Was Kissinger really a remarkable negotiator?
Why study him?
One reason is compelling to me: though perhaps less familiar to potential readers in the second decade of the 21st century, Kissinger has almost universally been hailed as a remarkably effective negotiator, not just for one notable agreement, but for several important deals across the globe. According to a June 1974 Harris poll, an astonishing 85 percent of Americans judged that Kissinger was doing a "splendid" job, while 88 percent considered him to be a "highly skilled negotiator." This represented "the highest approval rating for anyone in government since the polls were begun."
Decades later, in 2014, despite the many controversies surrounding Kissinger's actions in government, a survey of 1,615 international relations scholars at 1,375 colleges and universities overwhelmingly ranked him as the most effective U.S. secretary of state of the last fifty years. This top ranking held whether the expert respondents were liberal, middle-of-the-road, or conservative: male or female: and so on. Even Walter Isaacson, Kissinger's often critical biographer, judged him to have been "the foremost American negotiator of [the twentieth] century."
Today's urgent need for effective diplomacy and negotiation underscores the value of closely analyzing Kissinger's approach. How did he do these deals and resolve these conflicts? What strategies tactics worked and what failed? Why, how, and under what conditions? What ethical challenges does this approach present? Kissinger the Negotiator offers our detailed, actionable answers to these questions. Though our subject was historical, our driving objective was effective, forward-looking diagnosis and prescription for those facing tough negotiation challenges. (Some of the specific strategic and tactical negotiation insights are detailed here.)
Kissinger undertook his most crucial negotiations in a national atmosphere of rancorous political and social antagonisms, especially over the bloody Vietnam War (Does such polarization sound familiar?) In this challenging context, the former secretary of state and Nobel Peace Prize winner played central negotiating roles in U.S. foreign policy achievements: the opening to China after decades of mutual hostility, detente and the first nuclear arms control treaty with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War, the Paris peace accords with North Vietnam after years of bitter conflict (though the deal collapsed after two years), and Egyptian and Syrian disengagement deals with Israel following their 1973 war—that have largely endured to this day. In addition, Kissinger worked out a significant but largely forgotten agreement with Rhodesia's Ian Smith to accept black majority rule many years before the end of apartheid in South Africa.
It is one thing to have grand geopolitical designs and foreign policy conceptions. It is something else entirely, requiring effective negotiation, to have transformed such visions into reality. Yet how many secretaries of state have, among other accomplishments, negotiated fundamental improvements in U.S. relations with Russia (then the USSR) and with China, ended a Middle East war on stable terms that sharply reduced Soviet influence in the region for almost 40 years, and extricated the United States from a brutal Asian conflict? Not only did these actions advance many U.S. interests, they meaningfully reduced the likelihood of nuclear war when the vast arsenals of the Cold War antagonists were on hair trigger alert.
These are fascinating, world-shaping episodes, populated by provocative figures from Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, to Anwar Sadat and Golda Meir, to Julius Nyerere and Ian Smith, to Anatoly Dobrynin and Leonid Brezhnev, as well as to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger himself. Yet beyond any intrinsic interest in these people and past events, we undertook this analysis for its future implications.
Of course, unlike the nation-state-dominated landscape of the 1970s, today's global negotiators must contend with fundamentally changed conditions. These include a densely wired world with widely decentralized information sources, omnipresent social media, the rise of non-state actors (e.g., multinational corporations, global criminal enterprises, jihadi networks, NGOs), as well as transborder phenomena (e.g., cyberthreats, climate change, disease vectors).
As our analysis took shape, we became persuaded that, taking these changes into account, the dealmaking and dispute resolution insights we were distilling would be genuinely helpful for addressing challenges such as those posed by North Korea, Iran, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—as well as in private sector negotiations. By analogy, when adapted to his context, Kissinger found great practical value in his close study of Metternich and Bismarck, whose 18th and 19th century settings were devoid of air travel, radio and television, instantaneous global communications, nuclear weapons, and other core features of Kissinger's world. Essential elements of negotiation endure.