Stuart E. Eizenstat, former policy adviser in the Clinton administration and author of The Art of Diplomacy: How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements that Changed the World (Rowman & Littlefield, May), spoke with PW about why effective diplomacy is essential in our evolving new world order.

The Art of Diplomacy recounts the United States’ most significant and consequential negotiations over the past 50 years—including conflicts from the Middle East peace process, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the lingering issues of World War II. Why is it so critical for people to understand the nuts and bolts of how these negotiations come about?

There is an unprecedented simultaneous series of crises facing the United States. These include the wars by Russia in Ukraine and in Gaza provoked by the brutal Hamas attack on Israel; threats of broader regional conflict in the Middle East from radical groups in Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria; and aftershocks from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran remains a challenge to U.S. national security interests with its emerging nuclear threat and its support for the groups it calls the Axis of Resistance. At the same time, the rise of China as a superpower, its threat to Taiwan, and its aggressive actions to gain influence in the South China Sea and beyond, have led to tensions in the relationship between the world’s two greatest powers. Another challenge facing the United States is the rise of new powers like India and Brazil.

We live in a time of global turmoil and conflict that has profoundly challenged the world order that the United States helped create after World War II, and reinforced after the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. To successfully deal with these issues and avoid endless conflict, diplomacy is critical. Without U.S. diplomatic engagement, the world could fall into chaos, with our adversaries filling the vacuum. I also want readers to understand how America’s unparalleled military capabilities can be used wisely to achieve diplomatic agreements, as well as the disastrous failures that can result from the imprudent use of military force.

My book explains to readers how U.S. diplomacy, backed by expert negotiators, can succeed and make the world a better place. It provides a quick history lesson but also a recognition of the qualities that successful U.S. negotiators must possess to reach agreements between countries with profoundly different goals, including preparation, stamina, perseverance, creativity, and critically, understanding the human element in negotiations by appreciating what your opponents must achieve to secure support from their governments, and establishing a relationship of trust and confidence with them.

By examining the most important agreements of our era, my book provides hope that we can learn the lessons from America’s successes, and its failures, which will allow our country to continue to take a leadership position, together with allies, to solve the challenges we face. This may also help combat the profound, disastrous isolationist sentiment, similar to what the United States experienced between the two world wars, which has arisen in part from a feeling that we cannot make the world a better place and that it is not worth the sacrifice to do so.

You played a leading role in several of the negotiations in the book. Would you share an example of a negotiation that you were involved in that had a particularly profound impact on U.S. foreign policy?

Over several years during the Clinton administration I led a multiagency set of Holocaust-related negotiations, mediating lawsuits brought by American class-action lawyers, supported by Jewish groups representing Holocaust survivors and heirs, against Swiss and French banks, German and Austrian slave labor companies, European insurance companies, and Nazi-looted art restitution, together some $8 billion. But I would also highlight my climate change negotiations.

With only a few short weeks of advance notice, I became the lead U.S. negotiator for what became known as the Kyoto Protocols on Global Warming in December 1997, heading a team of roughly 100 U.S. government officials from a dozen agencies. The stakes were high, with more than 190 nations participating and the U.S.'s leadership in combating global warming at risk. Through five virtually sleepless days and nights, I created an “Umbrella group” of disparate countries, from Australia, Canada, Norway, and Japan to Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, to fight for reasonable limits on greenhouse gas emissions offset by market-oriented measures like emissions trading and “sinks” like forests, against the European Union’s unrealistically high proposed cuts, achieved solely by regulatory mandates.

Mastering the complex issues and the competing interests of so many parties required intensive preparation, along with stamina and perseverance. I had to develop personal relationships of trust and confidence with officials from other countries, with the White House staff (12 time zones away), with the large delegation from the U.S. Congress, and with Vice President Al Gore, who made a dramatic personal appearance at the conference. But the Kyoto Protocol also required an element often overlooked in international negotiations: the willingness to walk away from a negotiation when you cannot achieve your bottom line. Negotiators want to succeed, but it is just as important to know where your redlines are. At the last plenary session, with the conference already running far overtime, the air conditioning turned off, the translators gone, and a new exhibition being erected in the hall, I shocked the other delegations by voting “no” on a proposed agreement because of an unacceptable position staked out by the European Union. This led to a frank discussion with the E.U.’s top negotiator and with the chairman of the conference, in which we finally found the language to reach an agreement.

This successful agreement in Kyoto created momentum for future talks on climate change and established U.S. leadership in this arena, which has continued, though unevenly, from Kyoto through conferences in Copenhagen, Paris, Glasgow, and most recently Dubai.

How do international negotiations between governments differ from commercial negotiations between businesses?

Whether or not we realize it, we all negotiate as part of our everyday life—with our spouses, with our children, with our colleagues at work, and in our occupations. Many of the lessons in my book of what makes a successful international negotiator apply to the ways in which we negotiate throughout our lives. But international diplomatic negotiations between nations are unique and have broader implications.

Diplomacy is the management of international disputes, competing interests, and relationships through negotiations. They are a means to avoid constant warfare. Just as an artist creates paintings or music, there is an art to diplomatic negotiations. In the right hands, it can resolve seemingly intractable disputes between countries for the common good. But in the wrong hands, or if external circumstances prevent the bridging of differences, it can lead to failure and dashed hopes.

Commercial negotiations (as described in many other books, including Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal) differ from international negotiations because they are often one-off deals that either work for both sides or the parties walk away and proceed to the next opportunity. They are generally about money and result in legally binding contacts that are enforceable by courts or binding arbitration. The negotiators usually have no ongoing relations. And even the largest business deals have a finite impact.

By contrast, international negotiations are rarely if ever a zero-sum game in which one side wins and the other loses; to succeed they must be win-win situations. Each side must satisfy its national interests, government leaders, and public opinion. And there is no outside authority to enforce compliance of any agreements that are reached. Moreover, as nations, they will have ongoing relationships on other issues that must leave both parties satisfied. The art of diplomacy is to frame the negotiations so the other side sees the outcome as something it can live with. Successful agreements may even leave significant controversial issues unresolved, to be addressed in subsequent talks, which might sink the immediate talks if there is an insistence on including them, because failure in major negotiations can have a convulsive impact.

You personally interviewed more than 125 U.S. and international leaders for this book, including two presidents, eight U.S. secretaries of state, and prime ministers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority. What was the most common through line that you heard from them about what makes international negotiations succeed or fail?

The most important ingredients for success were the ability of the negotiators to be fully prepared on the details of the issues, to know their own bottom-line objectives, and, significantly, the ability to listen to the other side and understand their requirements for success—to put themselves in their opponent’s shoes.

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger emphasized to me the critical importance of understanding the history of the countries with whom he was negotiating, and his ability to listen and absorb what his interlocutors told him regarding their ultimate goals. He applied this knowledge in his negotiations with Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam, Zhou Enlai of the People’s Republic of China, and, as a mediator following the Yom Kippur War, with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, and Israel’s Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin.

Secretary of State James Baker stressed in his interviews the central importance of cultivating a personal relationship of trust and confidence with his Soviet counterpart, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, during the sensitive negotiations over German reunification within NATO.

We are in a moment of profound turmoil. What is the most important lesson that history can teach us in terms of using diplomacy to bring stability to the world in the years and decades ahead?

The United States must be fully engaged in international diplomacy to deal with conflicts that threaten our national interests as a global power, with maximum bipartisan support at home; relying upon our allies to assist us; maintaining preeminence in our economic and military power; effectively using our soft power commitments to democracy, international economic assistance, the rule of law, and human rights; and employing military power only when it can be effectively used to achieve clear, realistic political goals that cannot be reached by other means. Retreating into a latter-day isolationism, as in the 1930s, will create a vacuum that will lead to an even more unstable, lawless world.

For individuals involved in government or business negotiations, what key principles or strategies outlined in your book do you believe are particularly transferable and applicable to a wide range of negotiation scenarios?

While international negotiations between nations are unique, there are many lessons that are transferable and applicable to other forms of negotiations, including business and personal negotiations in a wide range of areas.

These include the following:

  • Always be prepared; knowing more about the subject than anyone at the negotiating table is a great advantage.
  • Develop personal relationships of trust and confidence with your negotiating opponents.
  • Listen carefully to what your interlocutors are saying, empathize with their goals, and put yourself in their shoes.
  • Begin by framing in broad terms what you wish to achieve and explain why your goals are also in your interlocutors’ interests to achieve a win-win outcome.
  • Concede positions that are less important to your side, to build confidence in your sincerity in reaching an agreement.
  • Don’t shoot for the moon at the beginning; create agreement on confidence-building measures.
  • Be creative in developing compromises when an impasse develops.
  • Have the stamina and determination to continue negotiating even when progress is slow, and agreement seems distant.
  • Exercise leverage in the form of positive incentives and negative consequences.
  • Have the capacity and staying power to implement the agreements you reach.