Concerning Nukes, cont'd: Iran
Time marches on. A little while ago I posted on nuclear weapons programs. With events recently, I think I need to revisit and update things a bit.
E3 diplomatic efforts with Iran have failed utterly. The only thing I did not forsee was the brazenness with which the US backed the E3's obviously doomed efforts. Alarmingly, the least cynical interpretation of this is that someone in the current administration was actually dumb enough to think the negotiations would succeed.
Roughly speaking, the E3 plus Russia and the US have been offering Iran a long series of offers all based on the same framework, pretending that somehow something in that framework will prove acceptable. The framework is that Iran would agree to ship some portion of its nuclear fuel cycle to Russia to be conducted under close scrutiny, and in exchange nobody will refer Iran to the UN Security Council and maybe someday it will get a hand getting WTO membership. Unsurprisingly, Iran hasn't been thrilled with this. They may be misgoverned fundamentalist wackos, but they aren't stupid. In fact, they seem to know more about negotiation than certain Western powers that I could name.
Iranian President Ahmadi-Nejad recently made some fascinating statements that the US press has completely misunderstood. Roughly speaking, it was a slight variant of the standard Iranian anti-Israel rant,* albeit delivered with unusual detail and vehemence. In spite of press reports running the range from the baffled to the hysterical, this is actually a well-established Iranian position, as we were all reminded by Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei's concurrance the next day.
(Israel of course responded perfectly: "Our relationship with Iran has grown beyond the purely diplomatic, and we are re-evaluating our posture in this light." Memo to the US Executive branch, that is how it is done; take a lesson.)
So anyway, what was all that? What was surprising about it is that it was given now -- during a lull in negotiations, at a time of relative strength for the Iranian regime internally, and with a number of crucial UN, EU, and other international meetings coming up. Yes, that was the sound of the US/E3/Russian negotiating posture flying out the window.
Did you miss that? I am now going to give a brief refresher on negotiation theory. If you are already a master of gamesmanship, go ahead and skip this.
Let's take it nice and abstract. Negotiations can be represented as occuring within an n-dimensional space of potential outcomes (the "outcome space"). Every party to a negotiation has a preference function mapping every point in that space to a subjective idea of the value to that party of that outcome (the "utility function" of that party). Thus, any outcome has a particular value to each party.
In addition, every party has some value associated with the failure to reach an agreement. This is called that party's "threat point": That party can always sincerely threaten to withdraw from the negotiation rather than accept any worse outcome.
The portion of the outcome space that is of higher value to a party than its threat point is that party's "negotiating space." That party will never accept an offer outside of the negotiating space, so for a negotiation to succeed, all the parties' negotiating spaces must overlap.
Negotiation consists of the various parties identifying particular regions of the outcome space as within ("offers") or outside ("threats") their negotiating spaces. Obviously, where you end up within your negotiating space will depend on the order in which you make offers and threats in different parts of the outcome space. A nice high threat
point helps. Not only does a high threat point let you turn down unappealing offers, but it lets you make a threat in response to nearly any offer from another party; since the negotiations can only conclude when you match the other parties' offers with one of your own, the ability to make threats all over negotiating space gives you control of the negotiation process and lets you batter the other negotiators into making offers deep within favorable parts of your negotiating space. A common and surprisingly deep analogy is to the strength of one's hand in poker.
This is all very simple. There are "for Dummies" books to explain it if you find yourself negotiating an international arms-control treaty and don't know it. You could practically make a Kindergarten-level board game out of it.
Roughly speaking, Iran has just declared, "we are literally indifferent to American interests such as Israel or to our ever being accepted by the West." Since it is not plausible that a party's utility function is actually uniform along a crucial dimension like that, that means that the whole question is outside of its threat point (where everything is in effect uniform, since it's not going to be agreed to anyway). Iran is saying that within the offer space so far revealed by the US/E3/Russia, there is not a single point better than its threat point. It is a statement of profound strength in any negotiation. "Go back home until you can field something real, 'cause you aren't even in the right league here," it says.
It is possible that this surprised someone. There may be people out there who think that the threat point for the Iranian government (UN Security Council referral, possible Israeli airstrikes, remote possibility of sanctions, and tremendous popular appeal) favored the E3, but these people are idiots.
This was all really quite predictable. In fact, oh look, I did predict it. The give-Russia-the-keys-to-your-security plan was always stupid, and the E3's demonstrated inability (or unwillingness) to make effective intermediate concessions basically doubled down that stupidity. If the US put its own momentum behind this deal in hopes of actual success**, then someone should be quick to get feeding tubes into all those State Department Deputy Undersecretaries: they're decerebrate. Whatever happened to the cold-blooded diplomats of yore? Where are the Henry Kissengers and Adlai Stevensons? "Whatever happened to the Snowdens of yesteryear?" Today's American diplomats, stumbling around the old and subtle Cold War treaties, seem like unruly children in a museum, pissing on the paintings.
The rules of negotiation do not change when the US is involved, or where nuclear weapons are involved, or where the UN is involved, or when someone wishes very hard. Negotiation is a simple business of outcome optimization, and its strategy emerges from a small number of universal mathematical rules. If you haven't something valuable on offer, or if your offers lack credibility, you're not going to get what you want. American nuclear diplomacy of late seems to have entirely forgotten this. If your threat points are weak, you need to cut a deal, not posture around impressive sounding proposals.
And need I look at North Korea? Oh yes, the same sorts of stupid negotiating tactics have all but failed there. I admit I was wrong; I thought that there would be a pointless face-saving scrap-of-paper agreement, whereas in fact there is no agreement -- in short, for all my cynicism I was over-optimistic. The US, with North Korea holding a decisive threat-point advantage, charged in with ultimata and hard lines in negotiation. It does not take a game theorist to see that that's a losing strategy. Sure enough, it lost.
I am quite worried that American diplomacy is relying on some sort of delusion that other countries want to sacrifice their interests to accomodate the US. "Welcome us with flowers" or something, I guess. Nope. When the US brings nothing to the table, it takes nothing back from the table either. Can I drive this home to the idealists on the ends of America's political spectrum? Nobody will help you out of the goodness of their hearts, and not everybody wants the same things in the end as you do. You can't play diplomacy like a political speech, with soundbites and grand words and no specifics offers of give-and-take. You can't treat people you negotiate with as enemies (even -- especially! -- if they are) and expect their prices to go down as a result.
To the diplomats of the West: Stop behaving like dumbass amateurs. Sincerely, Nonnihil.
(* This week's particular variant from Iran was: "If the Holocaust actually happened, it would be the responsibility of Germany and Austria, not of the Islamic Peoples, to give up territory to establish Israel. We graciously offer our financial support to move Israel to Europe. If Israel and Europe decline this generous offer, it obviously proves that they don't believe in the holocaust either -- that it was always a Zionist pretext to oppress Islam.")
(** Of course, there is a more cynical interpretation, that I am quite afraid may be true. The US may be giving itself diplomatic cover for supporting an Israeli airstrike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Unlike the "Osiraq" attack, which could be done without outside assistance (and thus in the face of blistering condemnation even from its allies), an Israeli attack on Iran would have to pass over airspace that the US could not convincingly claim not to control or effectively monitor. By involving itself at the last minute in doomed negotiations, the US may be setting itself up with diplomatic cover for assisting an "Osiran" type of operation. However, the odds of such an operation succeeding seem to me quite remote -- and the Osiraq attack, clean as it was, was hardly a success on the larger scale.)
E3 diplomatic efforts with Iran have failed utterly. The only thing I did not forsee was the brazenness with which the US backed the E3's obviously doomed efforts. Alarmingly, the least cynical interpretation of this is that someone in the current administration was actually dumb enough to think the negotiations would succeed.
Roughly speaking, the E3 plus Russia and the US have been offering Iran a long series of offers all based on the same framework, pretending that somehow something in that framework will prove acceptable. The framework is that Iran would agree to ship some portion of its nuclear fuel cycle to Russia to be conducted under close scrutiny, and in exchange nobody will refer Iran to the UN Security Council and maybe someday it will get a hand getting WTO membership. Unsurprisingly, Iran hasn't been thrilled with this. They may be misgoverned fundamentalist wackos, but they aren't stupid. In fact, they seem to know more about negotiation than certain Western powers that I could name.
Iranian President Ahmadi-Nejad recently made some fascinating statements that the US press has completely misunderstood. Roughly speaking, it was a slight variant of the standard Iranian anti-Israel rant,* albeit delivered with unusual detail and vehemence. In spite of press reports running the range from the baffled to the hysterical, this is actually a well-established Iranian position, as we were all reminded by Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei's concurrance the next day.
(Israel of course responded perfectly: "Our relationship with Iran has grown beyond the purely diplomatic, and we are re-evaluating our posture in this light." Memo to the US Executive branch, that is how it is done; take a lesson.)
So anyway, what was all that? What was surprising about it is that it was given now -- during a lull in negotiations, at a time of relative strength for the Iranian regime internally, and with a number of crucial UN, EU, and other international meetings coming up. Yes, that was the sound of the US/E3/Russian negotiating posture flying out the window.
Did you miss that? I am now going to give a brief refresher on negotiation theory. If you are already a master of gamesmanship, go ahead and skip this.
Let's take it nice and abstract. Negotiations can be represented as occuring within an n-dimensional space of potential outcomes (the "outcome space"). Every party to a negotiation has a preference function mapping every point in that space to a subjective idea of the value to that party of that outcome (the "utility function" of that party). Thus, any outcome has a particular value to each party.
In addition, every party has some value associated with the failure to reach an agreement. This is called that party's "threat point": That party can always sincerely threaten to withdraw from the negotiation rather than accept any worse outcome.
The portion of the outcome space that is of higher value to a party than its threat point is that party's "negotiating space." That party will never accept an offer outside of the negotiating space, so for a negotiation to succeed, all the parties' negotiating spaces must overlap.
Negotiation consists of the various parties identifying particular regions of the outcome space as within ("offers") or outside ("threats") their negotiating spaces. Obviously, where you end up within your negotiating space will depend on the order in which you make offers and threats in different parts of the outcome space. A nice high threat
point helps. Not only does a high threat point let you turn down unappealing offers, but it lets you make a threat in response to nearly any offer from another party; since the negotiations can only conclude when you match the other parties' offers with one of your own, the ability to make threats all over negotiating space gives you control of the negotiation process and lets you batter the other negotiators into making offers deep within favorable parts of your negotiating space. A common and surprisingly deep analogy is to the strength of one's hand in poker.
This is all very simple. There are "for Dummies" books to explain it if you find yourself negotiating an international arms-control treaty and don't know it. You could practically make a Kindergarten-level board game out of it.
Roughly speaking, Iran has just declared, "we are literally indifferent to American interests such as Israel or to our ever being accepted by the West." Since it is not plausible that a party's utility function is actually uniform along a crucial dimension like that, that means that the whole question is outside of its threat point (where everything is in effect uniform, since it's not going to be agreed to anyway). Iran is saying that within the offer space so far revealed by the US/E3/Russia, there is not a single point better than its threat point. It is a statement of profound strength in any negotiation. "Go back home until you can field something real, 'cause you aren't even in the right league here," it says.
It is possible that this surprised someone. There may be people out there who think that the threat point for the Iranian government (UN Security Council referral, possible Israeli airstrikes, remote possibility of sanctions, and tremendous popular appeal) favored the E3, but these people are idiots.
This was all really quite predictable. In fact, oh look, I did predict it. The give-Russia-the-keys-to-your-security plan was always stupid, and the E3's demonstrated inability (or unwillingness) to make effective intermediate concessions basically doubled down that stupidity. If the US put its own momentum behind this deal in hopes of actual success**, then someone should be quick to get feeding tubes into all those State Department Deputy Undersecretaries: they're decerebrate. Whatever happened to the cold-blooded diplomats of yore? Where are the Henry Kissengers and Adlai Stevensons? "Whatever happened to the Snowdens of yesteryear?" Today's American diplomats, stumbling around the old and subtle Cold War treaties, seem like unruly children in a museum, pissing on the paintings.
The rules of negotiation do not change when the US is involved, or where nuclear weapons are involved, or where the UN is involved, or when someone wishes very hard. Negotiation is a simple business of outcome optimization, and its strategy emerges from a small number of universal mathematical rules. If you haven't something valuable on offer, or if your offers lack credibility, you're not going to get what you want. American nuclear diplomacy of late seems to have entirely forgotten this. If your threat points are weak, you need to cut a deal, not posture around impressive sounding proposals.
And need I look at North Korea? Oh yes, the same sorts of stupid negotiating tactics have all but failed there. I admit I was wrong; I thought that there would be a pointless face-saving scrap-of-paper agreement, whereas in fact there is no agreement -- in short, for all my cynicism I was over-optimistic. The US, with North Korea holding a decisive threat-point advantage, charged in with ultimata and hard lines in negotiation. It does not take a game theorist to see that that's a losing strategy. Sure enough, it lost.
I am quite worried that American diplomacy is relying on some sort of delusion that other countries want to sacrifice their interests to accomodate the US. "Welcome us with flowers" or something, I guess. Nope. When the US brings nothing to the table, it takes nothing back from the table either. Can I drive this home to the idealists on the ends of America's political spectrum? Nobody will help you out of the goodness of their hearts, and not everybody wants the same things in the end as you do. You can't play diplomacy like a political speech, with soundbites and grand words and no specifics offers of give-and-take. You can't treat people you negotiate with as enemies (even -- especially! -- if they are) and expect their prices to go down as a result.
To the diplomats of the West: Stop behaving like dumbass amateurs. Sincerely, Nonnihil.
(* This week's particular variant from Iran was: "If the Holocaust actually happened, it would be the responsibility of Germany and Austria, not of the Islamic Peoples, to give up territory to establish Israel. We graciously offer our financial support to move Israel to Europe. If Israel and Europe decline this generous offer, it obviously proves that they don't believe in the holocaust either -- that it was always a Zionist pretext to oppress Islam.")
(** Of course, there is a more cynical interpretation, that I am quite afraid may be true. The US may be giving itself diplomatic cover for supporting an Israeli airstrike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Unlike the "Osiraq" attack, which could be done without outside assistance (and thus in the face of blistering condemnation even from its allies), an Israeli attack on Iran would have to pass over airspace that the US could not convincingly claim not to control or effectively monitor. By involving itself at the last minute in doomed negotiations, the US may be setting itself up with diplomatic cover for assisting an "Osiran" type of operation. However, the odds of such an operation succeeding seem to me quite remote -- and the Osiraq attack, clean as it was, was hardly a success on the larger scale.)