An Interview with Douglas Feith (Editor's note: Douglas Feith served during the Reagan administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense, where he had extensive experience in negotiations, and as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council. In the following interview, he discusses the pitfalls in negotiations and the implications for Israel.) Outpost: You have had extensive experience with negotiations in the Defense Department. What are some of the lessons you learned that would be applicable for the negotiations that Netanyahu will be entering into, both with Syria and the 'Palestine Authority'? Feith: I think one lesson is the distinction between keeping communications open and negotiating toward a specific goal. It is always a good idea to keep communications open because communications can provide information and insights. That's a different matter from agreeing to negotiate on a specific agenda toward a specific goal. There are times when democratic governments are trapped into negotiating toward a defined goal when they know in advance that they don't favor the goal. They think they can be clever enough to manage the negotiations so that they get all the benefits of participating without paying the price of actually arriving at the undesired goal. I can give you an example from my own experience. In the '80s, the United States was urged by different countries to enter into negotiations on naval arms control. It was not in America's interest to have an agreement on naval arms control. Our navy was much more important to us and our alliance than the Soviet navy was for the defense of the Soviet Union. There was no naval arms control agreement that we could imagine that would serve American or Western interests, and yet we were pushed to negotiate. Outpost: How were you pushed? Feith: The Swedes and others kept coming up with resolutions in the UN Disarmament Conference and other forums urging an initiative on naval arms control. When that occurred, people at the State Department would report these demands, which were then debated within the U.S. government. One school of thought within the U.S. government was "Say no, because we are against it." Another school said, "What's the harm of talking?" We, in the pentagon, said, "But it's undesirable and there is no goal that we want to achieve in this field." The proponents of entering into these talks responded, "Look, you pay a political price for being unwilling to talk for what on the surface sounds like an attractive arms control proposition. Why pay that political price? Why not enter into the talks and block any undesirable result?" We pointed out that the political price for saying no immediately was small because there were no such talks; there was no big political or public support for such

talks; they were esoteric and obscure. We said, "If you are unwilling to pay the price now of refusing to enter into such talks on a subject that you know is going to lead to an undesirable result, it gives us no confidence that if these talks are institutionalized, and have a higher political profile and a higher bureaucratic momentum behind them, that you will be willing to say no later." It is common that people who want to make imprudent concessions at the moment for public relations purposes defend their position by arguing they will be tough later when the price is higher. Outpost: What happened in the case of naval arms control? Feith: In this case we aborted it. But there were other cases where we didn't. And the classic case where we didn't is the chemical weapons negotiations. The distinction I made earlier between discussions and negotiations is of the essence here. We were engaged in discussions in Geneva for well over a decade on chemical weapons--in particular, whether we should enter into a treaty to ban possession of chemical weapons, as opposed to their use, which was banned by the 1925 Geneva protocols. The discussions were okay because in those discussions we did not say we were committed to the goal of a ban. But then we began to get pressed by our European allies and by the State Department to move from the discussion stage to the negotiating stage, which meant adopting as a matter of policy the ultimate goal of a global comprehensive ban on the possession of chemical weapons. We argued against that on the grounds that such a ban would be inherently unverifiable. We had a U.S. government intelligence study done that said it was impossible to verify a ban on the possession of chemical weapons because they are small, easy to produce, easy to hide and militarily significant in small quantities. Nevertheless, mainly because of an unauthorized announcement by Secretary Shultz (engineered by one of his assistant secretaries, though Shultz, I think, acted in good faith) that we would be willing to put forward a treaty to ban the possession of chemical weapons, we were locked into a negotiation where we knew in advance that the treaty would be ineffective. For a number of years, we were able to control the negotiation and it didn't produce a treaty. But sure enough, after a while, it got out of control and produced the current chemical weapons convention. We entered into this treaty, even though every sensible person in the U.S. government knew that the treaty would be unverifiable and ineffective. The dynamics of the international negotiations are such that you often go into them with certain red lines and then the red lines get erased as a result of political and diplomatic pressures. (It is a terrible conceit to believe that a democratic government can enter into negotiations where it really doesn't support the goal and then be disciplined enough and intellectually rigorous enough to maintain what is fundamentally a dishonest line of pretending to be in favor of the goal but actually preventing its achievement.) What usually winds (Continued on p.8)

Outpost               - 6 -               July-August 1996