, is a central insight of this book.
It is necessary to delineate negotiations against two adjacent terms: bargaining and diplomacy. The term bargaining refers to the general process of deciding how to divide gains from some form of joint action.10 An article by Rubinstein conceives of bargaining as a noncooperative and zero-sum process where two parties attempt to reach an agreement about how to divide a “pie.”11 Many issues in international relations that can escalate to conflict involve bargaining. This form of interaction can ensue through negotiations but, as the next section clarifies, also transpires through war. As such, negotiations are a form of bargaining.
According to Sir Ernest Mason Satow’s classic Guide to Diplomatic Practice, diplomacy can be succinctly defined as “the conduct of business between States by peaceful means.”12 Diplomacy is the manner in which states often bargain with one another, and negotiations are a tool through which diplomacy takes place. The Oxford English Dictionary goes as far as to define diplomacy as “the management of international relations by negotiation.”13
That said, two clarifications are worth mentioning. First, the idea that diplomacy occurs via peaceful means does not imply that it is completely removed from violence.14 Giving verbal ultimatums, performing military exercises, and mobilizing one’s military forces are all forms of diplomacy that do not involve direct violence but obviously seek to coerce an opponent by threatening it. By analyzing negotiations during war, this book focuses on the extreme version of this concept, where diplomatic activity takes place alongside active violence (rather than under the threat of violence) and the result of failed diplomacy is the continuation of violence. Second, diplomacy need not require states as actors. Satow’s definition is informed by his experience as a foreign officer for the British government in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Westphalian notion of the nation-state was robust and nonstate actors were not prominent in international affairs. Today it may be more accurate to say that diplomacy involves the conduct of business between political entities, including negotiations, by peaceful means.15 Discussions between governments and rebel groups within a state or between governments and terrorist organizations abroad should therefore also count as examples of diplomacy, and my findings on interstate conflicts yield implications regarding these other arenas.
While the above discussion outlines how negotiation, bargaining, and diplomacy are not completely identical, unless otherwise indicated, I will use the terms negotiation, diplomacy, and diplomatic bargaining interchangeably throughout the text to refer to the central concept of negotiation.
The Reversion Outcome
Negotiations involve the ostensible goal of reaching a mutually acceptable agreement. How do actors determine what potential deals are worth taking or rejecting? When actors make decisions regarding whether to negotiate, what they would seek during negotiations, and how they would utilize negotiations, they must consider what alternatives to talking exist. Scholars and practitioners alike emphasize the significance of a party’s best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or BATNA. A term popularized by Fisher and Ury in their book Getting to Yes, a BATNA refers to the next-most-favorable alternative that an actor has should negotiations fail to result in agreement.16 In political science and formal modeling literature, this concept is often called the reversion outcome. I treat these two terms as equivalent throughout the remainder of this book. The reversion outcome is important because it defines each side’s bargaining leverage. Actors with a more favorable reversion outcome are freer to walk away from talks or eschew them completely, while those with a less favorable one are more pressed to make a deal because their fallback option is undesirable.
An actor contemplating negotiations in a wartime setting cannot precisely know what will happen if negotiations collapse and fighting continues. In such cases, actors must estimate the benefits, costs, and likelihoods of all possible outcomes or actions should talks fail and then calculate the expected value of the reversion outcome.17 If a belligerent believes, accurately or not, that defeat with massive casualties is likely, the reversion outcome is highly negative. If a belligerent instead predicts victory but is uncertain about the magnitude of lives and resources that will be lost in the process, the reversion outcome’s value is more complicated to appraise. These estimates will change and perhaps sharpen over the course of conflict as each side learns more information that helps it revise its assessment of the war’s likely trajectory.
The concept of the reversion outcome is distinct from the concept of a minimally acceptable offer. In standard models of war, actors consider what share of a disputed good they believe they would win from fighting, and they subtract the expected costs of conflict from that share. This quantity is known as a minimally acceptable offer, or the value of war.18 Wars are fought in order to truthfully unveil each side’s minimally acceptable offer. Any diplomatic deal that would give each actor at least this minimum value would be preferable to fighting; any diplomatic deal that is at least as good as both sides’ minimally acceptable offer constitutes the viable bargaining range. The BATNA or reversion outcome represents the scenario an actor faces if a negotiation generates an impasse. As an actor’s BATNA becomes progressively worse, the minimally acceptable offer it would be willing to accept through negotiations can also fall.
While BATNAs may influence minimally acceptable offers, the two are not identical or permanent.19 As a brief illustration, suppose an artist hopes to sell a painting for no less than $500, which accounts for the costs of raw supplies and the artist’s time. Based on similar past transactions and their own assessment of the painting’s quality, the artist initially believes they can easily find a client who will pay $1,000. A client who offers $750 at this point will be turned away. Even though $750 exceeds the minimally acceptable offer of $500, the artist’s perceived BATNA—quickly finding a different client who will pay more—has a higher value of $1,000. Suppose, however, that the artist’s original intuition is eventually proven wrong, and they struggle to find another interested buyer. The BATNA may then involve putting the painting away and making no money. The artist in this case would accept any bid worth at least $500. Indeed, the new reversion outcome’s value of $0 may lead the artist to revise their minimally acceptable offer dramatically below $500, simply to defray some costs instead of no costs at all.
Although many canonical bargaining models of war explicitly capture the notion of a minimally acceptable offer and the bargaining range that exists between two sides, their treatment of the reversion outcome is far more implicit. In some models, negotiations take place only to codify the outcomes of war as determined by the results of fighting.20 In others that portray war as an alternating process between fighting and negotiating, the diplomacy phase is depicted as a moment of suspended animation. The war freezes in its current configuration while the belligerents exchange, consider, and respond to bargaining offers in an instantaneous fashion. If an offer is rejected, the war proceeds with another battle, where each side’s likelihood of victory is based on the characteristics of the belligerents and battlefield immediately before the previous round of talks began.21 Across both cases, the reversion outcome when negotiations fail is the continuation of hostilities based on little other than the state of affairs that existed prior to negotiations.
Negotiation scholarship suggests that reversion outcomes are far more complex, accounting for situations and changing circumstances that may exist outside the narrow confines of the direct bargaining interaction in question. BATNAs are not necessarily alternatives that exist independent of the other side.22 As an example, suppose members of a union are considering whether to go on strike in order to demand safer working conditions. Their minimally acceptable offer may involve a series of safety reforms and the installation of newer equipment in their facilities. If the company refused to honor these demands, it may seem as if the union members’ reversion outcome would be continuing to work in an unsafe environment while preparing for another collective effort. But more factors exist beyond the scope of the specific negotiation. If union members choose to go on strike but fail to obtain their demands, they may end up being replaced with individuals willing to cross the picket line and could ultimately be fired. The workers’ reversion outcome is therefore not necessarily the continuation of their hazardous jobs; it could be the potential end of their jobs. This may cause hesitation about what terms to demand or whether to strike at all. But if local media outlets were already reporting on this dispute, the workers may believe that the strike will attract enough public attention to cast a harsh spotlight on the company, which might reduce the likelihood that anyone would be fired. The reversion outcome in this situation would be an expected value calculated using the estimated prospects that media scrutiny will or will not protect the striking workers’ jobs. Regardless of the specific calculation, union members would have greater leverage and more incentives to strike if the media became involved compared to a scenario where they did not. Whether these or any other reversion outcomes are more likely depends on factors internal and external to the specific bargain over workplace conditions. What binds all of these disparate possibilities together is that engaging in negotiations can influence an actor’s bargaining leverage if talks fail to reach an agreement.
I contend that wars are equally, if not more, subject to a similar logic. The theory I develop proposes the following: The basic act of negotiating during war can directly alter a belligerent’s reversion outcome and thus its bargaining leverage. The political and military environment following failed talks may be fundamentally different from the conditions that existed prior to any diplomatic interactions, for good or for ill, and these changes may redirect the trajectory of conflict compared to a scenario where negotiations did not take place. This prospect helps to explain when, why, and how belligerents would choose to talk while fighting. My theory suggests that the costs and benefits of negotiation are all related to how the act of negotiating either worsens or improves belligerents’ prospects should talks fail. In some cases, words can be used to fight.
To understand this strategic argument and its implications in full, we must first enumerate and explore the competing costs and benefits entailed by negotiating during war and how they relate to an actor’s reversion outcome.
Avoiding Negotiations
I begin by addressing why belligerents often choose not to communicate with their opponent during active hostilities. As my data show, approximately 83 percent of war-days involve no negotiations between actors in interstate wars. This observation is especially puzzling and incongruous with many current conceptions of negotiations in war.
One natural reason negotiations do not occur is that they may not be worth the trouble. In wars primarily driven by credible commitment problems, belligerents would sense very little utility to negotiating an agreement that stands little chance of being upheld over time. The complete surrender or neutralization of the enemy may seem to be the only real and self-enforcing solution.23 The War of the Triple Alliance of 1864–70—also known as the López or Paraguayan War—provides a useful illustration. Paraguay’s access to the Atlantic Ocean, which was vital for its security and economic well-being, ran through Argentina and Uruguay. When Argentina and Brazil began to directly intervene in Uruguayan affairs, President Francisco Solano López feared that his nation would be choked off from the sea. He subsequently launched attacks against Argentina and Brazil to reverse their claims on Uruguay. The attempt failed and instead led the two regional powers plus occupied Uruguay to escalate hostilities against a seemingly irrational opponent. The resulting war was fought to the bitter end, concluding only in 1870 when Solano López was killed in battle. Due to extreme concerns about the opponent’s intentions and willingness to uphold any diplomatic settlement, the war raged for six years, wiped out approximately 70 percent of the prewar Paraguayan population, and featured no negotiations.24
While commitment problems may explain diplomatic silence in the Paraguayan War, this explanation does not account for the infrequency of talks during conflicts primarily motivated by incomplete information, nor does it address why wars borne of commitment problems—such as the United States’ experiences in Korea and Vietnam—may still feature negotiations at different points during hostilities. A more compelling answer emerges when we consider the potential costs of talking with the enemy. Despite many models of war treating negotiation as a costless activity, numerous scholars and practitioners have argued that a major obstacle to initiating negotiations during conflict is the fear that any interest in dialogue will be construed as a sign of weakness or flagging resolve.25 Practitioners in government and business also commonly suggest that actors refrain from starting a conversation, especially when information asymmetries exist.26
Some examples illustrate this point concretely. On February 12, 1964, Fidel Castro of Cuba relayed a back-channel message to President Lyndon Johnson through the ABC News correspondent Lisa Howard. The communication expressed hope that the two countries could “eventually sit down in an atmosphere of good will and of mutual respect and negotiate our differences.” Yet tellingly, Castro’s message ended by stressing that Johnson “should not interpret my conciliatory attitude, my desire for discussions as a sign of weakness.”27 An entry from the President’s Daily Brief—the premier intelligence document of the United States government—also demonstrates the reality of this concern. Discussing tensions between King Hussein of Jordan and militant Palestinian fedayeen who had created a quasi-state within his country, a brief in early 1970 concluded that “[Hussein] has been accused of weakness because he preferred negotiating to fighting.”28
This mindset is also reflected in popular culture. In an episode of the television show The Office, aptly titled “The Negotiation,” regional manager Michael Scott clumsily applies bargaining tactics he learned from Wikipedia in a mock negotiation to obtain a pay raise. Several seconds of uncomfortable silence pass before he announces that he is “declining to speak first.”29 In the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street, the stockbroker Jordan Belfort echoes a similar sentiment when teaching other brokers how to make sales, saying that “whoever speaks first loses.”30
Returning to the realm of international relations, Thomas Schelling describes the predicament raised by the choice to talk, as “one side or both may fear that even a show of willingness to negotiate will be interpreted as excessive eagerness.”31 Work by Oriana Skylar Mastro refers to this concern as “adverse inference of weakness.”32 Several contributions in economics make a similar point but from the opposite direction, finding that refusal to negotiate can be harnessed as a mechanism to signal one’s continuing resolve.33 Since wars almost universally involve some form of incomplete information, indicating interest in diplomacy may suggest that a party is starting to falter, losing patience, or preparing to sue for peace. Any sign of vulnerability may motivate the opponent to fight harder and adopt an even more hard-line approach.34 Communicating with an opponent that has been politically villainized can trigger misgivings about appeasing an aggressor or validating their behavior, empowering the opponent to work more assiduously toward its own interests.35
History abounds with mentions of this concern during crises and wars.36 During a meeting on June 5, 1961 (the day after the storied Vienna summit between President John F. Kennedy and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev), Kennedy and British prime minister Harold Macmillan discussed how the quadripartite allies would handle the escalating crisis against the Soviets in Berlin. Both leaders agreed that any act by “the West to offer negotiations might now seem to be a sign of weakness” to the Soviets, emboldening them and endangering the allies’ ability to protect West Berlin.37 In February 1965, ambassador to Vietnam (and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Maxwell Taylor warned against any diplomatic overtures, arguing that “haste to get to the conference table may spark upsurge in [Viet Cong] efforts designed to achieve the maximum negotiating advantage, since Hanoi and Peking may interpret our eagerness as a sign of weakness.”38 In discussions with the Norwegian ambassador to Peking during the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese ambassador similarly justified refusal to diplomatically engage with the United States by asserting that “when North Vietnam showed an interest in negotiations, Americans had taken such interest as a sign of weakness and with results of stronger escalation.”39
The Second Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 affords a fuller example of how deeply belligerents worry about looking weak from seeking negotiations. In early 1877, a conference of powers including the Russian Empire submitted terms to create autonomous Bulgarian provinces using Ottoman territory. The Ottoman Empire, which was then in slow and steady decline, refused these terms, and the conference dissolved by January 20. The war officially began on April 24, 1877, when the Russian Empire broke diplomatic relations with the Turkish government and began an attack against the Ottoman Empire—an endeavor that had not succeeded during the Crimean War two decades before. The ultimate outcome of this new war was not obvious at its outset. Russia had higher numbers in terms of personnel, but its soldiers were poorly equipped and served under relatively incapable commanders. The Ottomans wielded more modern weapons supplied by the Americans, British, and Germans and established strong defenses, but they were not well organized.40 The war dramatically broke in the Russians’ favor on December 9, when, after a monthslong siege, Russian forces seized the critical town of Plevna. This was a devastating outcome for the Ottomans. Not only was Plevna the last stronghold to prevent an unfettered march toward the capital city of Constantinople, but the surrender itself resulted in the capture of forty-three thousand Turks.41
On December 12, the Ottomans made their first meaningful attempt to negotiate an end to the conflict. The Porte distributed a diplomatic circular to numerous states that attempted to strike a tone of magnanimity and strength: “What object can there be in prolonging the contest ruinous to both countries? The moment has arrived for the belligerent powers to accept peace without affecting their dignity. Europe might now usefully interpose her good offices, since the Porte is ready to come to terms.”42 The language in this circular attested to how acutely the Ottomans worried about looking weak from requesting negotiations on one hand while confronting the reality of requiring negotiations on the other. The statement “The moment has arrived for the belligerent powers to accept peace” evinced the Ottomans’ desire to sound as if they did not need peace but were willing to consider it. The phrase “without affecting their dignity” also spoke to a desire for any potential peace talks not to be interpreted as part of a humiliating loss.
The Porte’s deep concern with perceptions of weakness was further highlighted on December 17. In response to the general reactions to their circular from five days earlier, the Ottomans distributed a follow-up notice stating the following: “Erroneous interpretations having been given to the circular dispatch, by which the Porte expresses a desire for peace and requests the mediation of the Powers, it is explained, that Turkey does not approach the Powers as a vanquished State, since she still has two lines of defense which the government believes it would be able to hold. It is pointed out that by its circular dispatch the Porte desires to intimate its willingness to take into consideration the proposals made by the conference.”43 But even this clarification overstated the Turks’ position. After the fall of Plevna, Russian troops were making steady progress toward Constantinople. The notion that the war would be resolved by simply accepting the results of the Constantinople Conference in late 1876 and early 1877 was no longer tenable. Indeed, Russian forces arrived in Constantinople by January 30, forcing the Turks to sue for peace. The preliminary agreement signed on January 31 and the subsequent Treaty of San Stefano on March 3 were stacked with onerous concessions. The Ottoman Empire agreed to recognize Romania, Montenegro, and Serbia—territories that had been under Ottoman control—as independent states, and Bulgaria would be considered an autonomous principality. The Turks would pay an indemnity valued at 1,410,000,000 rubles, of which 1,000,000,000 would be paid via the transfer of territory to Russia.
Beyond the international sphere, starting negotiations can also produce domestic political costs. Both troops and citizens that learn of diplomatic overtures may lose motivation to commit themselves to the war effort when they believe the government is contemplating settlement.44 Audience cost theory implies that if a leader publicly promises that a war they initiated will result in victory, any move that appears to pull back from that promise could attract sizable political punishment.45 Potential concessions that would be made in negotiations may also upset key constituencies and political coalitions that a leader requires to maintain power, preventing leaders from taking steps toward peace and even pushing them to continue fighting when their true interests hew toward settlement.46 Notably, leaders of belligerent parties often rally support for war by framing the adversary as evil and uncompromising, which can ultimately impede their ability to later open talks with the enemy.47
Both world wars provide useful illustrations of these liabilities. During World War I, the German government was extremely hesitant to make a peace overture with the Allies for fear of signaling weakness and demoralizing troops on the ground. The offer that Germany did make in 1916 was phrased to sound confident, but it was promptly rejected by the Allies and was still interpreted as an indication of Germany’s disadvantaged position.48 In World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had multiple reasons to refuse negotiations with Hitler. One of these was his deep concern that talks with the Axis powers would pose a “slippery slope” and a situation from which Britain would “be unable to turn back,” obliterating domestic morale and creating an unrecoverable political climate if talks did not conclude the war.49
These examples all illustrate an actor’s belief that expressing interest in negotiations would potentially embolden the enemy and perhaps even deflate the war effort at home. These changes, in turn, would simultaneously undermine the likelihood of negotiations producing an acceptable peace agreement and worsen the actor’s ability to succeed on the battlefield when diplomacy fails—even before any verbal exchange of offers takes place. In language we have used thus far, sitting down at a bargaining table could directly undercut a belligerent’s reversion outcome. Should talks occur but then fail, a belligerent may find itself subjected to even more aggression from an enemy that senses potential victory, or it may become accosted by painful political repercussions at home. Either situation would be worse than what a belligerent might anticipate experiencing by talking without fighting.
Negotiating Anyway
Fears of signaling weakness are thus a powerful reason why warring parties may avoid negotiating with one another. But as my data indicate, about 17 percent of war-days do involve negotiations, and we know that a solid majority of wars end through negotiated settlements. We can logically deduce that diplomacy can sometimes confer benefits that outweigh the aforementioned costs.
I argue that there are two distinct sets of benefits associated with negotiating. Each set of benefits is defined by how it relates to an actor’s reversion outcome—namely, whether talks are designed to forestall the continuation of war or to reshape the future trajectory of fighting by potentially improving an actor’s political or military situation when talks fail. These objectives are each tied to different modes of negotiating, which I call sincere and insincere, respectively. Belligerents can dynamically choose which mode of negotiation to prioritize over the course of the war in response to circumstances surrounding the conflict. The decision is neither binary nor permanent, so the discussion that follows should be interpreted as an exploration of ideal types that help establish the foundations for my theory.
Sincere Negotiation: Avoiding More Fighting
In the traditional treatment of negotiation, actors come to the table with earnest hopes of resolving the issue in good faith—that is, under the presumption that all parties will communicate and act with genuine desire to reach and fulfill an agreement. I refer to this mode of negotiating as being sincere. It bears emphasizing that sincerity is a characterization of intentions rather than outcomes. While all negotiations that settle a conflict are conducted sincerely, agreement is not a requirement for talks to be sincere. Fruitless talks are still sincere if agreement was the goal, free of ulterior motives.
An instructive case of a “failed” sincere negotiation comes from the Russo-Polish War of 1919–20. The conflict was sparked by the Russian Soviet Republic’s desire to seize the newly independent state of Poland in hopes of spreading revolution westward, as well as by Poland’s hope of expanding eastward to restore its much larger pre-1772 borders. In July 1919, about five months into the war, representatives from each state met in Soviet-held territory to discuss a potential peace. The meeting produced some limited concessions that would have pushed the Soviet-Polish border further east and thus would have favored Poland, but no final agreement was struck. Both delegates nevertheless expressed a clear desire to meet again the following month, and to do so in secret (using the guise of Red Cross prisoner exchanges), indicating that neither wanted to exploit talks for any other purpose than to find compromise.50
It also merits noting that sincerity is a characteristic of a negotiation effort and not a descriptor of the actual negotiators. Actors can and do shift between different modes of negotiation depending on the circumstances.51 Another round of negotiations in the Russo-Polish War helps illustrate this point. Thirteen months after a sincere attempt to find peace, diplomats from the belligerent states met in the Belorussian capital of Minsk. The negotiation round was not only fruitless but intentionally designed to get nowhere. Polish forces had initiated a major offensive against Warsaw the day before scheduled proceedings in Minsk began. Wanting to see how this battle would pan out, both sides backtracked and demanded more onerous preconditions that they anticipated would be rejected.52 Discussions fell apart within a week.
Intuitively, belligerents seek to negotiate sincerely when they sense that the prospects of continued war are undesirable. A party struggling on the battlefield may consider the trajectory of hostilities to be so poor that the reversion outcome of additional fighting feels worse than accepting a harsh set of negotiated provisions. A party enjoying relative success on the battlefield may eventually believe that the additional costs of fighting are no longer worthwhile in relation to what has already been gained and what the opponent is willing to concede. When both sides feel that a negotiated settlement is preferable to each party’s reversion outcome, the benefits of ending the war can outweigh the perceived costs of starting negotiations at all. It is at this point that belligerents engage in the process of ascertaining and codifying what the specific terms of a negotiated settlement might be. The Russo-Polish War ended with the signing of a peace protocol in October 1920 after Polish forces decisively won in Warsaw and made a steady eastward push toward the Russian Soviet Republic. The Soviet government saw no option but to sue for peace, while the Polish government had little appetite to keep fighting. For both sides, the reversion outcome of the war continuing on its present trajectory was less appealing than an imperfect compromise that established the new states of Ukraine and Belarus in between Poland and Soviet Russia.53
Insincere Negotiation: Reshaping Future Fighting
Negotiations can negatively affect a belligerent’s reversion outcome by signaling weakness. Yet negotiations can also affect an actor’s BATNA in a positive manner, potentially improving the prospects of war outcomes in the next period of hostilities. Stated more dramatically, talking can become an extension of combat.54
Most negotiation literature assumes that the only possible objective and effect of negotiations is to make a deal, but some exceptions prove this rule. Classic but often-overlooked treatments of interstate diplomacy by Fred Iklé and Paul Pillar use the term “side-effects” to describe any consequences of talks that are unrelated to reaching an agreement.55 The two authors’ discussions of side effects are somewhat cursory and unsystematic, but their core insight is highly salient. Side effects offer a fundamental modification to our view of negotiation, as they suggest that talks themselves can actively alter the trajectory of conflict. If diplomacy can be harnessed to change the state of affairs between two disputants, then negotiations that apparently “fail” may actually be successful for at least one party by changing its relative ability to prevail against the opponent in the overall bargain. Negotiations used primarily to extract side effects are what I call insincere. Talks are not defined as being insincere simply because they failed to forge an agreement but because the disputants attempted to use them to pursue ulterior motives. The inclusion of the word ostensible in my definition of negotiation is an important acknowledgment of this insincere mode of diplomacy, where actors may pretend to seek an agreement while actually exploiting talks for other ends.
A commonality across many side effects is that they accomplish extraneous objectives by using negotiations to stall for time, creating space to pursue unrelated ends. The literal process of negotiation—discussing, exchanging, revising, and contemplating proposals—takes time. The atemporal nature of negotiations in bargaining models, as well as the imposed separation of fighting and talking, forestalls the opportunity to think about what time can buy.56
Policymakers and trained negotiators have recognized that disadvantaged actors may use talks to drag their feet in hopes of improving their relative position in the future.57 Numerous examples in and out of international affairs demonstrate how insincere negotiations are exploited to reap benefits for at least one actor. In the fittingly titled book Stalling for Time, the former FBI negotiator Gary Noesner recounts multiple hostage negotiations where “time purchased through delays” was essential to grinding down the hostage taker’s resolve, gathering information, and allowing law enforcement to develop and execute a complex operation that would maximize the number of lives saved.58
Arms reductions negotiations during the 1970s and 1980s also featured insincerity. As détente took hold during the Cold War, several NATO countries sought to reduce their military budgets and scale down their conventional forces. The United States opposed these cuts for fear of having to commit more resources to defend Western Europe. To forestall these proposals, the United States suggested that it and the NATO countries directly negotiate a conventional force reduction agreement with the Warsaw Pact. This resulted in the establishment of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, or CSCE, in 1972.59 Both the United States and the Soviet Union encouraged these talks with the intention of making them languish. Many years later, negotiations (and the Soviet Union, for that matter) fell apart, and the NATO states largely maintained their military spending throughout that entire period.60
Dilatory negotiation is so common that domestic regulations sometimes expressly prohibit it. Labor law in the United States is dictated by the National Labor Relations Act, which describes permissible conduct in collective bargaining. Its rules indicate that actors must “bargain in good faith,” which disallows failing to meet at reasonable times and intervals, engaging in piecemeal bargaining, refusing to provide relevant information, creating impasses using irrelevant topics, and not signing completed agreements.61 Far fewer tools exist to preclude such obstructive behavior at the international level.
Despite the possibilities and consequences of using talks as a stall tactic, insincere negotiations have not been fully incorporated into our understanding of conflict even as, ironically, the acrimonious and turbulent environment wrought by war arguably presents stronger incentives for parties to consider exploiting diplomacy for side effects. Deftly utilized negotiations, even in interstate conflicts, can be a way to accomplish policy objectives in a more economical manner than violence alone. This is wholly consistent with military doctrine. The use of diplomacy to promote war objectives without as many costs embodies the principle of war known as the economy of force—the employment of force in the most effective manner possible.62
Stalling in wartime negotiations can produce myriad side effects.63 As it is not practical to enumerate every plausible one, I will instead focus on two that are distinctly relevant and consequential in armed conflict.
Deflecting Pressure and Blame
We commonly think of wars as violent interactions between two (sets of) actors, but all wars take place in view of countless third parties. Many of these outside actors wield resources and political capital that could potentially be directed toward a conflict that touches on their own interests or violates principles they deem important.64 Unsurprisingly, parties at war may harbor concerns about how these third-party actors view their behavior.
Negotiations offer an avenue for belligerents to redirect international scorn and pressure away from themselves and to attract support for their own cause. David C. McGaffey, an academic and storied US diplomat, described these incentives in no uncertain terms: “Negotiations are not always intended to reach a conclusion. They are sometimes intended as a deflection in the face of political pressures… . [T]here have been historical cases where Presidents pressed to do something have begun negotiating. I think there have been cases where it has been made clear to the negotiators that they are not to reach a conclusion.”65
In his book Between Peace and War, Richard Ned Lebow proposes a similar idea called the “justification of hostility crisis.” Leaders that are already bent on fighting an adversary can use cynical tactics to legitimize the use of force. By making diplomatic offers that are not patently outrageous but designed to be rejected by an adversary, an actor can attempt to cast the other side as the recalcitrant and aggressive party. These theatrics may allow the actor to justify using military force and help bolster support for its cause.66 Lebow discusses this process in the context of crisis diplomacy that precedes a potential war, but the same story readily applies to diplomacy that occurs during active conflict. Belligerents may be targets of political condemnation for using violence instead of diplomacy, and support for costly wars may falter over time. By convincing both domestic and international audiences that they have tried to reach a settlement but ultimately failed, actors with no real interest in negotiated arrangements can deflect pressures to seek peace. This maneuvering can temporarily resuscitate support for war against a seemingly intransigent enemy, as it seems to bolster the case that all other avenues short of extended hostilities have been exhausted.
The 1948–49 Arab-Israeli War, which chapter 5 explores in detail, offers an example of this behavior. In late October 1948, five months after the conflict began, the Israeli delegation at the United Nations helped to craft Security Council Resolution 62, which called on all states to revert to lines of control that had held two weeks prior and also urged belligerents to arrange a negotiated peace. The resolution was soon adopted on November 16. As much as Resolution 62 seemed against the interests of Israel, which was gaining ground in the conflict, the Israeli delegation intentionally participated in this process in order to look like the magnanimous party offering an olive branch. Israel correctly anticipated that the Arab states would reject the resolution and thus become a new lightning rod for international criticism while Israel continued plowing forward in the Negev Desert without as many objections.67
Both sides sought to redirect political pressures in peace talks four decades later. In 1991, riding the momentum of victory in the Persian Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush announced a diplomatic initiative to “put an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict.”68 Secretary of State James Baker spent several months conducting numerous aggressive rounds of shuttle diplomacy to convince the relevant states to participate. The resulting Madrid Conference in October, cochaired by the United States and the Soviet Union, included representatives from Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. This gathering gained widespread attention for being the first-ever direct talks to include all actors that had been embroiled in the conflict. Many lamented the unproductiveness of the talks as they ended in early November, but Israel and the Arab states were satisfied with this result. The two sets of belligerents had attended talks not because they sought or expected peace but because they needed to feign interest in peace to placate the United States.69
Analogous developments have played out in the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011. When UN-mediated peace talks in Geneva collapsed around early February 2016, some Syrian rebel commanders expressed enthusiasm and hoped that additional outside states would realize the Assad regime was unreasonable and thus provide rebels with “something new, God willing” that would permit them to fight more effectively against the state.70
Belligerents repeatedly demonstrate that an insincere mode of negotiation can help navigate political crosswinds while avoiding settlement. When this strategy proves successful, a belligerent’s reversion outcome improves because demands to seek peace are diminished and support for war is revitalized. Both empower an actor to fight more freely compared to a situation in which it did not negotiate.
Reshaping the Battlefield
Although the fortunes of fighting are revealing, they are not inevitable or unidirectional. A party experiencing losses on the battlefield is not necessarily fated to continue losing, or vice versa. An actor who believes that its future costs of fighting will fall and its future battlefield performance will improve may seek to continue fighting and to push through the short-term costs in hopes of turning hostilities in its favor in the longer term.71
For some, the idea that a beleaguered belligerent’s ability to prosecute a war could improve later in the conflict may sound peculiar. Bargaining models of war view fighting as a costly activity that drains belligerents’ finite resources and is dictated by the distribution of power that stood prior to fighting.72 Yet in reality, having a set of resources or capabilities is not equivalent to being able to effectively or immediately use them. Choices regarding the employment of force and the elements of strategy also play important mediating roles in a belligerent’s success on the battlefield.73 Mobilization, which refers not only to the general production of war materiel or the recruitment of troops (though those are certainly important) but also to the ability of a belligerent to adapt its capabilities to fit the specific needs of the present conflict, does not happen overnight. Belligerents may thus believe they can obtain more positive outcomes in the future once they have a chance to translate more of their latent capabilities—whether those are troops, weapons, vehicles, or the like—into mobilized and functional capabilities on an active battlefield.74 Military strategists readily point out that a sufficient number of standing forces may be effective at defense once conflict erupts but that more time is typically necessary to prepare the materiel, logistics, and strategies for offensive countermeasures.75 Literature on the element of surprise is also predicated on the idea that a belligerent can enjoy a temporary strategic and logistical advantage that is not captured by straightforward measures of military might.76
Mobilization and planning, in short, both require time.77 Prussian field marshal August von Gneisenau, a contemporary of Clausewitz and an influential figure in his own right, makes the point succinctly: “Strategy is the art of utilising time and space. I am more economic of the first than of the second. I can always regain space; time lost, never.”78 Different tactics can be used to reclaim or effectively create time. In the realm of military tactics, delaying or retrograde operations are designed to buy time and temporarily hamper an opponent’s forces in order to allow the party performing the operation to reorganize its forces, wait for reinforcements, and sap the enemy’s resources.79 Stalling for time through diplomacy can accomplish a similar goal during war.80 By engaging in insincere negotiations, an embattled party can create an opportunity to rearm and regroup its military forces in hopes of creating a strategic advantage that helps reverse some of its losses once discussions fold.81
The Syrian civil war is relevant again here. After Geneva peace talks failed in early February 2016, the United Nations spearheaded a ceasefire that began later that month. Over the following weeks, the anti-Assad coalition accused the government of bargaining in bad faith and using past diplomatic endeavors to stall for time in order to prepare an assault on Aleppo—the country’s most populous and economically active city.82 By December 2016, the Assad government decisively took control of this highly valuable strategic objective.
Another useful example is the Assam War of 1962 between India and China. On October 20, Chinese forces launched offensives across the McMahon Line—a boundary between India and China that had been determined in 1914 but disputed ever since. Within three days, Chinese troops had overrun a series of Indian outposts and largely achieved their limited aims. Mao Zedong’s regime proposed an agreement to end the affair before it would draw more international attention, which was then focused on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Jawaharlal Nehru’s government in India spent weeks asking for technical clarifications regarding the proposal before accusing China of “cold-blood[ed] … massive aggression” and renewing hostilities with remobilized troops in mid-November.83 Within several days, this burst of activity led the Chinese to offer a more favorable ceasefire that granted India two-thirds of the disputed territory.
For negotiations to potentially facilitate mobilization, they must not only forestall agreement but also temporarily slacken the intensity of hostilities and create breathing room for at least one actor to exploit. As the next section explains, the incentives and reasons for belligerents to reduce hostilities during negotiations are a function of the strategic environment in which negotiations occur.
The Logic of (Not) Negotiating
Up to this point, I have characterized the costs and benefits of negotiating during war. A central danger to negotiating is that an actor may signal weakness and worsen its own reversion outcome, which in turn undermines its bargaining leverage if talks do not produce peace. Conversely, negotiation can afford some valuable benefits, which vary depending on whether an actor adopts a sincere or insincere mode to negotiating. Actors who negotiate sincerely engage in good-faith efforts to reach an agreement, in hopes of avoiding the reversion outcome of continuing a painful war; actors who negotiate insincerely engage in bad-faith attempts to abuse diplomacy by stalling for time, which enables them to improve their reversion outcome by deflecting political pressure and remobilizing their forces to fight more effectively once talks falter. With these concepts now in place, we can address the crucial question: What influences the balance of these costs and benefits of negotiating sincerely, insincerely, or at all during war?
I propose that two central dimensions affect this calculus: the existence of latent external pressures to negotiate and information obtained from the realities of the battlefield. Both have been mentioned in my discussion thus far, but we will now address each explicitly in the context of how they moderate the costs and benefits of conflict diplomacy. Notably, the two key side effects of insincere negotiations that I mentioned—diverting political pressures and remobilizing for further conflict—roughly parallel these two factors.
Latent External Pressures
Belligerents do not exist in a vacuum. Various third parties with some vested interest in peace can encourage warring parties to settle their differences via diplomacy. I use the term latent external pressure to refer to the extent to which third parties can readily activate diplomatic pressure on belligerents. Latent external pressures are reflected by the presence of institutions and power structures that exist beyond the specific circumstances that unfold over the course of a particular conflict. These include the existence of international organizations that promote peace, laws and norms that condemn aggression, peace lobbies or ecosystems that supply mediators, and relationships that belligerents have with powerful states that could influence their behavior. Many of these institutions and structures, such as the creation of the United Nations, the advent of nuclear weapons and their potentially pacifying effect on violence, and the strengthening of conflict-averse norms and institutions, are associated with the post-1945 international order.84 The existence of such structural and institutional conditions define a baseline for the amount and quality of explicit third-party diplomatic pressure—such as mediation efforts or other discrete attempts to initiate dialogue between the belligerents—that can be deployed and placed on the belligerents during a given war.
To be clear, battlefield developments and discrete third-party efforts to advocate diplomacy are almost assuredly related to one another. The United Nations, for instance, may try to wield its influence more forcefully when violence is highly destabilizing and likely to cause negative externalities for specific member states. Literature on conflict mediation also debates the merits of intervening during different stages and circumstances of war.85 But even if specific events during a conflict influence the degree to which external actors may push actors to negotiate, institutions and power relations supply the infrastructure for such endeavors to occur more readily. Latent external pressures for peace also provide a more useful source of empirical leverage, as they are more exogenous to the conflict itself.
Once actuated, third-party diplomatic pressures have been shown to be effective at obliging belligerents to communicate with one another.86 Yet getting belligerents to sit at the same table is separate from convincing them to reach a meaningful compromise. External pressures to negotiate, if sufficiently strong, can create perceived costs to avoiding diplomacy and compel actors to engage in talks even when they have no interest in reaching an agreement. Fred Iklé describes these incentives in his classic work on international negotiation:
Governments are reluctant to refuse negotiation, no matter how unlikely or undesirable an agreement. They fear that such refusal would impair the good will of groups important to them—their own parliament, the public in allied countries, or other governments, for example. These audiences may judge quite superficially in praising those willing to negotiate and censuring those who refuse. Outside groups may have only a vague notion as to what negotiating means and how it relates to the merits of the issue. Governments that negotiate in order to win public approval value the act of negotiating as the Pharisee values prayer. It is not the thoughts behind the prayer that matter, or the purposes pursued, or the deeds before and after—what counts is that the ceremony be performed with the proper gestures.87
International organizations can wield a heavy hand in creating diplomatic pressures. During the war over the Aouzou Strip between Libya and Chad in 1986 and 1987, the Organization of African Unity and multiple heads of African states initiated relentless peace missions to bring the two states together for talks. The negotiations that did occur in March 1987 were superficial and dissolved on their first day.88
Even major powers are not completely immune to these forces. Throughout the Falklands War of 1982, at least three individuals—US secretary of state Alexander Haig, Peruvian president Fernando Belaúnde Terry, and United Nations secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar—independently attempted to push Argentinian president Leopoldo Galtieri and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to accept mediation. Both belligerents eventually caved after one month of constant pressure but proceeded to engage in perfunctory and unproductive talks. The war instead ended when British reinforcements arrived in the Falklands and reclaimed the islands from Argentinian forces. Recounting this conflict more than a decade later, Thatcher would write that she felt “under an almost intolerable pressure to negotiate for the sake of negotiation.”89 It is notable that British opinion strongly supported reclaiming the islands by force.90 Thatcher’s decision to entertain diplomacy represented at least a partial capitulation to third parties and the ideals they espoused.
The Syrian civil war affords a more contemporary illustration of the international community’s constant attempts at promoting diplomacy. Between 2012 and 2017, the United Nations organized multiple talks in Geneva, none of which made meaningful progress. Some meetings even failed to get representatives of the Assad government and Syrian rebels in the same room. The majority of these negotiations were backed by United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254 (passed on December 18, 2015), which called for a ceasefire and laid out a plan for formal negotiations that would lead to open elections within eighteen months. As the aforementioned failures of 2016 suggest, this timeline did not come to pass. Starting in early 2017, another diplomatic track opened in Astana, Kazakhstan, under the auspices of Iran, Russia, and Turkey but with the general support of the United Nations. An agreement reached in January 2018 aimed to create a 150-member committee facilitated by the United Nations and populated by representatives from all sides that would draft a constitution. On October 30, 2019, the resulting Syrian Constitutional Committee convened for the first time. Five rounds of talks between October 2019 and February 2021 failed to even settle procedural matters, leading United Nations special envoy and Norwegian diplomat Geir Pederson to suspend talks indefinitely.91
Latent external pressures and their activation during conflict introduce a fundamental complication to the calculus of negotiation. When belligerents are left to their own devices, efforts to negotiate require a unilateral attempt to contact the enemy, which incurs potentially high costs from signaling weakness. Any benefits to be gained from negotiating sincerely (making peace) or insincerely (stalling for time) are counterbalanced by the risks associated with appearing hesitant to keep fighting. These concerns decrease the number of scenarios in which belligerents would consider talking while fighting. In contrast, relenting to third-party diplomatic efforts does not signal weakness in the same way as independently seeking negotiations. External actors’ active presence and participation may help belligerents reframe their decision to engage in diplomacy by converting it from an expression of weakness to a conscientious recognition of the international community’s will.92 By introducing an outside force that presses actors into talking, warring parties perceive fewer downsides to their reversion outcome if diplomacy fails, making them more willing to negotiate in a wider array of conditions where they experience less pain or foresee fewer benefits. In sum, strong external pressures for diplomacy obfuscate the relationship between negotiating and potentially signaling weakness.
This logic facilitates both sincere and insincere negotiations. Belligerents that earnestly seek to cease hostilities can initiate the peace process more quickly and potentially obtain less unfavorable terms in a settlement without suffering as many negative repercussions associated with looking fragile. Quantitative, experimental, and historical works alike have shown that international institutions and third parties offer political cover that allows actors to make broadly unpopular concessions or policy choices while blunting some political fallout.93 That said, externally imposed negotiations can interrupt the revelation of information necessary to resolve the original causes of war, undermining prospects for fruitful negotiations or a lasting peace even if this is the belligerents’ earnest goal.94
At the same time, actors without interest in peace can negotiate for side effects without worrying about perceptions of weakness. The Iklé quotation above suggests that belligerents may decide that the performance of diplomacy, however empty, is worthwhile specifically because it helps relieve and redirect political pressures for peace. By going through the motions of talking, actors can gain a reprieve from external actors insisting on a diplomatic settlement.95 Belligerents who believe that buying time will give them an opportunity to fully mobilize their military may also have greater freedom to pursue this strategy.
In sum, if all else is held equal, higher amounts of latent external pressures for peace increase the likelihood of both sincere and insincere negotiations. Regardless of an actor’s intentions in a specific round of talks, the ability to act on those intentions increases when outside forces help to diminish one of the crucial costs and liabilities of engaging in diplomacy with the enemy.
Information from the Battlefield
The existence of latent external pressures for peace explains the frequency of negotiations. It does not, however, address the question of whether these negotiations would be sincere or insincere. For that, we turn to the battlefield.
If wars are a consequence of incomplete information, then war represents a painful yet truthful way to learn each side’s actual strength, resolve, and intentions—all of which would help reveal the potential bounds of a bargaining range.96 By commonly observing an objective reflection of each side’s performance on the battlefield, belligerents obtain new information that may lead them to reduce their uncertainty, update their beliefs, and revise their bargaining positions. In some canonical models, fighting is depicted as a struggle to possess a series of forts. The term fort here is used broadly to represent strategically valuable military resources that can be exchanged and can shape actors’ ability to fight.97 Forts include not only literal military fortifications but also hills critical for communication, ports used for resupply, ships in the sea, units of beneficial territory, capital cities where governments sit, and more. Each belligerent is assumed to possess a certain share of forts prior to war, and wartime battles are discrete clashes that result in the potential exchange of a single fort. Observing how forts are given and taken, and also what costs are suffered along the way, will eventually promote convergence on shared expectations about the future course of hostilities. This allows belligerents to develop a firmer understanding of both the opponents’ and their own reversion outcomes, as well as how each may evolve if war continues. When both sides are able to identify potential arrangements that are preferable to their reversion outcomes and are at least worth their value to war, they have found a viable bargaining range from which they may develop a mutually acceptable agreement. Active hostilities are therefore crucial to dictating how, in the historian Geoffrey Blainey’s words, “rival expectations, initially so far apart, are so close to one another that terms of peace can be agreed upon.”98
Scholars have noted that outcomes from the battlefield are most effective in shaping common beliefs and ending wars when one side dominates the other over a continuous sequence of battles.99 While this conclusion is reached using a wide array of methods and evidence, the fort analogy proves particularly useful here. If Actors A and B each win two forts in the first four battles, uncertainty regarding each side’s prospects in war remains high. A wider set of actors can sustain a wider set of beliefs about their chances of success should they continue to fight. In contrast, if Actor A seizes four of Actor B’s forts in the first four battles, both sides should believe that Actor A is far more likely to succeed in future fighting than Actor B, regardless of what claims each side may have verbally made before or during the opening stages of war. As Actor A’s odds of success become more commonly understood, any bargaining range and negotiated settlement that settles the war will heavily favor Actor A.
We can extrapolate this idea to diplomacy that precedes conflict termination. Witnessing a distinct battlefield trend has three intertwining effects on negotiation strategy. First, concerns about looking weak from negotiating will fade. The disadvantaged party is no longer worried about the risk of adverse inference via diplomacy because its weakness has already been made apparent. Simultaneously, the advantaged party will feel more confident that its victories sweep away perceptions of weakness.
Second, the appeal of negotiating sincerely will rise. A persistently poor battlefield performance will push an actor to realize that its reversion outcome is not only poor but likely to worsen if war continues. The prospects of weakening bargaining leverage will lead the actor to make larger diplomatic concessions in hopes of minimizing its prospective losses. It is through these evolving offers that belligerents may find a settlement that both sides find preferable to the continuation of war.100 This is consistent with the empirical finding that wars have more durable peace settlements when they end on the back of a distinct battlefield trend.101
Third, the value of negotiating insincerely will fall. Although belligerents may sometimes be correct in assessing that their fortunes can improve through insincere negotiations, this belief can also be a manifestation of incomplete information. It is easier to believe that political and military mobilization will turn a war in one’s favor when this belief has not been disproven through fighting.102 Once the battlefield reveals a consistent stream of information that also creates real costs, the potential side effects to be extracted from stalling for time will dwindle and be unable to compensate for the increasingly dire reversion outcome that would arise if talks do not end the war. Truly weak belligerents will have little left to remobilize, and both domestic and international tolerance for further violence may disintegrate when an irreversible trajectory seems self-evident.
In sum, if all else is held equal, higher amounts of information from fighting increase the likelihood that negotiations are sincere, and lower amounts of information from fighting increase the likelihood that negotiations are insincere.
It bears emphasizing that my argument is consistent with existing schools of thought regarding the role of information in war. My innovation is to highlight the possibility of insincere negotiations and how their propensity is also related to what is learned from the battlefield.
Combining Pressure and Information
By combining the two broad predictions I have presented in this section, we can produce a coherent set of expectations about the frequency and mode of negotiations that take place during war. Figure 1.1 presents two stylized diagrams that illustrate how latent external pressures and battlefield information affect wartime negotiation strategies. As I have previously stated, the choice of negotiation mode is not binary in practice and is simplified here for the sake of outlining broad expectations. Belligerents that genuinely seek peace may still consider which side effects they can accrue if talks fail, and belligerents that primarily want to extract side effects may be willing to stop fighting if they receive a sufficiently appealing offer. We can nonetheless presume that actors predictably prioritize one of these modes of negotiation over the other, depending on the circumstances.
First, the left-hand diagram of figure 1.1 depicts an environment where few mechanisms exist to pressure actors into negotiating. Belligerents would pursue diplomacy only when they sense that the risks of adverse influence are less onerous than the risks from continued conflict. This condition is least likely to be met when hostilities have produced very little information; actors have insufficient incentive to revise their beliefs and avoid further bloodshed. Some parties may believe that they can extract sufficiently large side effects from insincere negotiations to attempt talks, but the costs associated with this choice are too high for most actors to be considered worthwhile. As the battlefield supplies more compelling information about the future trajectory of conflict, the disadvantaged actor would seek to stop fighting and to stem additional costs, and the advantaged actor would want to discuss and codify a settlement from an obvious position of strength. These incentives would push both parties to seek sincere negotiations. This is reflected in the right-hand side of the figure. Since at least one belligerent wants to cease hostilities and may even be incapable of fighting further, negotiations should be associated with a substantial decrease in contemporaneous battlefield activity.103 The final stages of the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War, described in the introduction, embody this situation. Peace talks at Portsmouth during August 1905 were associated with a de facto ceasefire.104 Overall, an environment featuring lower latent external pressures for peace will lead to relatively few negotiations, but talks that do occur are also more likely to be genuine attempts to reach agreement because they are a response to the realities of fighting.
Next, the right-hand side of figure 1.1 illustrates an environment where a great deal of latent external pressure can be activated and directed toward the belligerents. The costs of negotiation are considerably diminished, and fewer benefits are necessary to contemplate negotiating during war. Belligerents have greater liberty—or, in more extreme cases, the obligation—to talk to one another, independent of their underlying interest in peace. Negotiations will thus occur far more frequently across all states of the battlefield. This higher propensity of negotiations reveals a double-edged sword. Some wars may see sincere negotiations that resolve war more quickly than would be the case in the absence of outside parties encouraging settlement. Yet at the same time, these same pressures can unleash insincere negotiations aimed at reshaping belligerents’ reversion outcomes and supporting their war efforts.
Whether talks are used sincerely or insincerely is dictated by information from the battlefield, which influences each side’s assessment of its reversion outcome and how it can be shaped. In low-information environments where little to nothing has been gleaned through hostilities, diplomacy will commonly be exploited for side effects. The paucity of information about the belligerents’ true characteristics—which is further exacerbated by the inorganic motivation for negotiating—allows for many of the informational asymmetries that contributed to the start of war to persist. This point is critical. Belligerents that have not yet learned enough common information about their relative capabilities, resolve, or intentions can sustain misinformed beliefs regarding the value of negotiating, incentivizing one or both sides to enter talks under the impression that stalling for time and producing side effects through diplomacy can recast the reversion outcome in their favor. For all these reasons, talks may be associated with lower levels of battlefield activity, but the motivations to slacken the pace of fighting are cynical and not self-enforcing. Belligerents may temporarily dampen hostilities because this affords them an opportunity to promote their war aims through other means. The appeal of negotiating insincerely should be especially pointed for belligerents that have wider gaps between their latent material capabilities and the actual military force they could rearm, regroup, and remobilize if given some time to do so, but the ability to divert political blame by looking interested in peace and highlighting the opponent’s intransigence offers another reason to talk without any desire to strike a lasting agreement.
Importantly, this argument indicates that deception and duplicity are not prerequisite conditions for talks to be used insincerely.105 If scant information has been culled from fighting, both sides can be fully aware that negotiations could be exploited, but they may simply disagree on the extent to which any side effects will provide one actor an advantage over the other. According to Thucydides’s account of the First Peloponnesian War, Sparta chose to enter a one-year truce and diplomatic interactions with Athens because it believed that a temporary peace would deflate Athens’s willingness to fight again. For its part, Athens agreed to a truce in order to quietly reinforce its defenses.106 Similarly, during the lull in hostilities over the first round of Korean War armistice talks, both the United Nations Command and Communist forces harbored the belief that the war would turn in their favor. Each side prepared for further fighting and made statements designed to curry favor with international audiences.107
The negotiation calculus becomes more difficult when the battlefield produces moderately clear information in an environment with high latent pressures for peace. This situation is reflected by the center of the right diagram in figure 1.1, where the composition of sincere and insincere talks is more comparable. The belligerent with a relative advantage on the battlefield faces a precarious decision regarding whether to bend to any third-party diplomatic pressures and enter negotiations. On the one hand, the advantaged party could refuse to talk, suffering external costs of avoiding diplomacy and any additional costs from future fighting. On the other hand, the advantaged party could choose to talk, which poses a gamble between two outcomes. In the first, the enemy negotiates sincerely, peace is struck, and no additional costs of war are suffered. In the second, the enemy engages in insincere negotiations and alters the reversion outcome before resuming hostilities. Compared to the scenario where no talks occur, the side effects generated in this case may decrease the advantaged party’s likelihood of overall victory, increase the costs it will suffer in future fighting, or both. If the probability of a negotiated settlement, the costs of future fighting, or the costs of eschewing diplomacy are sufficiently high, they will outweigh the possible consequences that side effects may have for the future trajectory of conflict.
This calculus helps to explain why belligerents with even a modest upper hand on the battlefield may choose to engage in negotiations even when they are aware that their opponent may use diplomacy for side effects. First, intermediate levels of information may lead some advantaged actors to believe that the probability of the enemy genuinely seeking peace is sufficiently high to try reaching a settlement. Second, the potential side effects that the enemy could accrue from insincere diplomacy could be deemed low and therefore not a serious threat to ultimate success. Third, as my theory implies, sufficiently stiff latent external pressures may make the costs of rejecting negotiations outright too high, compelling advantaged belligerents to come to the table even if they do not intend to act sincerely. Indeed, side effects are a tool not only of the weak; advantaged parties could also try using talks to augment the war effort in their favor, independent of the opponent’s true intentions. Fourth, an advantaged party may have largely accomplished its policy objectives and would gamble on the possibility that the opponent wants to negotiate sincerely and end the war.
As battlefield information becomes increasingly lopsided (reflected by moving rightward on the right-hand diagram in figure 1.1), decisions to negotiate become more straightforward. Any potential side effects that could be accrued from insincere talks are not sufficient to counteract the reality of the battlefield—both because the fortunes of fighting are too strongly imbalanced to easily reverse and because the gap between latent and actual military capabilities, which stalling for time can help close, naturally diminishes as hostilities proceed over time. As such, disadvantaged belligerents that may have otherwise considered adopting an insincere approach are screened out, leaving behind actors who desire sincere negotiations to resolve the conflict. The advantaged party thus gains more confidence that any enemy who is willing to talk must possess a genuine desire to reach peace and cease the creation of any additional costs of conflict.
In sum, an environment featuring high latent external pressures for peace will lead to relatively frequent negotiations, but many more of these talks will be insincere, motivated by the goal of diverting the war’s current trajectory rather than ending it entirely. Talks will be more likely to be sincere, however, when the battlefield offers conspicuous information regarding one side’s advantage.
Implications
The discussion above produces a number of testable implications. The first three, which address the frequency of negotiations and their propensity to resolve conflicts, are reflected by figure 1.1.
- Hypothesis 1: In an environment with low latent external pressures, negotiations will be less frequent but also more predictive of overall conflict termination.
- Hypothesis 2: In an environment with high latent external pressures, negotiations will be more frequent but also less predictive of overall conflict termination.
- Hypothesis 3: Negotiations that do take place are more likely to terminate conflict when battlefield information exhibits clear information in one side’s favor.
The next two hypotheses speak to the ramifications that negotiations have for the battlefield itself. Based on my theory, negotiations should be linked together with decreased intensity of fighting on the battlefield. Belligerents seeking to negotiate sincerely would tone down their violence out of necessity or a desire to indicate interest in peace. Meanwhile, actors with insincere motivations would also dampen hostilities, though perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, because doing so would allow them to better accrue at least two important side effects: deflecting political pressures for peace and buying time to remobilize their military forces.
- Hypothesis 4: Periods of negotiation are associated with lower levels of active hostilities on the battlefield.
If the only impact of negotiations failing to end war were that fighting would resume along the same trajectory as before negotiations began, then existing models of conflict that treat diplomacy as a costless, perpetual, and instantaneous activity might be making reasonable simplifying assumptions. I argue that this is not the case. The act of negotiating itself can potentially improve a belligerent’s reversion outcome, which would boost its leverage in the next stage of bargaining. If my theory is valid, then negotiations that do not end wars are more likely to be insincere, and insincere negotiations should reshape the battlefield so that it differs from the state of fighting prior to talks.
- Hypothesis 5: Negotiations that do not lead to settlement are likely to be followed by battlefield trends that are distinct from those that existed prior to the start of talks.
Caveats
Several matters are worth clarification at this point. Critically, I do not claim that every attempt to negotiate insincerely is successful in reaping the desired side effects. In the 1974 Turco-Cypriot War, explored in chapter 3, the Greeks dragged their feet during ceasefire negotiations pushed by the United Nations, United States, and United Kingdom in late July and early August. Greece hoped to use this diplomatic interlude to amass international sympathy, frame the Turkish initiators as military occupiers, and prepare for further hostilities. Their diplomatic stall tactics failed to stop Turkey’s advance two weeks later.108 Insincere negotiations are a strategic gamble to disrupt the current trend and turn it in one’s favor, and gambles can be in vain. Even so, my argument does suggest that these attempts should work often enough to produce some measurable overall effect. Evidence in favor of this prediction poses a major challenge to the common scholarly assumption that negotiations bear no consequences of their own besides arranging agreements. Negotiations are not a mere reflection of the battlefield but a tool that can be used to help reshape it.
My theory and implications assume rational actors that objectively process information and make decisions based on specific cost-benefit calculations. But a body of work underscores the psychological biases and flawed rationality that permeate real-world decision-making.109 Actors that fight and negotiate in wars are humans, and humans unconsciously tend to rely on mental shortcuts and heuristics that are based more on intuition than on the reasoning process involved in theories of rational choice.110 Humans also possess different dispositional traits that affect their underlying preferences for using force, as well as how these individuals behave in policy deliberations with others.111 Moreover, actors’ decisions are also influenced by their emotions.112 Decisions made in the shadow of strong emotions are more likely to result in biased views about an actor’s own likelihood of victory, which further exacerbates the actor’s penchant for dismissing information that calls their prior beliefs into doubt. The desire to restore one’s honor or to seek revenge can lead to similar tendencies to discuss inauspicious information and to fight for retribution, which may lead to greater unwillingness to negotiate with an enemy.113 Such emotional motivations may be partially responsible for explaining the protracted nature of World War I.114
Psychological factors are undoubtedly relevant to understanding war and some of its worst excesses, and my theory does not suggest otherwise. Rational and psychological considerations can coexist in explaining conflict. If I find systematic evidence that negotiation patterns can be largely captured by analyzing patterns of fighting and external diplomatic pressures as reflected in figure 1.1, then a fundamentally rational logic does motivate at least a considerable degree of negotiation activity, and additional behavioral considerations can exist on top of this foundation. Such a result would push back against an attempt to study wars using a purely behavioral perspective and support a more open approach. Subsequent studies could then characterize the specific conditions in which psychological and emotional dimensions pull wartime behavior away from what is predicted by rationalist theories such as the one I advance.
Comparisons with Ripeness Theory
One of the most prominent research agendas regarding negotiations during war stems from I. William Zartman’s work on ripeness theory. Ripeness theory represents the leading framework on conflict-based diplomacy and is more commonly discussed in studies of civil war mediation.115 The introduction provided a brief summary of ripeness theory, but its outsized importance in both scholarly and policymaking circles compels us to return to Zartman’s argument and understand its relationship with mine.
Ripeness theory suggests two necessary but not sufficient conditions for belligerents to seek a negotiated settlement. First, the parties must feel as if they are stuck in a costly deadlock that cannot be pushed to a complete victory. This is called a mutually hurting stalemate, and it presses actors to reassess the viability of fighting through severe losses for little anticipated gain. Second, the belligerents must perceive a “way out” of their deadlock, referring to the general perception that a negotiated mutually acceptable settlement may exist. It is when both conditions hold that warring parties may be more “ripe” for negotiations. The opening of armistice talks during the Korean War (discussed in chapter 6) is often presented as a textbook example of this dynamic. It was only after lines of control stabilized after several offensives and counteroffensives at the thirty-eighth parallel that both sides realized complete victory was impossible, stepped away from their original demands, and agreed to negotiate in July 1951.116
The notion of a hurting stalemate may reflect a relatively low-information environment where belligerents are caught in a stagnant environment and neither side is able to produce a distinct battlefield trend in its favor. The second requirement of ripeness theory, “a way out,” is highly subjective—a point Zartman readily makes. The fact that perceptions of a way out are so malleable is meant to be a feature, rather than a shortcoming, of the theory. The intentional flexibility of this concept is designed to elevate the importance of third parties and their role in shaping the perceptions of the belligerents and pushing them to sit at the negotiating table.117 As such, while my theory does not directly capture a way out, the notion of a way out as constructed in ripeness theory presumes an environment that could constantly press belligerents to reconsider their views and return to the negotiating table. Ripeness theory therefore implies that negotiations are most likely to occur when battlefield information is low and latent external pressures are high. This is represented by the left side of the left-hand diagram in figure 1.1.
Ripeness theory has been disputed on theoretical grounds,118 and quantitative empirical support for its predictions has been mixed at best.119 Beyond those direct responses to Zartman’s argument, my theory offers at least three related advancements over ripeness theory’s understanding of wartime diplomacy. First, I outline additional sets of conditions in which belligerents may be more willing to negotiate: when latent external pressures are low but battlefield information is high, and when both latent external pressure and battlefield information are high. Ripeness theory best addresses when third parties should attempt to promote diplomacy in more protracted and stagnant conflicts, but in doing so, it places less emphasis on the fact that belligerents would also organically seek negotiations when fighting consistently and heavily tilts in favor of one actor.
Second, I systematically flesh out the idea of insincere negotiations. The precondition of a way out tacitly suggests that negotiations begin when both sides believe that a viable settlement is at hand. My framework expressly argues that negotiations can occur even when belligerents do not see eye to eye about a potential bargain. Zartman transiently acknowledges this point, remarking that “it is difficult at the outset to determine whether negotiations are indeed serious or sincere” and that some negotiations “may be a tactical interlude, a breather for rest and rearmament, a sop to external pressure, without any intent of opening a sincere search for a joint outcome.”120 These are acute concerns that subvert the professed goal of helping belligerents negotiate peace.
Third, and as a natural consequence of the previous point, ripeness theory does not address the question of which negotiations are more or less likely to be sincere. Zartman appears to recognize this issue.121 His subsequent refinement of ripeness theory establishes an additional condition that is necessary but not sufficient for negotiations to occur and also to succeed: a “mutually enticing opportunity” that not only pushes belligerents to talk but also pulls them toward an actual settlement.122 The purposely vague and subjective character of this concept further emphasizes the role that third parties have in crafting ideas and thrusting them on the actors directly at war, making ripeness theory relevant in situations where belligerents experience lower costs of negotiation and therefore have a lower likelihood of diplomacy leading to settlement. The fact that ripeness theory presupposes third-party intervention precludes the question of whether external pressure for diplomacy could enable insincere behavior.123 My theory addresses when such disingenuous forms of diplomacy are more likely to pass and how they may affect the conflict itself.
Assessing a Theory of Wartime Negotiations
My theoretical framework, which calls attention to the existence of insincere negotiations and enables us to understand when and why they occur, substantially revises what we know of what diplomacy can accomplish during war. Interestingly, extant studies of wartime negotiation acknowledge the possibility that diplomacy can be exploited, but the idea is more broached as a passing thought than highlighted as a central puzzle. As previously mentioned, Zartman only briefly raises the possibility that negotiations can be exploited, but he then says no more on the matter. Mastro’s explication of CCT also mentions that “wartime diplomacy can have negative externalities.”124 Her discussion touches on the concept of side effects, but the core theory does not explain when and why belligerents may have greater incentives to engage in a cynical mode of negotiation. My theory advances a systematic manner to understand when negotiations are more likely to occur, when these negotiations are more likely to be sincere, and what impacts—pacifying or otherwise—these negotiations have on the future trajectory of a conflict.
In the chapters to come, I evaluate my theory using a series of statistical and qualitative analyses, each of which features its own strengths and weaknesses. While no single piece of evidence can validate every aspect of my theory, the separate studies I present work together to support it as a whole.
A principal empirical contribution of this book is to analyze patterns of fighting and negotiating across two centuries of interstate wars. Doing so not only tests whether my theory can broadly explain a wide range of conflicts across space and time, but also provides novel and valuable sets of tools for future research on conflict. With that in mind, we now turn to reviewing the data constructed for this purpose.