Ross on Slow Boring of Hard Boards

Deep into his absorbing (if sprawling and uneven) book Statecraft, Dennis Ross comes up with one good anecdote that might find its place in a novel. The time is 1990. The situation is the run-up to the first Gulf War, where Ross is at work (under the leadership of Secretary of State James A. Baker) to get the (collapsing) Soviet Union on board for an invasion of Iraq. Ross has established a back-channel relationship with Sergei Tarasenko, the confidante of Edward Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign secretary under Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. “[I]n the fall,” Ross recounts

The political counterattacks and pressures within the Kremlin against Shevardnadze led Gorbachev to allow Yevgeny Primakov, a longtime Soviet Arabist with a close relationship to Saddam to come to Washington to try to persuade us to alter our approach away from pressure on Saddam to an engagement strategy in which Saddam might be given something in order to get him to withdraw. … At this juncture, Tarasenko sent me an extraordinary message through a secure channel, showing both desperation and the extent of his trust in [our] relationship:

Dennis,

Primakov is coming over Shevardnadze’s opposition. He is against Saddam paying a price. He wants to reward him. His mission has been pushed on Gorbachev and if he succeeds, he will replace Shevardnadze as foreign minister and end everything we have been working for. He must be seen as failing and creating problems with the United States. This is a desperate situation.

Sergei’

Dennis Ross, Statecraft 85 (2007)

“Needless to say,” Ross adds, “the president made sure that Primakov was seen as failing.” It’s a dramatic but still useful capsule summary of Ross’s message. “Statecraft” here is a not entirely felicitous shorthand for what Ross has spent his career at, what he thinks the W has failed so miserably to follow through on, and what he hopes will occupy center stage on the agenda of the next administration. More precisely: the slow boring of hard boards, patient listening and talking, the hard work of engagement with our friends and our enemies.

The book is complicated by a triple agenda; it is at once a critique, a program, and an apologia pro vita sua—skeptical readers will say it is Ross’ brief for why he should be Secretary of State. Maybe it is, and maybe he should be, but he still makes a compelling critique and a set of persuasive recommendations. If his program isn’t quite as comprehensive as he supposes (government is not only negotiations, after all), still there is good reason to believe that the W regime has fallen down on the job, and blown off a lot of good opportunities.

The hero of this account, if it is not Ross himself, is Baker, the Richelieu, the Metternich, the all-round Mr. Fix-it of the Reagan and Bush I years. Ross’ showcase item is his account of the orchestration around the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in particular, the repositioning of Germany inside NATO—one of those political coups pulled off so smoothly that you almost forget that it happened and (more disturbingly) how easily it might have gone otherwise. Ross makes a powerful case that things like this don’t just happen; that it was Baker, with a lot of skill and virtually unflagging effort, who put it all together. [There is another, not radically different, account of the same episode by another participant –Robert Zoelleck, newly installed as president of the World Bank (link)]

Next in importance behind Baker we have Richard Holbrooke, then assistant secretary of state who (as Ross undertakes to show) brought off an extraordinary smoke-and-mirrors trick in achieving a kind of stability and order in the former Yugoslavia. It’s easy to forget already that there are really two stages to the Yugoslav story in the 90s—before Holbrooke, under both Bush and Clinton, when things were really a mess, and after, when Holbrooke, with a combination of skill and good timing, succeeded in making a dreadful situation at least somewhat better. Indeed, if Ross does hope to be secretary of state, he may have to get in line; Holbrooke is only 66, and still pretty spry (Ross is 58).

This kind of background sets Ross up for what must be seen as the heart of the book; his “12 rules to follow” in negotiation, and his “11 rules” for mediation. At first glance, these may be the same-old same-old that you would get from any attempt to explain bargaining techniques, from Thomas Schelling and Roger Fisher down to the whole raft of MBA revivalist tracts. The “rules” earn their keep here as filters for Ross’ own formidable experience, particularly working with Palestinians and Israelis.

All of which sets himself up for his unsparing critique of the W administration:

The Bush administration has certainly not had a negotiating mind-set for dealing with friends or adversaries. … Too often the Bush administration has lectured others and has not tried to persuade them. Too often it has conveyed that it knows best and that others need to accept this. Too often it has thought that the essence of diplomacy is to give a speech and expect others to respond. … The patience is rarely there for painstaking work. The mechanisms for follow-up are almost always lacking. The level of effort from the top is either short-lived or missing in action. The instinct to ask hard questions, certainly by the president, is almost unmistakably absent.

Id., 336-7

Nothing to add, your honor.

Fn.: Well, yes, something to add. The Middle East peace story is a morass all its own. Ross previously weighed in with his own account. For a dissenting view, go here.