The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime

By Oriana Skylar Mastro Consulting LLC

After a war breaks out, what factors influence the warring parties' decisions about whether to talk to their enemy, and when may their position on wartime diplomacy change? How do we get from only fighting to also talking?

In The Costs of Conversation, Oriana Skylar Mastro argues that states are primarily concerned with the strategic costs of conversation, and these costs need to be low before combatants are willing to engage in direct talks with their enemy. Specifically, Mastro writes, leaders look to two factors when determining the probable strategic costs of demonstrating a willingness to talk: the likelihood the enemy will interpret openness to diplomacy as a sign of weakness, and how the enemy may change its strategy in response to such an interpretation. Only if a state thinks it has demonstrated adequate strength and resiliency to avoid the inference of weakness, and believes that its enemy has limited capacity to escalate or intensify the war, will it be open to talking with the enemy.

Through four primary case studies—North Vietnamese diplomatic decisions during the Vietnam War, those of China in the Korean War and Sino-Indian War, and Indian diplomatic decision making in the latter conflict—The Costs of Conversation demonstrates that the costly conversations thesis best explains the timing and nature of countries' approach to wartime talks, and therefore when peace talks begin. As a result, Mastro's findings have significant theoretical and practical implications for war duration and termination, as well as for military strategy, diplomacy, and mediation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501732225

Book preview

The Costs of Conversation

Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime

ORIANA SKYLAR MASTRO

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

To Arzan, who makes having it all possible

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. A Framework for Explaining Wartime Diplomatic Posture

2. Chinese Diplomatic Posture in the Korean War

3. Chinese Diplomatic Posture in the Sino-Indian War

4. Indian Diplomatic Posture in the Sino-Indian War

5. North Vietnamese Diplomatic Posture in the Vietnam War

Diplomacy and War

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

There have been so many friends, colleagues, mentors, and benefactors who have made this book possible—it is hard to know where to begin. The seed of this project germinated in the Politics Department at Princeton University. Aaron Friedberg and Jake Shapiro provided constructive criticism and pushed me on the core theoretical assumptions of my dissertation, which paved the way for the much revised and better explanation of diplomatic posture found in this book. Keren Yarhi-Milo also read the manuscript and has since become a mentor and friend. Most of all, I thank my mentor Thomas Christensen for his guidance, knowledge, and support over the past decade. He is one of the few who have successfully struck a balance between public service, China expertise, and contributions to international relations theory—a standard that pushes me to work harder. Moreover, his feedback was always spot on—even if I had to have a few glasses of wine before I could handle reading through his detailed suggestions.

A number of institutions and foundations provided support for this project. First, the fieldwork was conducted thanks to support from Princeton University’s Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), the Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation World Politics and Statecraft Pre-doctoral Fellowship, and the Asia Foundation Faculty Research Grant on the Domestic Dimensions of IR. Jim Goldgeier and Charlie Glaser helped arrange a pre-doc position at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University, where this research project first took its current form. I also received support for this research from the Miller Center of the University of Virginia, where I was a National Fellow. Also, I thank the Council of Foreign Relations, where I sat as a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where I have served as a Jeane Kirkpatrick Scholar. Both of these institutions provided me with research support and an intellectual home, which allowed me to make progress on a number of projects, including this manuscript. AEI also provided me with additional research assistance and funding, which helped me put the final touches on this manuscript. I was able to take advantage of these opportunities thanks to the support of Georgetown—especially Jeff Anderson, Irfan Nooruddin, Bruce Hoffman, and Keir Lieber.

I was lucky to find academic homes when I was abroad conducting research. My husband and I spent six blissful months at Campion Hall at Oxford University, where I was able to write the first drafts of two chapters thanks to the serenity and intellectually stimulating environment (and the port at Sunday lunch). The Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA) in New Delhi provided me with library access and office space, and Beijing University, in particular Wang Dong, provided me institutional support.

But this book really came to fruition during my time as a professor of security studies at Georgetown University. I could not ask for a better academic home than the Security Studies Program (SSP) in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS). To be surrounded by top scholars who also engage in public debate and affect real-world policy undoubtedly made this book better. SSP, partly through the Bilden Asian Security Studies Fund, and SFS also provided me with ample research funds to conduct fieldwork in India, China, the UK, and the United States—as well as to present earlier versions at APSA, ISA, MPSA, and ISSS-ISAC annual conferences. Additionally, I received excellent research support; several research assistants made important contributions to this project over the years, including Denise Der, John Chen, Zachary Karabatak, Danni Song, Yilin Sun, Danni Wang, Christian Verhulst, Annie Kowalewski, Zi Yang, Elaine Li, and Lynn Lee. I would also like to thank my editor at Cornell University Press, Roger Haydon; the series editor, Robert Jervis; my production editor, Kristen Bettcher; and my manuscript’s anonymous reviewer for their feedback and insights. Also thanks to the many others at Cornell, along with Allison Van Deventer and Anne and Rob Holmes for their help in preparing the manuscript.

The Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown also generously sponsored a book workshop, through which Keir Lieber, Kate McNamara, David Edelstein, Mike Green, Victor Cha, Thomas Mahnken, and Charlie Glaser pointed out issues and potential solutions, which helped take the book to the next level. Dani Reiter and Taylor Fravel did most of the heavy lifting as my honorable external reviewers. It is hard to overemphasize how critical these inputs were to the final product—the discussion helped me resolve a few outstanding theoretical issues and led me to completely restructure the manuscript. Besides providing excellent feedback on the book, Kate McNamara and Liz Stanley have been excellent mentors and role models for me at Georgetown, and have also served as stellar role models as top women in the field. My ideas were also sharpened by invaluable feedback at various presentations and seminars at MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, Duke, and George Washington University.

There are some people for whom there can never be enough thanks: my parents, Claudia and James, for stepping in to lend a helping hand whenever I have needed it (which has been often). I also acknowledge our faithful dog, Tava, who forces me to take breaks to walk around outside, and makes it impossible to be in a bad mood.

Last but certainly not least, my husband, Arzan, to whom this book is dedicated. He left behind a fulfilling and successful career, and his old home in idyllic Australia, to make a new home in DC with me. He has been an iron-handed editor and a sounding board for my ideas—and most of my best ones were actually his. But most important, he saves me from myself, bringing balance, calm, and joy into our lives.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Diplomacy and War

After a war breaks out, what factors influence warring parties’ decisions about whether to offer talks, and when may their position on wartime diplomacy change? Decision makers and academics tend to believe that the transition from pure fighting to talking while fighting is progress, but both tend to overlook or misunderstand how we get from one to the other. States currently lack a framework for understanding an opponent’s approach to wartime diplomacy and how to best shape it. This can lead to harmful miscalculations that may unnecessarily prolong wars, encourage escalation, and reduce third parties’ ability to mediate and bring peace to conflict areas. In some cases, decision makers have assumed, usually incorrectly, that escalating military pressure is the most effective way to convince an opponent to come to the negotiating table. In others, they put their faith in employing face-saving measures, often with similarly disappointing results.

This debate about how to get the enemy to the negotiating table unfolded in the context of US war efforts in Afghanistan. The 2009–10 US-led surge was designed in large part to pressure Taliban insurgent leaders into negotiating an end to the war. As one senior official from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) explained, You’ve got to put pressure on the networks to get them to start thinking about alternatives to fighting.¹ Some experts cautioned that attempts to bleed out the insurgency would backfire, leaving the Taliban even less inclined to negotiate.² The same debate is currently unfolding with respect to a potential conflict between China and the United States. In the event of a war, it has become a popular idea that blockading China’s access to natural resources would be effective at compelling the Chinese to enter into talks that could lead to a negotiated settlement to the South China Sea disputes.³ This is a very dangerous assumption, and one that is currently uninformed by rigorous research and analysis.

Diplomacy plays a critical role in the management and resolution of armed conflict in the international system. At some point after a war breaks out, decision makers usually see the opening of talks as a constructive step in the conflict’s resolution; dialogue allows for deals to be brokered and implemented among all the relevant parties. Aspects of rationalist, psychological, and institutional approaches to international relations all accentuate how meeting and exchanging offers can facilitate war termination, albeit by focusing on different mechanisms. Because of these benefits, third parties often push for the belligerents to meet, and even direct participants in the conflict may actively try to launch peace talks.

Despite wartime diplomacy’s positive effects, however, history is replete with examples of leaders refusing to talk to the enemy. In the Korean War, fighting ensued for over a year before an agreement to hold peace talks, fighting continued in the Iran-Iraq War for almost eight years before both sides came to the table, and the US-led coalition fought in Afghanistan for a decade before its leaders began publicly to consider integrating diplomacy into their war effort.⁴ In over half the wars since World War II, at least one belligerent refused to talk, privately or publicly, throughout the entire conflict.⁵ Political scientists have identified this nearly universal tendency for states at war to simply fight for extended periods of time without making serious offers for a negotiated settlement.⁶ Even when states are open to talks, they often do so with hesitancy. Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton captured the challenges of shifting to a new sentiment in a statement about the US diplomatic position in Afghanistan: I know that reconciling with an adversary that can be as brutal as the Taliban sounds distasteful, even unimaginable. And diplomacy would be easy if we only had to talk to our friends. But that is not how one makes peace.⁷

One famous case of a reluctance to talk concerns Winston Churchill’s success in convincing his colleagues not to open negotiations with Nazi Germany after the fall of France. During British War Cabinet meetings between May 24 and 28, 1940, Churchill made the case that the timing was not ripe for talks, largely because Britain had just suffered such a grievous defeat. Churchill was also concerned that entertaining talks would terribly damage British morale, which in turn would hurt the country’s ability to hold off an invasion.⁸ In other words, Great Britain needed to first demonstrate resiliency; in Churchill’s words, If, after two or three months, we could show that we were still unbeaten, our prestige would return.… Let us therefore avoid being dragged down this slippery slope with France. The whole of this manoeuvre was intended to get us so deeply involved in negotiations that we should be unable to turn back.⁹ The British ambassador to Japan did not inquire about the types of proposals Germany might be willing to make in talks when meeting with the Japanese foreign minister for fear of encouraging belief that [Great Britain] might be prepared to listen to them.¹⁰

One of the main proposals considered was to approach the Italians and ask them to make inquiries with Germany about potential terms of peace. But Churchill was against demonstrating any willingness to negotiate, fearing it would convey weakness to Hitler and make it impossible to credibly return to a position of defiance.¹¹ Liberal leader A. Sinclair agreed that any sign of weakness would encourage the Germans and Italians and also undermine morale at home. The members of the war cabinet came to the agreement that the situation would improve only if Great Britain could demonstrate confidence in its ability to counter the Germans, and at this point this message could be conveyed only by refusing to negotiate.¹²

This book demonstrates that diplomacy and war fighting are best understood as integral aspects of a state’s wartime strategy that interact and shape each other, not as two separate state behaviors. Decisions about diplomatic posture can impact one’s prospects for victory by helping or hindering one’s ability to fight and shaping the nature and intensity of the conflict. These choices are purposive in that states survey their environment and, to the best of their ability, choose the diplomatic posture that maximizes their prospects of victory and minimizes the aggregate cost of conflict.

All else being equal, states prefer genuine peace talks to the absence of talking while fighting. The problem is that states are often uncertain about the true motivation behind an offer to talk. Willingness to talk may be construed as a sign of weakness, that one is less resolved or militarily weaker. The repercussions of communicating such information can be severe—an adversary may feel more optimistic about its own prospects and be encouraged to fight harder and longer as a result. Because of this dynamic, leaders are often reluctant to take the risk for peace necessary for talks to emerge.

Talks between states play a central role in prominent theories regarding peace, crisis, the onset of war, war duration, and war termination. In peacetime, direct talks allow states to bargain, coordinate positions, and implement agreements to realize strategic interests short of war. Neoliberal institutionalists argue that institutions may increase cooperation by reducing transaction costs of information transmission, something that is often done through verbal communication among member states.¹³ Some scholars point to the increased people-to-people interaction and communication that result from trade as a mechanism through which economic ties can lead to a reduced likelihood of war.¹⁴ From the rationalist perspective, direct communication can help maintain peace by enhancing the credibility of states’ threats and assurances.¹⁵ Research in the cognitive psychology tradition posits different mechanisms through which talks are instrumental: face-to-face interaction may help facilitate agreements because it allows states to demonstrate sincerity and build trust through personal impressions.¹⁶ Talking is also a key component of coercive diplomacy, or the simultaneous use of threats or limited military action and diplomatic efforts designed to persuade the target state to change its policies or behavior.¹⁷

As tensions escalate between states, talks continue to be central to narratives about costly signaling in crisis bargaining.¹⁸ States’ decisions and responses that are often used to decipher whether they are a weak or strong type are often conveyed through talks, albeit implicitly.¹⁹ The argument of this book centers on the premise that states believe a willingness to talk could give away their type as weak, and therefore they need to signal strength and resiliency before such a step can be taken. Open communication channels can also signal conciliatory intentions, while refusal to engage underscores a state’s dedication to a contentious approach.²⁰ A nascent research agenda looks at how states choose to communicate—through private or covert talks or public posturing—and the conditions under which each method allows states to send credible signals.²¹ Robert Trager articulates that the existence of diplomatic channels affects the likelihood of conflict, and shows that leaders can learn from conversations behind closed doors with potential adversaries.²² States’ willingness to talk also varies inversely with the likelihood that a disagreement will escalate to war. Direct communication is critical to avoiding miscommunication and miscalculation, which is why countries sometimes establish direct hotlines between leaders.²³ Other work points out that states often cut off talks or diplomatic ties when they are on the brink of war without explaining the rationale behind this decision.²⁴

When war breaks out because states fail to credibly communicate their willingness and ability to fight, talks have a place in scholarly explanations of the duration and its termination of the military conflict. For example, Catherine Langlois and Jean-Pierre Langlois argue that states may delay negotiations as part of an attrition strategy of holding out in the hope that the other side will give in to outstanding demands.²⁵ In a conflict between rivals, war may be prolonged because domestic political interests prefer military victory over negotiated settlement—in other words, rivalry leads to heightened reluctance to talk to the enemy.²⁶

Finally, talks are one mechanism through which wars can come to an end. The bargaining model of war argues that wars break out because of incomplete information, and therefore conflicts should cease when beliefs about relative power, resolve, and cost sensitivity converge.²⁷ Such learning can occur through the exchanging of offers, which tends to happen in the context of direct talks.²⁸ This is not to say that talks always lead to the quick resolution of war, but they are one important causal pathway to peace. Moreover, war termination is theoretically more likely after talks emerge because of the informational value of direct engagement. The opening of negotiations can alter the positions of the belligerents, in part by strengthening the hands of the doves when there are competing domestic interests.²⁹

The Imperative to Study Diplomatic Posture

While direct talks are not the only way states communicate with each other, this review shows that many theoretical treatments distinguish this type of communication from others because of the psychological impact of face-to-face interaction, the effectiveness of direct information transmission, and the higher certainty of the source of the signal or target audience. But the existing literature either ignores or gives a shallow treatment to how states approach talking to the enemy. Instead, most of the existing literature assumes states have a particular diplomatic posture and proceed from there to explain peace, crisis signaling, and the onset, duration, and termination of war. Even the bargaining model of war, which goes to great lengths to treat diplomacy as part of the war-fighting process, provides little insight into the strategic choices shaping diplomatic posture.³⁰ If peacetime diplomacy is a fragmented field of study with a weak theoretical base, then the study of wartime diplomacy—whether states are willing to talk with the enemy—is virtually nonexistent.³¹ This creates a theoretical imperative to explain the variation we see in diplomatic posture across countries, conflicts, and time.

Additionally, there is not an adequate appreciation of the distinctiveness of talking while fighting compared with peacetime or crisis diplomacy. In wartime diplomacy, the direct interaction between political entities, their principals, and accredited agents has lost its routine nature and takes place with violence in the backdrop.³² This continuous state of violence distinguishes wartime diplomacy from peacetime diplomacy in two important ways. First, war ensures that states pay real costs if they fail to negotiate a settlement, meaning there is a constant and strong pull toward the negotiating table.³³ Even if states manage to achieve a decisive victory, they could have potentially achieved their war aims at a smaller cost by talking while fighting. Second, war fighting also creates a situation in which diplomacy becomes an integral part of the coercive strategy in which states use force and the threat of force to influence other states.³⁴ This backdrop of violence creates the possibility that a readiness to talk will be interpreted as conceding under military pressure, raising the strategic costs of conversation.

Identifying the conditions under which states are more inclined to engage in wartime talks may serve to inform policy as well. Policymakers do not have a firm understanding of the concerns that discourage leaders from coming to the table and how to allay them. By examining the historical record, including instances in which countries were unable to get or delayed in getting key players to the negotiating table, lessons can be learned that will help members of the international community more effectively convince belligerents to negotiate with one another in the future. Such knowledge is especially important in contemporary international relations, since an ever-increasing majority of modern wars are limited wars that end in a negotiated settlement.³⁵

Defining and Measuring Diplomatic Posture

This book is designed to provide the first comprehensive framework for understanding when and how states incorporate talking with the enemy into their war-fighting strategies. The scope of analysis is limited to wartime decisions. Peacetime bargaining behavior is theoretically distinct in that states may delay resolution of an issue indefinitely at negligible cost. Warfare ensures that states pay real costs if they fail to reach a negotiated settlement.

I refer to the belligerent’s willingness to engage in direct talks with its enemy at a given point in a war as its diplomatic posture. Diplomatic posture is a country-level variable that captures a country’s position as either open or closed to talking with the enemy at a given time. Countries can exhibit both closed and open diplomatic postures during the course of a war.

In an open diplomatic posture, the warring party is willing to talk directly with the enemy unconditionally in a given period, meaning under current conditions. States can appeal directly to their opponent for talks through public statements or secret channels. States can also ask third parties—individuals, international institutions, countries not party to the dispute—to communicate their readiness to engage. A country may also demonstrate its open diplomatic posture more passively, by accepting third-party mediation or offers for direct talks made by the enemy. Because it is a country-level variable, an open diplomatic posture may not actually lead to peace talks. For talks to emerge, a state’s counterparts must also be open.

This definition and its values consist of a number of key components. First, talks and negotiations are used interchangeably so as not to artificially attach any judgments about the value or effectiveness of the engagement.³⁶ Second, the emphasis on direct talks is important; if a state is willing to communicate only through third-party interlocutors, it is not open. Because the critical factor is how one relates to the enemy, a government can still have an open diplomatic posture even if it pushes for secret talks, a strategy that can alleviate domestic political pressures. Third, unconditional willingness in a given period of time is an important feature. Once a state puts preconditions on talks, in practice it is not open to talks in the current period under the current conditions. If these preconditions are met and the state does not create additional obstacles, then a state may move to an open posture. Simply put, for its diplomatic posture to be considered open, a belligerent needs to express both a desire for direct communication and acceptance of engagement without any conditions.³⁷

When one of these two conditions is not met, a belligerent’s diplomatic posture is considered closed. A country’s opposition to wartime diplomacy can entail (1) refusing to receive representatives from the other side, (2) opposing all international and multilateral efforts to bring belligerents to the negotiating table, or (3) receiving third-party mediators only to communicate its rejection of direct diplomacy under current conditions. This opposition can be expressed as a blanket policy—for example, the US policy of never negotiating with terrorists. States may alternatively present their closed posture as conditional, claiming they will be open to talks once certain conditions are met.³⁸

At any given point in a war, a state may have either a closed or an open diplomatic posture. A country may also transition between diplomatic postures. While theoretically possible, in practice states rarely revert back to a closed posture from an open one, so transitions tend to be unidirectional from closed to open. This does not imply that states are always talking; the schedule of interaction inevitably includes pauses between rounds, and sometimes states purposefully extend these pauses to increase bargaining leverage. But it is difficult for a state to credibly communicate that it is intractably closed off to talking to the enemy over the issue when it previously opened itself up to negotiations after hostilities began. Moreover, states expect delays and walkouts as a bargaining tactic in negotiations, and therefore such moves do not provide new information needed to change expectations.³⁹

Limitations, Caveats, and Scope Conditions

In the next chapter I present the costly conversations thesis, which argues that decision makers are primarily concerned with the strategic costs of conversation; these costs need to be low before decision makers are willing to engage diplomatically with their enemy. Specifically, leaders look at two factors when determining the costs of conversation: the likelihood the enemy will interpret weakness from an open diplomatic posture, and how the enemy may change its strategy in response to such an interpretation. As leaders’ perceptions about these two factors evolve, so too does the cost-benefit analysis of different diplomatic postures. Only if a state thinks that it has adequately demonstrated strength and resiliency to avoid adverse inference and that its enemy does not have the capacity to prolong, escalate, or intensify the war in response will it choose an open diplomatic posture.

The costly conversations thesis is a strategic choice approach to wartime diplomatic posture. It takes into account states’ preferences over outcomes, the strategies they may employ to get to those outcomes, and how the strategic environment impacts the attractiveness of those different courses of action. The theory is designed to explain the decisions of a given state—but it is also strategic, in that the inputs to this decision-making process are determined by the beliefs and actions of other actors.

The costly conversations thesis is designed primarily to explain diplomatic posture during limited interstate conflicts. However, its logic provides insight into the obstacles in getting states to the negotiating table in many other situations as well. In the next chapter I discuss how a narrower interpretation of the costly conversations thesis can explain diplomatic posture when states harbor absolute aims as well. Specifically, states may choose a closed diplomatic posture because they fear that a willingness to talk could mistakenly convey limited aims to their opponents, thereby encouraging them to persist in fighting rather than capitulate, which would increase the overall costs of the war. In the concluding chapters I discuss in greater detail how the logic of the costly conversations thesis can shed light on the diplomatic choices of combatants during civil wars and those of nonstate actors, as well as such decisions made outside of a war-fighting scenario. There are many cases in which states have poor and tense relations and struggle to get talks started over critical security issues, but do not find themselves at war. The dynamics may be similar to a war if one of the countries is engaging in coercive behavior through other means, such as economic sanctions, which creates the possibility that coming to the table conveys weakness. Fears of encouraging greater coercion likely created obstacles in getting North Korea and Iran, for example, to the table to discuss their nuclear programs. The application of the costly conversations thesis to these cases and crisis bargaining in general are explored in the conclusion.

This is a book about the conditions under which leaders are willing to talk to their enemies during the course of a war. It does not attempt to explain the content of offers exchanged at the negotiating table, when talks eventually lead to a war termination settlement, whether that agreement is upheld, or why talks break down. Moreover, my theory does not address in great detail the validity of decision makers’ fears about the repercussions of an open diplomatic posture. States have difficulty drawing inferences from others’ behavior, and they often guess wrongly. Perceptions of diplomatic posture are no exception.⁴⁰ However, the evidence in this book suggests that for the most part states are correct in their assessments of how the enemy will perceive a willingness to talk at various stages of the war. Finally, the costly conversations approach is a threshold theory. This means there is not an objective level of demonstrated resiliency or constrained enemy strategic capacity that all leaders believe to be adequate to allow for talks—it is possible that leadership beliefs and personalities or domestic politics affect that threshold, though that is a question for future inquiry. The critical insight is that leaders consider these two factors when estimating the costs of conversation and choose a diplomatic posture accordingly.

While I argue that the costly conversations framework explains states’ diplomatic decisions in the vast majority of interstate conflicts, there are two caveats. First, the costly conversations framework may best explain states’ preferred diplomatic posture at a given time in a limited conflict; it is not always the case that these preferences alone determine the policies implemented. A leader, for example, may want to fight without talking but be forced to engage in peace talks or respect a ceasefire at the insistence of allies or the international community.⁴¹ Second, even when other countries do not have the ability to impose their diplomatic preferences on the combatants, they may still have the ability to change a belligerent’s incentives to continue fighting.⁴² This is most likely in extreme situations in which a belligerent relies on external support so