Not for the Faint of Heart: Lessons in Courage, Power, and Persistence (Sherman, Ambassador Wendy R.)
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
Sherman, Ambassador Wendy R.. Not for the Faint of Heart: Lessons in Courage, Power, and Persistence. PublicAffairs, 2018.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
Introduction
The best way to describe the negotiation was as the world’s most complex and consequential Rubik’s Cube. The more you twisted one side to line it up, the more the other sides needed fixing. “No single part of the deal is done until it’s all done,” I’d tell the press when they asked about what issues were still outstanding. I used the Rubik’s Cube comparison so many times, in fact, that one of the technical experts on our team designed his own version, with key phrases from the talks on each colored square. It was such a hit that I had several of them made as keepsakes for members of the team, one of which now sits as an artifact of the negotiation in the Diplomacy Center at the State Department.
The contrast that we’re facing now in leadership is really between the autocrat and the diplomat. The diplomat weighs things and chooses words and actions carefully; the autocrat acts impulsively (sometimes at 6: 00 a.m. on Twitter) without checks and balances. The diplomat is inclusive and expansive, the autocrat transactional and lacking in empathy. The diplomat understands that every decision is grounded in present and past history, with an obligation to the future; the autocrat sees only what’s in front of him and what’s at stake right now. The diplomat knows that every conversation, every negotiation, every action, is like a move on a giant chessboard that affects all other pieces; the autocrat simply tries to find a way out, the way a child scrawls all over a pizza parlor placemat puzzle with a blunt crayon.
To make a meaningful deal, we need to see our adversaries not as eternal enemies, or dispensable ones, but as virtual partners.
Chapter 1: Courage
Since 1991, an organization called Brothers to the Rescue had been flying over the Florida Straits to search for refugees afloat. When they spotted a raft, the Brothers pilots would alert the Coast Guard to the boat’s whereabouts. The Brothers had other concerns besides the refugees’ safety: their flights were directly aimed at promoting the flow of Cubans to Guantánamo and the States.
Given the advantage, Congress added a twist to the knife. The embargo, which for fifty years had been primarily left to the White House to plan and execute, would now be enshrined in Helms-Burton as law, giving Congress unprecedented control.
one courageous gesture is rarely enough. Having begun to make a change, we are usually rewarded by being asked to take further risks until the job is done.
“Change is hard, in our own lives and in the lives of nations, and change is even harder when we carry the heavy weight of history on our shoulders. But today, we are making these changes because it is the right thing to do.”
we might call them hard hard-liners and hard-liners.
Obama spoke directly to Iran, saying in his first inaugural address, “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”
Sanctions are often useful in bringing a misbehaving nation to the bargaining table, but they rarely if ever convince any nation to change the misbehavior itself.
Despite the patent futility of war or simply continuing sanctions, no previous president had dared to literally open talks with the Iranians.
computer virus known as Stuxnet had been released into the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization’s network, crashing the country’s uranium-producing centrifuges.
Chapter 2: Common Ground
These achingly monotonous sessions were the ultimate expression of the reality that diplomacy sometimes consists of nothing more than staying attentive, hoping to discover a way forward.
In a negotiation as consequential, difficult, and long as this one promised to be, you need to lower the barriers between you and your adversary.
Establishing a common sense of mission and shared success is crucial.
But as the deal, and the two sides, got closer, Zarif, very social and expansive by nature, began to invite us to talk over meals. That was an indication to us that we were getting closer to a deal.
For one thing, the professional and even personal stakes were much higher for their negotiating team than for ours.
Another factor was what has been called Iran’s culture of resistance. The Iranians bridled constantly at being told by the former colonial powers what kind of weapons they could have.
Some of their emotional moments—Zarif wasn’t above abruptly leaving the table at difficult spots, saying he had to pray, or clutching his temples—were calculated and purely tactical, as were ours. When your approach to a negotiation is that your very survival as a nation is at stake, it explains a lot of behaviors.
The picture we have of negotiations is often that of a set-to between antagonists. In fact, the most successful negotiations I’ve been a part of have operated with a responsibility to the group. Fostering cohesion by building relationships creates norms, and norms change minds. You create a norm of wanting to get to success. “We will never get to peace” becomes “We must get to peace.” This is how groups work. No matter how disparate its members, a group that builds common ground develops its own center of gravity. It then begins to move in a single direction.
So much of coming to an agreement is learning the true nature of the opposite side’s concerns, and to do this we need to see what drives them.
Sometimes you can’t have everything on the table all at once and achieve your core objective. Sometimes compartmentalizing is key. Talking about the deal at hand can require not talking about everything else.
Chapter 3: Power
My news would not only surprise our partners but force them to confront what they suspected already: positioned in between the United States and Iran, they had unequal status.
But there was more than a little truth to the idea that the nuclear talks were fundamentally between the United States and Iran. And for good reason. The world would expect the United States, still the reigning superpower, to enforce any nuclear agreement reached with Iran with a realistic threat of sanctions. Alternatively, if a deal escaped us, it would be up to the United States to take military action to stop Iran from gaining a bomb—
On the contrary, the genius of the deal was that it gave Iran nowhere in the world to turn to evade its provisions.
This was an essential feature of the deal. The United States wielded its own power by holding out the ultimate threat of military action, as is often the case in diplomacy. More immediately, and practically, we were marshaling the combined economic power of the P5 + 1 and the EU nations to apply pressure on Iran through sanctions. We even wanted Iran to retain some power. We were concerned that President Rouhani be left with enough authority within his government to carry out the terms of the bargain. The trick, as always, was to use power without depriving everyone else of theirs.
our need for secrecy was principally based on our lack of trust in Iran. If our preliminary one-on-one talks had broken down, we didn’t want the failure to spread to the multilateral effort already going on.
Not least, confidentiality allowed the two teams to explore new ideas without exposing them to criticism from partisans in our respective countries who would be looking to sabotage any deal, no matter its merits.
EU’s coordination role was essential to gaining the support from the international community that we all would need for any final deal.
Early on, the French had appointed themselves the hard-liners among the P5 + 1 who would press for the most restrictive terms. In part, it was speculated, this stance was aimed at bolstering their relations with Iran’s main rival, Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are a major supplier of oil to France, but more pertinently, a ready buyer of French military equipment.
Senator John McCain, a Republican who opposed the deal, celebrated by tweeting, “Vive La France.”
Chapter 4: Letting Go
Failure in diplomacy can sometimes be attributed to a lack of what I call “ripeness.” In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Edgar tells his co-conspirator Gloucester that he can’t choose the time of his death any more than he could have chosen when he was born. “Ripeness is all,” says Edgar.
In diplomacy, ripeness is an agreement that can only be made when all of the parties have come to terms with what is needed—in this case, the need for peace.
acted according to a paradigm rooted in the idea that the United States is determined to destroy the regime. In his mind, the only way he could guarantee its survival was to have nuclear weapons to deter us from attacking. If you understood his perspective, his behavior was rational.
recall that at a dark moment in the Iran negotiation, when failure seemed certain, John Kerry said, “Sometimes you have to meet and not get anywhere in order to one day get somewhere.”
Chapter 5: Building Your Team
There were teams within teams within teams.
The model I always think of when trying to build consensus is “the Perry process,” which I observed close after Bill Perry asked Madeleine Albright if he could borrow me for his North Korea policy review in 1997.
Our orders were to seek out everyone who knew anything about North Korea—every scientist, every agency official, and every think tank from Washington to South Korea, Japan, and China, to Russia and North Korea itself. Over ten months, we gathered every point of view available. By the time we were done, we knew all the sensitivities of the region, what had been tried, and what was possible, and we were able to combine what we’d learned into a well-informed, well-formulated policy that the president embraced.
The Perry process was predicated on shared information. As I worked to bring my Iran team to consensus, I stressed that we were all interlocking pieces of a single team and we all had to know every part of the deal.
I asked our interagency players who would form the core negotiating team to draft a complete version of the entire agreement as we saw it, setting down on paper the basic agreement along with all of the technical annexes—more than one hundred pages. We all knew that what we wrote would not be final, but I wanted my team to know the larger goal, no matter what portion of the deal they were working on.
Those of us who weren’t nuclear physicists would have the technical language explained to us, and the scientists would learn the sensitivities of the politics. If some of us had trouble making sense of a section of the agreement, we changed the language so that it was clear even to the unschooled.
we all could attach a face and a name to every section of the agreement, from nukes to sanctions.
established not only what we were working toward but how we would work.
The first norm is that everyone should be at the same table every day. When we worked as a team in the actual negotiation we met as a group early in the morning and then again late at night, everyone at the same table, not matter what their job. Unless some information was particularly sensitive
What this also means is that if you’re on my team, I trust that you’ll bring your skepticism, your questions, and your doubts to the table as well.
Cathy Ashton also made efforts to solidify the disparate casts of the P5+1 countries into a cohesive team, as did her successor Federica Mogherini. During the frustrating summer of 2014, the nearly one hundred of us on all seven teams spent several days in Vienna holding seminars, suggested by Cathy, on the various topics covered in any expected agreement, with each country presenting on an assigned topic.
The whole exercise had the air of a high school science fair, but it drove home that we would have to operate in unison, shouldering different specialties and letting no one or two teams do all the heavy lifting.
It’s crucial during a time of consensus-building to allow as many ideas as possible to be offered and considered. Ideas are the lifeblood of any resolution process, and it’s in everyone’s best interest to let them flow,
Another benefit of a free flow of ideas is that a person’s ideas often reveal their primary concerns. Every proposal to the group contains more than a little self-interest; by entertaining many ideas, a leader of a negotiation can get some insight into what each party’s concerns really are.
I find that coming to consensus tends to require a place—a physical clearinghouse where all ideas are kept and evaluated. Even with all of our whiz-bang satellite communication devices, an ordinary whiteboard turned out to be the humble lynchpin to our understanding of the Iran deal.
The whiteboard became so valuable that I had its diagram of all the elements transferred to paper so that Secretary Kerry could carry around with him a complete map of those elements. The technical team also began using the whiteboard in no-fault discussions with other delegations for calculations of the interlocking pieces of a deal.
The whiteboard, where we could easily smudge out and rewrite, became not only our public square for discussion but a symbol of the overall dynamic of the deal and its intersecting parts.
When I hire a new person I like to sit down with them and lay out a few sternly worded rules
· First, if you screw up, own it. Tell me. I hate surprises. I won’t embarrass you in front of your colleagues, and I’ll help you fix what you’ve done. But don’t make me the last person to know.
· Second, be a risk-taker; I’d rather reel you back in from going too far than have to push you out.
· Third, know what your role is, and use the power of that role to get what you need, but appreciate that any role has its limits and responsibilities. Respect your colleagues. Help each other out. A little humility goes a long way.
· Fourth, stay in touch with my chief of staff or my assistant. They usually know how to solve the unsolvable, and perhaps more importantly, they know what my mood is on any given day!
A wise therapist once told me that no one dies of a little guilt.
how a team works together is as important to me as who is on it.
as if teams were clocks instead of living organisms.
skills outweigh nearly everything else when it comes to filling a job on a team.
After you’ve built a team, being flexible is also paramount when running it.
Chapter 6: Persistence
Diplomacy is not for the faint of heart. “Soft power,” as it is sometimes referred to in Washington lately, isn’t really soft at all. Practiced correctly, it is tough and smart, and it is guaranteed to be difficult. It ebbs and flows, has good days and bad, and rarely achieves its objectives in a linear fashion. One can’t be in a rush. The details must be precise and the language correct, since the words you agree to will be interpreted and reargued by both sides as they carry out the terms amid the jostle of events. Enforcement must be clear and consequences spelled out for all.
Negotiation is a spiritual and intellectual struggle as well as a physical one.
Persistence is not synonymous with patience.
When bulling your way forward doesn’t work, your best option may be to take a flyer—float an outlandish idea in hopes that its sheer bravado will clear everyone’s minds. At the worst, it may spur discussion; at best, it can be the solution everyone else has been secretly hoping for.
But there is a larger truth about the reality of diplomacy: negotiations are ultimately incremental, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution for all situations. Resolution 2118 solved the problem in front of us in September 2013 but not the problem of Bashar Al-Assad’s dictatorship
an agreement that fixes one problem should not be sacrificed even though other problems remain or arise.
“There’s a three-way race going on here,” an Obama aide told the New York Times in the spring of 2009. “We’re racing to make diplomatic progress. The Iranians are racing to make their nuclear capability a fait accompli. And the Israelis, of course, are racing to come up with a convincing military alternative that could plausibly set back the Iranian program.”
Chapter 7: Success
In any negotiation, it’s wise to keep in reserve some minor give, so you can appear to yield ground in the end with no real cost.
We all made hundreds of calls and paid dozens of visits to Congress, met with think tanks and NGOs, and spoke to reporters in an all-out strategic push directed by the White House, which set up a “peace room.”