Some news items from the past couple of days:
U.S. Navy fires at some ships, Iran fires at others.
JD Vance and buddies are getting on the plane to meet the Iranians in Islamabad.
JD Vance and buddies are NOT getting on the plane to meet the Iranians in Islamabad.
The cease fire ends Wednesday!
The cease fire will continue indefinitely!
Is there some way to make a some sense out of the confusing buzz of the news without being an expert in Iranian or U.S. politics?
Some prosaic things I've heard or said in the past couple of days:
Setting up a lunch date with a friend -- which day works for both of you?
"If you call before midnight we'll add a second set at no additional cost!"
"If you do that you'll be sorry!"
Do they have anything to do with understanding the important news of the day?
These are very different situations but they’re all examples of a basic and universal human activity: bargaining. It can be as significant as diplomats gathered around a table in a formal negotiation trying to find a way to end a war or almost invisible as two friends decide when and where to meet for lunch. But all bargaining is a process with some common elements. Knowing that can make it easier to understand what's going on.
The Three Stages of the Bargaining Process
Laying The Foundation
access and agreement to bargain
agenda and procedures
Finding the Bargainable
opening offers
counter offers
The End Game
reaching an agreement
ratification
implementation
This outline is NOT a checklist one might follow, completing one step and moving on to the next. For example, as I write this the United States and Iran seem to have gone from the stage of exchanging opening positions last week in Islamabad back to the initial stage, with the U.S. claiming there is another round of talks in a day or two (or all hell will break lose) and Iran claiming they have not agreed to any more meetings. The bargaining process can be recursive, moving forward, going backward (looks like the U.S. and Iran have gone from agreeing to negotiate to bargaining over whether to talk) or even stagnating (the two Koreas and the United States have never moved beyond the armistice agreement of 1953 to officially end the war.)
Although they follow the same underlying patterns, international negotiations are more complex and nuanced than domestic bargains and not just because the stakes are usually higher. Domestic bargains, from the trivial like agreeing on a lunch date to the life changing like buying a house, take place within a shared set of cultural and social norms and a legal framework. Shared values and institutions can even make some parts of the process automatic. A casual "let's do lunch" takes care of laying the foundation phase because everyone understands what it means and how to follow up. But with rare exceptions, even getting started in international relations requires bargaining.
Laying the Foundation
Especially in a conflict, for one or both sides getting access to bargain can be an issue. Do you really want to be seen as talking to those S.O.B.'s you're fighting against? That's where the role of back channel communications (secret, "unofficial" deniable messages) and intermediaries comes into play. In the current U.S. - Iran war, Pakistan and particularly the chief of the armed forces, Asim Munir, has made talks possible.
No one is interested in any bargaining that does not offer some prospect of making them better off. The technical term is a hurting stalemate. Just as it takes two to tango, it takes two hurting parties to bargain. But the level of pain varies. That should mean that the party hurting more needs an agreement more and so should be more willing to make concessions. But since neither side knows how much the other really needs a deal, neither is eager to make the first concession because that implies weakness. So Trump and other U.S. officials both boast of how much damage they have inflected on Iran and downplay the war's effect on Americans while Iranian state radio trumpets the resilience and valor of Iranian citizens.
Once the sides agree to talk about talks, emphasis shifts to agenda and procedures. THE AGENDA AND PROCEDURES ARE NEVER NEUTRAL. If we forget that, we cannot understand why both sides don't stop nit picking and bickering and get down to the real business.
Let me use two examples of agenda setting. The first is from a meeting at LMU that involved a student delegation, a faculty delegation, and some administrators and was meant to settle on next year's tuition rate and faculty salaries. The leader of the student delegation colluded with the administration to get the student proposal for a lower tuition increase as the first agenda item because a lower tuition increase meant lower faculty salaries. The faculty delegation preferred to settle the salary increase and set the tuition level to match it. The students and administration pushed through the low tuition number and took money out of the faculty's pockets (not that I'm bitter.) As we walked out of the room, the student leader reminded me that he had been in my class and I had stressed the importance of setting the agenda. I've never been quite sure if I should be pleased that he felt he learned something important from me or embarrassed. The second example is when your partner has done something irritating or untoward and you call their attention to it. Their response often is to bring up some small failing or peccadillo on your part and make that the agenda.
Procedures can bias the outcome. Who will be involved in negotiations: for example, when the Trump administration met with the Taliban to talk about the future of Afghanistan, the government of Afghanistan was notably not invited, making it effectively a negotiation about the terms and conditions under which the United States would withdraw; where will meetings be held (if they won't come to our capital we'll have to find some neutral turf because we are certainly not going to go their capital), and many other procedural details that need to be carefully arranged lest the devil be hiding in them. Fortunately diplomatic protocol and custom has evolved over several centuries of international negotiation so there is a thick playbook of procedures.
Finding the Bargainable
This is the usual back and forth of proposals with both sides trying to reach a win-win settlement that leaves each side better off but their side doing a little better than the other. This stage raises two issues: which is better, a maximum or minimum strategy and the question of credibility.
Let's go for the maximum: we'll ask for everything and if we have to, we'll make some concessions and settle for less. BUT as TACO (Trump Always Backs Out) suggests, asking for the maximum means you'll have to make concessions and once you start to concede it can be hard to convince the other side that this is really and truly, no kidding, your bottom line. The bargain you end up with may be less than you might have achieved.
OK, let's cut to the chase and ask for exactly what we need to make a deal. There are two problems here. The first is that the other side may happily accept your offer because it asks for a lot less than they were willing to give. The second problem is that if that really is your bottom line and the other side won't meet it, the negotiations fail and you're stuck with the hurting stalemate that motivated you to bargain in the first place.
Looking at offers and counteroffers also raises the question of credibility.
Credibility, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. As the ancient philosopher said, "a lie is as good as the truth if you can get someone to believe it." People seem to assess three things as they try to figure out whether to believe someone else: capability, proportionality and reputation.
Capability is usually straightforward -- do you have the ability to carry out a threat or promise. That's usually pretty clear but the "eye of the beholder" can come into play: it is not what you've got but what they think you've got. For example, for the last 60 years Israel has flatly denied having a nuclear weapon and for the last 60 years the rest of the world has firmly believed that Israel does have nuclear weapons.
Proportionality is a subjective element. Does the size of the promise or threat match what you're asking the other party to do. In the 1950's America's policy was initially to threaten massive nuclear retaliation against any hostile act by the Soviet Union. It didn't take long for us to have second thoughts ... are the Soviets really going to think that moving troops around or selling weapons to India or supporting anti-colonial forces in Africa are going to trigger nuclear war?
Reputation is the sense that you are someone who keeps their word, carrying out your threats and coming through on your promises. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me. The United States has a major credibility problem. This is a major factor in any Iran - U.S. negotiation. After two years of hard bargaining, in 2015 Iran, the P5+1 [The 5 Permanent Members of the UN Security Council: China, France, Russia, the U.S. and the UK plus Germany, and the European Union] agreed to the JCPOA [a very useful abbreviation for the Joint Common Plan Of Action] that traded severe restrictions and intrusive inspections on Iran's nuclear program for relief from economic sanctions. In 2018 Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement and in place of the promised sanctions relief announced new, harsher sanctions. A year later Iran announced that it would no longer be bound by the terms of the agreement.
Last June a U.S. delegation led by Trump's good buddy Steve Witkoff and his son in law Jared Kushner was in the Middle East holding informal talks with Iran when Trump and Netanyahu unleashed the massive bombing campaign of the Twelve Day War. And the same two were back at it in February when Trump started the current war. JD Vance may be leading the current team but Witkoff and Kushner are again major players. Are these serious negotiations or just a side show while the U.S. prepares for a surprise attack?
As something of a side note, Trump supporters tout his negotiating style as the "Mad Man" theory ... being unpredictable and irrational means the other side can never be sure what he will do so they have to give in. However there is no evidence that a crazy person gets more concessions than a rational actor and lots of evidence that a crazy person's friendly gestures or promises have no credibility.
The End Game
If negotiations do result in a win-win solution, sooner or later there will be an agreement. In international settings this is often a framework or broad outline, with the nuts and bolts to be negotiated by technical teams and career diplomats. At other times the order is reversed and the details are hammered out and agreed to by career diplomats or technical experts and the meeting of principals is a photo op. (The people who do the hard work of negotiating the therms and conditions are often referred to as "Sherpas" who do the grunt work to get the big shots to the top of the mountain.) Without the hard work of dotting the i s and crossing the t s, an agreement can end up worth less than the paper it is printed on. The much ballyhooed Board of Peace, which lacks any details or institutional specifics, is not the feared rival to the UN Security Council but an item for a pub trivia night.
As the man said "it ain't over until its over" and reaching an agreement is not the end of the story. An agreement needs to be ratified, that is, sold to the folks back home. In the current situation, the first step is selling the agreement to President Trump and the Iranian leadership. And that first step can become part of the process much earlier. Many a diplomat has told their counterpart that their offer is really fair and reasonable but they couldn't sell it to the head of state so they have to have a better deal. If the U.S. and Iran do meet in Islamabad one can imagine JD Vance telling the Iranians that Trump would never accept something or the Iranians explaining that they have to convince both the Supreme Leader and the hard line IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) leadership. Right now the leadership on both sides faces major political problems that greatly limit the range of agreeable outcomes. As part of the process, participants often try to underplay how much they need a bargain, hoping to convince the other side to make concessions.
If the most basic rule is that a bargain must be better than the current hurting stalemate, it may be impossible to find one.
Implementation is the last piece of the bargaining puzzle. Some bargains are self-implementing. A buyer and seller negotiate a price, buyer hands over money and seller hands over the goods and that's the end of the story. But especially in international politics, bargains are not self-implementing and getting each side to do what it has agreed to do may be problematic . Claims that the other side is cheating or dragging its feet or breaking the agreement are all too common in international relations and can even lead to the collapse of a poorly crafted agreement.
International negotiations are usually protracted and complex. A real estate deal is relatively simple: the initial stages of the process are well defined and routine, the major issue is typically price and the whole thing is over as soon as money changes hands. The Art of the Deal is not a useful introduction to the reality of international peace talks.
There are, I think, three core issues that Iran and the US. will have to resolve: freedom of navigation in the Straits of Hormuz, defining the scientific and technical limitations on Iranian nuclear activity, and settling on which U.S. economic sanctions will be ended. Reaching an agreement that can be sold to the key players in the Iranian government, President Trump and the hard line Iran hawks in the U.S. Congress, and Prime Minister Netanyahu and his far right cabinet members will take time, persistence, and creativity. President Trump called the 2015 agreement with Iran "the worst deal ever" as he blew it up in 2018. It may look like a great bargain compared to what we end up with in the weeks and months to come.
