Fareed speaks with the Council on Foreign Relations' Richard Haass and the Harvard Kennedy School's Meghan O’Sullivan about negotiations, and what they learned from the six months they spent with the parties in Northern Ireland trying to broker a compromise. Watch the video for the full interview.
Richard, you're somebody who taught negotiations at the Kennedy School at Harvard. Having gone through one of these classic, intense, grueling, six month processes, what did you learn about negotiations?
I mean the short answer is that negotiations and diplomacy isn't for sissies. It's tough business, particularly in the modern age, where there's no news cycle and everything you do, even if you try to keep it confidential, comes out.
What do you think were the biggest kinds of reasons that it didn't work, because it didn't work? And so what would you say were the top three things that happened?
...One is that what happens at the table is only a small part of a negotiation. You can negotiate with people and you have an understanding, even an agreement. But then, when the agreement gets exposed to public opinion or to a passionate minority, say a tax agreement in this country, and then when the Tea Party would take a look at it, it's very hard sometimes for the people around the table who have made certain compromises...They understand it, they understand the needs of the opposite party, it's very hard, then, to explain that to someone who comes at it cold.
And that's when these passionate minorities, in the full sunlight of public opinion, can really lead to the unraveling of an agreement. So it's never enough, if you will, to concoct a deal that has trade-offs and may make sense. You've got to always think about how do you prepare the outside world for it, so the individuals can sell it into their respective constituencies.