Know Your Adversary

Today's negotiation lecture - sure to be a controversial one - comes from Internet writer Ian Welsh. Here's an excerpt:

America needs to stop treating its enemies as EVIL and MONSTROUS and HITLER. It needs to stop assuming that just because a movement is Islamic, it can't be negotiated with. It's not just that demonization often leads to horribly immoral acts, it's that it often leads to very bad foreign policy and to blowback which hurts the U S's interests.

And above all, Americans need to start seeing the world through the eyes of their enemies. They need to understand why others often hate them. Understanding something, in the US, is often taken as excusing it. Being judgmental comes before judging, and as soon as a regime is labeled “evil” suddenly they can't be talked to. (The definition of evil, of course, is very flexible. The Saudis and Egyptians, who supplied most of the money and men for 9/11 are good American allies, after all.) But “evil” isn't an analytical framework, and all it does is close down opportunities to actually have peace. Organizations like Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah have much less in common than they have differences, but in American discourse you'd never know that.

At Wharton, we teach "information based bargaining." We know from research that the most successful negotiators are those who ask the most questions, who can see the world frmo the other party's point of view.

It's impossible to ignore as I read the papers that the United States, my home country, is really very bad at this, and it works against the country's own interests.