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  • The Challenges of Getting Adversaries to the Negotiating Table
  • Patricia M. Kim (bio)

Oriana Skylar Mastro's book The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime addresses a critical question all leaders grapple with while engaged in a war that is costing the lives and resources of their citizens: what will it take for their adversary to come to the negotiating table? Her research makes an important contribution to international relations literature by identifying two key factors that warring states take into account when contemplating their willingness to talk: whether entering negotiations will make them look weak and whether their adversary could exploit this perceived weakness to prolong or escalate the conflict. Mastro collectively calls these two factors the "strategic costs of conversation."

The case studies in the book are particularly rich with detail. Mastro draws on a vast array of primary sources, with original archival work at the Johnson Presidential Library, the British National Archives, and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. She also draws on Chinese primary source documents and personal interviews with Vietnamese leaders. This effort shines through in the case study chapters, which features meticulous analysis of the Chinese, U.S., Indian, and North Vietnamese decision-making processes during the Korean, Sino-Indian, and Vietnam Wars.

While the book is limited to actual cases of war, Mastro's theory is quite useful for shedding light on factors that influence leaders' decision-making when considering whether to negotiate in broader conflict situations. Two of the United States' biggest foreign policy challenges at the moment come to mind: the ongoing "trade war" with China and the stalled nuclear negotiations with North Korea. While these examples are outside the scope conditions set in the book, as they fall short of war and the relevant parties are already engaged in various negotiation stages, all the parties involved are just as concerned about the strategic costs of talking. This in turn affects the characteristics and pace of negotiations. Fears of looking weak and thus encouraging an opponent to press harder for its demands are universal concerns, whether in wartime or not.

Washington and Pyongyang's tortuous history of nuclear negotiations in particular is marked with long pauses and provocations by North Korea [End Page 177] attempting to project strength and communicate that it will not cave to international pressure. While many factors have contributed to the current opening of negotiations, the fact that North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and Kim Jong-un felt confident enough to declare his nuclear weapons program "complete" undoubtedly played a role in bringing Pyongyang to the table.

Since walking away empty-handed from the Hanoi Summit earlier this year, however, North Korea's leadership has yet to return to working-level negotiations. In recent months it has engaged in muscle-flexing—firing missiles off its coasts and ramping up its rhetoric against Seoul and Washington, notwithstanding the most recent and brief Trump-Kim encounter at the demilitarized zone. Such behavior is designed to signal that North Korea will not be coerced into an unfavorable deal and is aimed at two audiences: (1) the international community, especially Washington and Seoul, and (2) the North Korean people, especially hard-liner political elites, who are skeptical of Kim Jong-un's outreach to the United States and his stated shift away from North Korea's traditional policy of simultaneously pursuing nuclear weapons and economic development to one that focuses only on the latter.

Mastro makes the theoretical case in chapter 1 that strategic costs have the most explanatory power, at least in her four cases studies, while recognizing that domestic factors are important and often part of the story (pp. 29–31). But in the case of the nuclear negotiations with North Korea and in most cases, leaders are always adjusting their policies with one eye on their domestic audience and the other on their foreign counterpart. Regardless of whether leaders can be immediately constrained or punished by their audience, they are undoubtedly thinking about their legacies, election calendars, and reputation among political elites, among other factors, in addition to the strategic realities on the battlefield. As Mastro notes in the concluding chapter, there...

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