What part of this book would I find most unexpected and informative?
Given years of exposure to remarkable negotiators, I did not expect to be too surprised by Kissinger's approach. Yet though aspects of his strategies and tactics really stood out, my greatest surprise involved his fascinating negotiations to end white minority rule in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). At the outset, I knew practically nothing about these talks. Yet they turned out to serve as an ideal, if unexpected, vehicle in the three short chapters of our book to introduce and illustrate the main features of Kissinger's approach to negotiation. Later chapters develop each of these characteristics—strategic, realistic, game-changing, rapport-building, etc.—in more detail with examples from a number of different episodes. (If you were to read but one part of this book after the introductory material, I'd strongly recommend "Part I" on the Rhodesian negotiation campaign.)
Kissinger himself described the Rhodesia negotiations as the "most complex" he'd ever undertaken. Widely heralded around the world as a "dazzling" success at the time, these talks are now almost forgotten. As the book's only full case study, our analysis clarifies the unusual strategy and tactics by which Kissinger helped enable black majority rule in Rhodesia--some seventeen years before Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk ended apartheid in South Africa. (Piecing together this story involved some serious detective work, ably spearheaded by Alex Green, going back to long neglected memoranda of conversations, WikiLeaks disclosures, and so on.)
Without getting into the strategy, here's the essence of what happened: toward the end of the Ford administration, major Cuban and Soviet incursions into Angola threatened to open up a new front in the Cold War, amidst widespread predictions of a coming "race war" in white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa. In return for moderate and radical black African states agreeing to keep out any foreign troops, Kissinger embarked on a complex series of intertwined negotiations—with no military involvement and little money. Ultimately, he induced a most reluctant Ian Smith, then leader of Rhodesia's white minority government, to accept the principle of black majority rule within two years. This same Ian Smith—who had defied a decade of high-level British diplomacy aimed at this result—had flatly declared a mere four months before his dramatic reversal that "I don't believe in black majority rule ever in Rhodesia, not in a thousand years."
More surprising was how Kissinger had engineered Smith's turnabout—despite passionate U.S. domestic opposition as Ronald Reagan challenged Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination (accusing Ford's secretary of state of "preparing a bloodbath in Rhodesia"). By building an uneasy coalition among moderate and radical black African states that were suspicious of American motives, Kissinger persuaded South Africa—that "citadel of apartheid"—to apply decisive pressure on neighboring Rhodesia to abandon its policy of white minority rule. Against the predictions of most observers, South Africa agreed to bring this pressure despite the plain fact that, if Rhodesia capitulated, anti-apartheid forces would—and later did—shift their main energies toward South Africa, the major remaining white-ruled state in the region.
This victory for democratic principle—lauded at the time from a cover story in Time magazine to glowing press accounts worldwide—ultimately soured with Robert Mugabe's election and disastrous dictatorial rule over Zimbabwe. In any case, I'm getting carried away in the telling, but this merely indicates how unexpectedly intriguing I found this story.