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Active Levers

Perceived Ability to Grant or Withhold Economic, Technical, and/or Military Aid. Levers must be viewed within a system context and not singly. The aid lever, for example, would intuitively seem to grant considerable bargaining power to one side in certain asymmetrical relationships. Those governments

Richard Cottam

receiving aid are usually close allies of the mentor state and are often dependent on the mentor for regime survival. However, in reality, the aid is given most frequently when the relationship is based on well-recognized strategic interdependence. In this case, the recipient is likely to have as strong a lever, such as perceived economic and/or political instability, which essentially balances any advantage of the giver of aid. The less dependent the recipient and the more marginal the sense of strategic interdependence, it follows, the greater is the leverage strength of this type. The offer by U.S. administrations to give aid to North Vietnam during the Vietnam conflict in return for North Vietnamese acceptance of a proposed formula for settlement of peace negotiations is an example of a strong leverage position using this lever type. Even so, the U.S.-North Vietnamese leverage system was still weighted to the North Vietnam’s advantage, and the offer was insufficient to alter North Vietnamese policy.

Perceived Trade Opportunities. This lever type is certainly one of the most obvious and most commonly employed. It is useful in negotiations of widely varying importance and between parties in quite different relationships. It can be associated with the tightest strategic interdependence and with a low-intensity neutral relationship. In a great many instances, it will be the basis of leverage and the primary focus of the negotiations at the same time. Hence, the appropriateness of its use is entirely intuitive and need not be discussed further here.

Perceived Transnational Appeal of an Ideology. Far less obvious is this occasionally used lever type. It is used particularly by governments that are motivated to some considerable degree by a messianic drive to convert others to their ideology or religion. It is most useful when employed against another government that believes itself to be vulnerable to the appeal of the first and that may fear destabilization if the appeal is continued or intensified. As with most active levers, it can be applied either in the form of a threat or a promise: The threat would be to engage in or to enhance the appeal; the promise would be to offer to cease using the appeal in return for a movement toward a favored formula for settlement of negotiations. Many agreements will incorporate such promises, and this indicates an awareness of its bargaining force. This lever type, interestingly, is frequently used by the United States when dealing with the Soviet Union, even though it is the Soviet Union

that is usually charged with seeking to spread its ideology. As the bargaining advantage demonstrates, in actuality it is the appeal of the American normative system that is the greater.

Perceived Vulnerability to Exploitation of Domestic Political Dissatisfaction. In mentor/client relationships, the client frequently will have a major leverage advantage as a consequence of the mentor’s sense of strategic interdependence and the client’s political instability. The client, in effect, flaunts its weakness, daring the mentor to ignore the dangers supposedly created by this weakness becoming more serious. However, there are some clear limits to that advantage. The client who bargains too hard using the instability lever runs the risk of the mentor’s willingness to begin dealing with the opposition. This, of course, is a very risky endeavor because the client’s public might well conclude that the mentor’s support has been removed, and this may encourage revolutionary activity. Therefore, the lever is applied only sparingly and rarely, if at all, in periods of deep instability for the client. Its use by President Carter as a device for encouraging the Shah of Iran to move to broaden his support base by granting more human rights to his people is a classic example of inadvertently encouraging the opposition and helping precipitate the collapse of the client government. Both the United States and the Soviet Union have engaged in counterplay with oppositionists and, thus, have established the credibility of such leverage. The overthrow of the Diem government in South Vietnam is well remembered among American dependent allies. The suggestion that such a move is under consideration, therefore, could have a stimulating effect on the progress of negotiations between mentor and client.

Application of this lever outside the mentor/client relationship is substantial, but less dramatic. The parameters of such application, however, are never clearly understood, and there may be considerable risk of a strongly negative reaction. In virtually any relationship, the actions of one government may have an impact on the domestic political situation of the other. There will, in every case, be an implicit range of tolerance for such activity, and an overstepping of the bounds of tolerance could produce a deterioration in relationships. If negotiations are under way, such activity could produce deleterious consequences. In U.S.-Soviet arms control negotiations, for example, spokesmen for the two governments appear to have the attitudes of the publics of the United

UNDERSTANDING NEGOTIATION: THE ACADEMIC CONTRIBUTION 17

States’ European allies very much in mind. Both engage in efforts to persuade those publics, and when an advantage appears to be with one or the other, it is of considerable leverage consequence. An entire range of patterns of tolerance for this activity in different relationship types could be constructed.

Perceived Willingness to Alter the Type of the Relationship. This lever type can be one of the most powerful of this checklist. Possibly the most spectacular use of this type was by the PRC in agreeing to move from a hostile to a neutral-cum-de facto-allied relationship with the United States. Benefits from this alteration of relationship are still being reaped by both sides. The PRC has profited in the de jure abandonment of Taiwan by the United States, a vast array of economic agreements, and U.S. diplomatic support in many areas and silence in others, as with the PRC invasion of Vietnam. The United States has profited in being given the so-called "China card," implicitly a threat to move into an open allied relationship with China, thus giving the United States a major advantage in leverage with the Soviet Union, which has been used in a wide variety of negotiations and other tactical moves. Any further move of the PRC toward the United States is perceived by the Soviet leaders as extremely dangerous.

A far more mysterious, although equally dramatic case in point was Sadat’s willingness to move toward the United States in the 1970s, culminating in an effective mentor/client relationship, as well as a parallel distancing from the Soviet Union.¹⁶ The mystery of the case lies in the failure of Sadat to extract any major concession from this exceptionally powerful lever. Sadat followed it up with a similar move toward Israel and away from the Arab alliance that Nasser had created, largely with progressive regimes. Soon afterward, Sadat also broke with conservative regimes that had welcomed his earlier move with major financial gifts. In the negotiations that occurred throughout this period and culminated in the Camp David Accord, Sadat did regain the claim to Egyptian territory lost in the 1967 conflict. Accounts of the negotiations indicate that, again and again, Sadat made the critical concessions and never really seriously considered standing by the formula for settlement he had so often advanced.

Sadat, in fact, made it clear from the beginning that bargaining as such was not of great interest to him. He operated from a simple assumption: The United States government alone could produce a

lasting settlement, and he was determined to become a close friend of the United States and a loyal ally. Only by doing this could he expect the U.S. government to take the measures necessary to reach convergence around the well-established minimally acceptable Arab formula for an ultimate settlement. But the judgment of history already is that Sadat’s chosen path produced a formula that was only minimally acceptable to Egypt, and unsatisfactory for the Arabs. Could Sadat have done better with a more vigorous use of available leverage?

Perceived Willingness and Ability to Resort to War at a Range of Levers: Thermonuclear, Limited Nuclear, General Conventional, Limited Conventional, Insurrection and Counterinsurrection, and Terror. This is the lever most frequently referred to in the literature concerning international politics. Its utility in most negotiations, however, is questionable. Only at the highest level of centrality is it likely to be used with any regularity. When negotiations for stopping hostilities begin to approach convergence around an acceptable formula, there is frequently a temptation to alter the environment bythe use of force to make a favored formula more acceptable. Such a threat in this type of negotiation will be close to ubiquitous and, thus, a major aspect of the negotiating process.

The use of terror as a lever is designed to pressure a party into acquiescing is most likely to be successful when the party that threatens terror clearly has no options other than the expression of violence to achieve its intensely desired objectives and the threatened has a relatively low commitment to any particular outcome. If the commitment of the threatened party is also intense and the threatened has far more options, the lever is not likely to be effective, and the convergence of negotiations around a formula is unlikely to occur. Rather, the threatened in this case is likely to choose among a number of options that appear more likely to shift the negotiations in his or her favor.

Perceived Ability to Influence a Third Country. The seventh and last of the available active levers involves the ability to threaten or credibly promise action by a third party. This implies an advantageous bargaining position between one party and a third country, which is well-understood by negotiating partners. Lesser allies of great powers, which are regarded by the great powers as indispensable for a favorable strategic interaction, are probably

Richard Cottam

best able to utilize this lever. Any negotiations between the governments of Zaire and Angola, for example, would reveal a parity of leverage as far as the ability to influence superpower allies were concerned. Zaire would be able to command major U.S. support, and Angola would be equally able to command Soviet support. However, in the case of negotiations between El Salvador and Nicaragua, the advantage would surely be with El Salvador with regard to this lever type. The ability of El Salvador to threaten possible U.S. involvement would be far greater than that of Nicaragua regarding the Soviet Union.

However, this lever also serves a very important analytic purpose. Operating leverage systems are most easily constructed for dyadic relationships, that is, one in which only two parties are involved. When a system involving multiple actors is constructed, it tends quickly to become too elaborate to be analytically manageable. The third country focus serves the analytic purpose of summarizing the relative advantage in leverage that a particular actor brings to a dyadic relationship as a consequence of its relationships with a range of third countries. Thus, it can be constructed to link the various dyads of importance for a particular nego­tiation. It can be also be useful in constructing an overall bargaining picture of each actor.