Next weekend’s G7 summit in Hiroshima is, in part, a negotiating withdrawal for leaders of different status. Each participant’s position comes from a combination of their country’s size, GDP, and military might, as well as the leader’s charisma and electoral prospects. The biggest beast at the top is always the American president.
Humble pack members like it Giorgia Meloni or Rishi Sunak face a problem familiar to almost anyone who has ever worked a job or even shared a house: how to negotiate from a position of weakness? How do you ask something from someone more powerful? Here are some case studies on how to do it and how not to do it:
If you cannot speak your interlocutor’s language, speak at least excellent English. You are insignificant. You are not Xi Jinping, so the person you are pestering will not strain to hear your every word through the interpreter. To impress, you have to sound natural in their language. Don’t be like the Dutch prime minister in exile in London during WWII, who, when he finally had a moment with Winston Churchill, he is said to have greeted him with “Goodbye!” Churchill replied: “I wish all political meetings were this short and sweet.”
Don’t show off. When Adam Neumann ran WeWork, scored a 15-minute bout with Elon Musk. He used the opportunity to tell Musk that getting to Mars—Musk’s lifelong ambition—would be the easy part. The hard part would be building a community on the red planet. That, Neumann said, was where WeWork came into play. Musk eagerly corrected it: The hard part was getting to Mars.
Don’t lecture. In 2015, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis went around telling European institutions and German diplomats that their austerity prescription for his insolvent country was wrong. German “medicine”, Varoufakis said, was “part of the problem”. He was probably right, but beggars can’t give lessons.
Get it in writing. When Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew Soviet forces from Eastern Europe, US Secretary of State James Baker famously told him that NATO’s borders would not “move an inch east.” German Chancellor Helmut Kohl reiterated this. Gorbachev should have immediately had them write down the promise, notes Brown University’s Stephen Kinzer. Gorbachev no. The West then quietly rescinded the offer, which did not figure in the 1990 Final Settlement on German unity. The consequences still reverberate today.
Understand your weakness. British leaders approached the Brexit talks with the EU on the wrong premise: that it was a negotiation of equals. It wasn’t. The EU economy is much bigger, so the UK needed one more deal. Threats to leave without a deal or to make the EU “boo” its exit bill, therefore, lacked credibility.
The UK should have ‘magnified some demands rather than resist the EU across the board with a mantra of sovereign equality’, writes EU negotiating team member Stefaan De Rynck in his book Inside the deal.
Convince your interlocutor that you share his worldview. When Nelson Mandela was briefly released from prison to meet hardline South African president PW Botha, he compared the black struggle for liberation with the Afrikaner struggle against the British in the Boer War. Botha, whose father and grandfather had been Boer fighters, was fascinated, especially as Mandela said all this in Afrikaans.
“Zoom in” on a doable question. In 2008, during one of Argentina’s periodic crises, the country’s junior economy minister, Martín Lousteau, paid a visit to US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Paulson was concerned about the global financial crisis. Lousteau showed him that Argentina’s economic indicators looked remarkably like those of the United States during the Great Depression. He pointed out that whenever Argentina imploded, eccentric nationalists tended to take advantage of it. He said: “The outward-looking group of people need political victories. The political victory we need is to renegotiate our debt to the Paris Club [creditors] without the involvement of the International Monetary Fund”. Lousteau’s team had done its homework (an often overlooked precondition for negotiating) and found that legally the IMF could be sidelined.
Paulson agreed. Lousteau flew home with her victory, only to have it kiboshed by her president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who had just returned from Europe where she told the Paris Club that Argentina would not pay.
The hardest negotiating is typically not with powerful outsiders. It’s on your side.
Follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon and send him an email at simon.kuper@ft.com
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