Negotiating with the Untrustworthy
One common talking point in geopolitics punditry is the impossibility of negotiating with somebody who will not keep his word. Without trust, they say, actual agreements are just not possible; all they represent are concessions whose reciprocal concessions will be abandoned the next day. If the interlocutor is particularly uncreative, the historical example will be, perhaps, Nazi Germany and the unworkability of appeasement. Now, some of the refrain about untrustworthiness is predicated more on paranoia about Iran, China, etc, on excusing our government’s terrible negotiation tactics by making the opponent impossible to talk to productively, but the ‘excuse’ does seem valid on first glance, If we really take a look at reality, however, untrustworthiness does not necessarily prevent effective negotiation; it just shifts how that negotiation works.
There are types of untrustworthiness that makes negotiation much, much more difficult. The three main species here are: insanity; aggression-interest; and self-destructive lying. Insanity is simple: if the other guy (or your own leader) is actually insane (or senile), then the people he’s negotiating with can’t take his word or rely on incentives. A man whose cost-benefit analysis includes entries like ‘my army of sun-destroying tigers can definitely stop all their nukes’ just isn’t practical to make a deal with. The exception is when that insanity becomes predictable, if off-kilter; madmen are often exceptional self-consistent, just with a blatantly false premise (senility, to my understanding, is generally not so manageable).
Aggression-interest, meanwhile, is the type of untrustworthiness exhibited by Nazi Germany, modern Israel, and the entire Neocon/ Neoliberal wing of politics. This sort of untrustworthiness, besides giving not two hoots about honesty and good-faith negotiations (see: Ukraine breaking its pre-war treaty with Russia; Israel bombing peace negotiations), has as its motivating interest some form of aggression. Israel wants to break apart all rival powers near it (for reasons understandable, albeit their policy is backfiring horribly) and some extra living space for its people; Nazi Germany wanted revenge-hegemony-leibenstraum; the Neocon/libs generally want to spread Western cultural-economic hegemony, rending the rest of the world reliant on the West and tributary to it (a sort of globalist mercantilism), with a variety of boogiemen (Iran, Russia, China) as the foe).
Self-destructive lying, meanwhile, often crosses over with aggression-interest. Its best example is the United States, nowadays. The United States, alongside its aggressive interest, just lies and breaks its promises without a good reason to expect advantage. Most nations will break a promise if the benefit thereof seems greater than the downside (loss of credibility, mitigated by an excuse); the US seems bent on breaking the promise for the sake of benefits that the breaking won’t produce (albeit much of that is terrible analysis, like thinking the US can beat Iran without a politically impossible commitment, in an aggressive war).
Outside of these species of untrustworthiness we find the norm. Most nations across history are completely untrustworthy on a moral level. While cultural mores have some strength, a sufficient incentive will get just about any nation to break its commitments, to find an excuse; without faith in God, man just isn’t an honest being, not when the incentives get real big. The big governments of the modern world are no exception; possibly they are even less trustworthy than historically, given that their power often does not rely on personal loyalty and thus on trustworthiness (albeit the in-group/out-group distinction helps mitigate that incentive towards trustworthiness).
In international relations, therefore, ‘moral trustworthiness’ has never been the coin of trade. Or, rather, ‘trust’ has always been a coin of trade: a sufficient weight of something else will often get a nation to spend its credibility, its perceived trustworthiness, in order to get that benefit. So how do such negotiations work?
The secret is that such negotiations and agreements do not and cannot typically rely upon ‘trust.’ They rely on incentives, cost-benefit, and credibility, on balancing different interests against each other or changing the action which an interest dictates. Every player on the stage has a pattern of behavior which they will, to some extent, continue (and changes can often be predicted generally); every player has certain interests, national, cultural, economic, personal; every player has rivals, friends, and coworkers whose interests and patterns can be used to restrain other interests or create other incentives; every player has resources to create incentives or close opportunities (incentivizing prevention thereof); every player, though this relies heavily on their government looking to the long term, has an interest in establishing credibility (i.e. making its word worth something, and making its departure from its word understandable), in order to make future negotiations with other parties effective.
The key to negotiating with untrustworthy powers is to make following the agreement a more congenial choice than breaking it. That doesn’t necessarily mean waving a big stick military as the punishment for breaking the agreement. Carrots are useful too. And the punishment for breaking the agreement can be much more subtle or indirect. Finding a way to make the other guy’s allies his guarantors, giving them an interest in keeping him to the agreement, allows you to use his alliances, his strength, as a restraint on him. And he can do the same to you- but if you’re trustworthy, such restraints are no objection at all.
Negotiations with the untrustworthy are different, but they are, as a rule, possible. All that is required is a level of predictability, of competence, and of realism. How unfortunate that America prefers to avoid having or recognizing any of these.
God bless.
