George Rebane

In an effort to settle a claim, the insurance adjustor says to the claimant, “We’re prepared to offer you $100k.”  Looking obviously unsatisfied and avoiding eye contact, the claimant hesitates and finally responds, “Well, I don’t know … .” and trails off.  The adjustor considers this and offers, “OK, I can go as high as $150K.”  Still looking dissatisfied, the claimant again says, “Well, I don’t know … .” and just sits there.  After a bit the adjustor comes back with, “Look, we’ll go up to $200K, but that’s our final offer.”  Once more the claimant comes back with, “Well, I don’t know … .”  Exasperated, the adjustor finally says, “All right then, let’s make it $250K and bring this dickering to an end.  And let me ask you, why do you keep refusing my generous offers?”  Finally, the claimant looks at the adjustor and asks, “Why should I stop?”

Does this little anecdote remind you of what’s going on between President Trump and the ragheads?  The media reports of these on/off again negotiations are extremely uninformative and until now have failed to draw the obvious conclusion as to what the Iranians are doing.  During the last months we have witnessed the Iranians doing the same thing and the president repeatedly assuring us time and again that we are close to a deal, which the regime then quickly denies and and confirms with another attack on shipping and/or its neighbors and/or American bases.  All the while time passes, the elections approach, the president’s ratings are cratering, consumers are pissed about gas prices, etc, and an all-out military response becomes politically more and more expensive and less likely.  (What did Einstein say about this sequence?)

We all know that the anticipated negotiations will be a farce, even if they’re ever concluded.  But our professional journalists (especially on the Fox outlets) are behaving like propaganda shills for the administration when they report and/or interview a never ending row of ‘experts’ on this and that.  The experts don’t know any more about what’s going on and what might happen, and they answer no questions other than the obvious tautological ‘If this, then that’ which anyone paying attention could answer equally well.  The journalists accept this ongoing bullshit without any follow-up questions that demand a rationally informative answer, or even an honest ‘I don’t know’.

So let’s take a look at the structure and sequence of a real negotiation between parties, one that is to be carried out with public awareness through the media.  First and foremost a productive negotiation requires a clear statement of its objective – why negotiate at all?  Then we need to know the points to be negotiated; in short, what disagreements between the parties need to be resolved.  Finally, the parties need to agree on the negotiation process – venue, participating parties, schedule/timing, and the bona fide imprimaturs for accepting the negotiated agreement.  Besides the resolved points, the agreement should also state how it will be enforced and/or terminated.

In civil negotiations – say, between management and a workers’ union, or between politicians about legislation – each party should communicate these preliminaries to their constituents or audiences.  In the much-touted negotiations with Iran we see none of this kind of organization or preparation.  Instead we witness a chaotic see-saw that goes on between shifting parties with shifting demands to be satisfied by agreement on a set of ever-changing points, with both sides issuing divergent reports on what is actually going on – a strictly junior high kind of undertaking on a most important geo-strategic engagement.

As scholars R. Fisher and W. Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project study have taught us, not all issues can be resolved through good-faith and/or principled negotiations.  And some of those that possibly could be so resolved, quite often are not.  In negotiation talk, parties contemplating negotiations should always have formulated their ‘best alternative to a negotiated agreement’, or BATNA in the literature.  Only reveal your BATNA to the other side if you feel it is better than what they anticipate.

Our BATNA is clearly to resume full-scale destruction of Iran’s capability to attack its neighbors, control commerce, and generate income to fund its stated terrorist objectives.  But we are even deficient in doing that when we draw ‘red lines’ and then cave when Iran impertinently and with insolence crosses them, and we respond by once more by slapping their wrist with fruitless attacks on their missile launchers and storage sites, radar emplacements, and command centers.  We confirm our lack of resolution by refusing to attack their infrastructure which would cause the necessary pain that the mullahs would feel and motivate the Iranian people to rise up.

In the final analysis, there is no reasonable basis for negotiations with Iran’s murderous theocratic regime.  We simply have a set of necessary demands for them to meet, among them regime change, and an effective BATNA if they continue to spit in our faces.  Accepting anything short of that will not bode well for the west, and most certainly not for President Trump and the Republican Party.