Back To The Un-Table

For more non-negotiations.

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The air is thick this week with talk of negotiations to “end” the War in Ukraine. Everyone seems to assume that unspecified “negotiations” are coming, and that both sides are doing everything they can to “improve their position” before the negotiations start. This approach implicitly gives “negotiations” an agency of their own, as though they can decide when they will start and what they will cover. One of the Youtube Channels I follow has for some time been talking breathlessly about the need for the Russians to “take territory” before “negotiations start,” but in spite of numerous false alarms and excited talk, no actual negotiations on the ending of the War have actually taken place, or even look imminent. The recent circus in Istanbul is merely the latest over-egged pudding to be presented to a world which is then disappointed with with the very meagre results from it, although why anyone ever expected more is a puzzle which this essay tries to elucidate.

I have already devoted two substantial essays to the issue of negotiations, including what they are and what their purposes are, as well as their limitations, and more recently an essay trying to explain how the West is completely confused about the very idea of “talks.” I have also written about some historical precedents for how the war in Ukraine might end in terms of written documents. New(ish) readers might like to glance at those essays, because there’s a lot to say this week, and for reasons of space I can only briefly recapitulate what was in those essays here.

In brief, however, negotiations happen between states, (or states and other actors) to settle something that needs to be settled, and in an organised fashion. Some are completely non-confrontational, even routine, some are to resolve differences, more or less amicably, some are difficult and confrontational. Negotiations can take place at many levels, and about virtually any subject that interests more than one government. At one extreme, they may produce elaborate formal treaties, couched in a special type of language and imposing legal obligations, and requiring states to pass new laws to implement them. They may also be politically-binding agreements between departments of different governments. They may, at the other extreme, be nothing more than agreed declarations. And everything in between. The mistake that western pundits have been making is to assume that all negotiations are equal, and all documents produced have the same status, whereas in practice the number of possible variations is extremely large.

We can see this in the talks that have been taking place between the US and Russia recently (and which have not been confined to Ukraine.) Mr Trump seems to have decided that the policy of confrontation with Russia is a mug’s game, and that it is time to put the relationship back on a more normal footing. When Ukraine is discussed, these are not “negotiations.” At most, they will eventually produce a joint statement of some kind, but their real value lies in bringing the views of the two countries closer together on Ukraine, as on other issues, and jointly deciding how to handle the situation. So it might be agreed during the “talks” that the Russians will do such-and-such, and the US will reciprocate. But none of this will be legally binding, and there may, indeed, not even be an agreed written record of the “talks.” This is entirely normal, and happens all the time. Somehow, western pundits became very excited, and assumed (and still appear to) that Russians and Americans were working busily away at some kind of treaty which would then be given to Ukraine to sign.

The history of the Ukraine crisis itself gives plenty examples of different types of agreement between the parties. The so-called “Minsk Agreements” which were intended to put an end to the post-Maidan fighting, and which I’ve discussed extensively in one of my earlier essays linked above, are an example of an essentially informal record of decisions. They are not written in treaty language, and thus not legally binding, and contain various undertakings (such as that the Ukrainian Parliament will pass certain laws) which are never put in treaties anyway. They were signed by the Ukrainians and the two breakaway regions, and countersigned by the Russians, attesting essentially to the accuracy of the record. In practice, they only amounted to a set of minutes of a meeting, but this was enough to secure a halt in the fighting and the withdrawal of some types of equipment. At the other extreme, are the two draft treaties tabled by the Russians in December 2021, before the War began. These are in treaty language, would be legally binding, and would have to be ratified by the Parliaments concerned.

So it will be clear that talking about “negotiations” in the abstract is essentially meaningless. In particular, the idea that “negotiations” will suddenly begin, as though of their own accord, without any preliminary discussions and with no idea of what they will produce, is ridiculous. yet many commentators on all sides of the conflict seem to assume this is so. Much of the rest of the essay will be devoted to trying to explain why this they seem to think this is so. Interestingly, Mr Trump’s behaviour—on Ukraine as elsewhere—might actually be the harbinger of a return to a more traditional and more useful approach.

To begin with, the normal nature of wars between states has been a contest to capture or hold territory, and the fragments of history that European leaders may recall mostly deal with such conflicts. Of course wars have been about other things as well—the Spanish Civil War is an example—but they can almost all be solipsistically represented by arrows on a map, and control of different parts of a country represented by different colours. At least that’s easy to understand. Thus, the West is assuming that the invasion of Ukraine was launched by “Putin” to re-establish the Soviet Union or Greater Russia, that this invasion was not as successful as hoped because of Ukrainian heroism and western support, and that as a result “Putin” will soon be forced to sit down and negotiate which parts of Ukraine will be ceded to “him” on a temporary basis, while Ukraine is rearmed.

Whilst this interpretation of events is wildly inaccurate, and takes no account of actual Russian statements, nor indeed, Russian behaviour, it has a number of pragmatic advantages. The first is that it simplifies the conflict into something that can be represented on maps, that can be understood by the western political leadership and punditocracy, and which, indeed, seems comprehensible in terms of what military leaders learnt at Staff College. Thus, taking, holding and retaking terrain and population centres is a way of understanding and representing the course of the war, and the fact that the Russians are not primarily interested in capturing terrain enables their efforts to be branded unsuccessful. Inevitably, runs the argument, there will have to be “negotiations” before too long. Now of course the Russians do have territorial objectives, but they are essentially secondary to destroying the ability of the enemy to resist, and forcing Kiev to do what Moscow wants.

Given that this is exactly how Clausewitz described the purpose and conduct of war, it seems strange that it is so hard for even military leaders to understand what is going on. After all, one of the most famous wars of European history, the War of Spanish Succession (1701-14), was not about control of territory at all, but about whether a French candidate was to sit on the Spanish throne. But of course if the measure of success in Ukraine is the destruction of enemy fighting potential and thus ability to resist Russian demands, this becomes much more complex to understand, let alone explain. Better to stick to crude maps and arrows, and to assume that “negotiations,” which surely cannot now be long delayed, are going to be about who controls which territory.

The second advantage is that a territorially-based war is simply easier to sell politically. The idea of spending untold billions and sending large parts of European arsenals and stocks to Ukraine to defend the idea that one day Ukraine will be able to join NATO, let alone that certain extremist parties should be in the Ukrainian government even if the Russians don’t approve, is impossible to sell politically, even if it were possible to understand and find a common position on such issues. (Can you imagine 30 NATO members around a table trying to agree on a list of political parties and individuals whose presence in government has to be maintained at all costs, or otherwise the war will continue?)

This is the first reason why “negotiations” of some specified type are assumed to be imminent. And indeed, very powerful US pressure, or a final catastrophic collapse of the Ukrainian Army, may actually produce “negotiations,” although not in the form that many western pundits are anticipating. Here, I’ll just recall that, whilst wars generally end with some kind of agreement, these agreements can in some cases be just about the modalities of surrender, or the detail of doing what the victorious party has imposed. It’s doubtful if the West is thinking of “negotiations” like that.

The second involves a modest excursion into history. The West generally assumes today that all conflicts can in the end be resolved by sensible individuals getting round a table and hammering out a compromise: the basis, in fact, of the Liberal Peace ideology. It wasn’t always thus, and it isn’t always thus today, but in theory this is how the West sees things, and this theory is what influences pundits, NGOs, the media and to a large extent the political system. Historically, though, wars were frequently fought for fairly thorough-going objectives, and if, say, the British had put themselves forward as mediators in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, they would have been ignored. That war was about Prussia challenging the historical dominance of France as the principal military power in Europe, and had to be decisively won by one side or the other. There was no possibility of a compromise peace. And the resulting Treaty of Frankfurt was not what we would imagine a peace treaty to be today: it was entirely one-sided. The Prussians gained control of much of Alsace and Lorraine, the French had to pay an indemnity of five billion Francs, parts of France were under military occupation until that was done, and French citizens had to choose between leaving the two regions or becoming German citizens. (Most of them left, forever changing the nature of French cooking.) Thus, the Versailles Treaty, horribly one-sided as it was, was entirely within the traditional pattern of treaties at the end of wars, and indeed a negotiated peace, had one even been possible, would have settled even less than the Treaty did.

Now War, Peace and Treaties were traditionally the affairs of Kings: the French word régalien, which refers to responsibility for these powers, as well as to justice and the maintenance of order, comes from the Latin word for “King.” To the growing commercial and professional middle class in Europe, which sought to displace monarchs and aristocrats from power, whose sons did not become officers or diplomats, and who made their fortunes from trade and not ownership of land, all this started to seem a little anachronistic. Good relations with neighbours were important for trade, and quarrels about boundaries and the ownership of towns seemed a waste of resources.

This way of thinking was especially strong in Britain, with no land frontiers since 1603 and the sea and a powerful Navy as a protection. Liberalism became a major political force early on, and, once the threat from Napoleon was defeated, British policy was to avoid wars whenever possible. From the point of view of Liberals, wars were a waste of money, and a threat to commerce. Liberal opposition to the Crimean War, vindicated in the eyes of many as the ineptitude and suffering during the war received increasing publicity, set the tone for British attitudes to war and peace for some time thereafter, as well as confirming the view that Armies were necessarily run by aristocratic idiots.

The Liberal view of the world was a transactional one, based on pragmatic benefit. Buyers and sellers would sit together and agree prices and terms for delivery. In principle, for every commodity there was a buyer, and for every demand there was a supplier. (The vocabulary of international relations comes very largely from French, where négociant meant, and still means, a businessman or banker, who negotiated commercial deals.) Wars, crises, embargoes, simply got in the way of Montesquieu’s “peaceful commerce,” which in the view of many Liberal thinkers was a much better guarantee of peace than any amount of great power balance-of-power politics. The democratising trend in much of Europe in the nineteenth century greatly strengthened the middle-class advocates of this way of thinking: indeed, before 1914 it was common to say that Europe was now so connected by trade and banking that a war would make no sense.

Liberals opposed overseas involvements generally, and colonies in particular. The latter were expensive to acquire and run, required forces to garrison them which had to be paid for by taxes, and always ran the risk of embroiling the country in pointless wars. There was no economic benefit from colonies that could not be gained from ordinary trade and commercial agreements, and attempts by Rhodes and others to sell imperialism as profitable resulted in humiliating failure, and expensive nationalisation by the government. There was a fairly clear class distinction in the attitude to Empire in Britain, for example: Great Power status and national prestige were important to the still-ruling Crown and aristocracy, much less so to those who considered themselves practical businessmen, and whose apologists who looked to Germany, a country without colonies, as Britain’s major commercial rival.

Now of course even countries led by absolute monarchs did not resort to war light-heartedly. Wars were expensive, had somehow to be financed, and could result in humiliation and economic ruin for the losers. So as the costs of the War of Spanish Succession spiralled out of control and threatened the very solvency of the belligerents, and with no end in sight, multiple attempts were made to end the fighting by negotiation, although all ultimately failed. This pragmatic approach to avoiding war, or negotiating an end where possible, received a massive additional impetus from the experience of the two World Wars of the twentieth century. The First World War in particular, where large numbers of educated middle-class young men fought in the front line, was decisive in moving the dominant discourse towards the search for peace at almost any cost. Chamberlain and Daladier have been much sniggered at for attempting a deal with Hitler which would have prevented a war with tens of millions of deaths, but in fact negotiations about transfers of territory were a standard method of reconciling differences and preventing wars.

After the shattering experience of the Second World War, the dominant discourse turned even more towards the “peaceful settlement of disputes.” The major powers of the world were careful to restrict their military involvement to proxy wars, and did not fight each other directly. After the end of the Vietnam War the West never fought a peer or near-peer enemy again. And after the end of the Cold War, as I have described many times, western thinking about the nature of contemporary conflict substantially changed. The traditional Liberal assumption that war was an anomaly, the result of a breakdown in political and economic systems, of the systematic cultivation of hate or the wickedness of individuals, came to dominate. Around the world, countries were believed to have “fallen into” conflict, as a result of the “widespread violations of human rights,” “instrumentalisation of grievances” by “entrepreneurs of violence,” the “struggle for control of resources,” and even, in true Liberal fashion, cost-benefit analyses of violence compared with peace. Various theorists produced models claiming to be able to predict conflict, although, like many such initiatives they were much better at predicting the past than the future.

Whilst all those factors were certainly present from time to time, such theorising, sanctified by the UN, the EU and various other international agencies, largely ignored the reasons why actual conflicts were fought. That being so, it seemed obvious that the solution to such conflicts lay in the patient, Liberal identification of common ground and scope for bargaining between warring parties, much as merchants might haggle over the price of wheat. Since the locals were clearly incapable of doing this themselves, then the international organisations the NGOs and the donors would regrettably be obliged to do it for them. (Ironically, it became clear to those with ears to hear that many parts of the world—notably Africa—had traditional conflict resolution mechanisms that worked far better than anything imported from the West did.)

So the model of western experts jetting in with ready-made peace settlements just needing to be signed was established early and disastrously, in Rwanda (1993), in Bosnia from 1992-95 and in Sudan in 2005, to name only three egregious examples of western processes imposed in situations that were not remotely appropriate. It should also be added that western-influenced initiatives, such as the Sun City talks on the DRC in 2002 under South African sponsorship were just as unsuccessful. Nonetheless, because the theory is right, it has to be applied irrespective of the circumstances. Undaunted by the tendency of flawed negotiations and peace settlements to bring disaster (as in Rwanda and Sudan) or simply to bury problems instead of resolving them, as in Bosnia, the idea of precipitately bringing parties together for negotiations has become a conditioned reflex within the large industry devoted to crisis management issues. And as time passed, peace agreements became more and more elaborate, as every interest group strove to have its pet projects included in the text (elections, human rights, liberal economic ideas, gender parity, etc. etc.)

Now it is very reasonable to prefer peace to war, and it would be a strange person indeed who wanted suffering to continue when peaceful solutions were available. (Though they do exist, believe me.) But of course it is necessary firstly that the opportunity for substantive agreement actually exists, secondly that the various parties share objectives which are least compatible, and finally that what is agreed is actually possible to implement and and effective in bringing peace. Few negotiations actually lead to such outcomes, and it is more common for some (not necessarily all) of the actors to be dragged along to negotiations and persuaded to sign an agreement which looks good, even if it can never be implemented. But because Liberal ideology is obsessed with the belief that everybody wants peace under all circumstances, and that compromise solutions are always possible, pointless negotiations and ineffective treaties continue to proliferate. As I have said a hundred times, if the will to agreement is there, the words are secondary: if the will to agreement is not there, the words are irrelevant. But many in the West are under the delusion that words and signatures are magical totems that will in themselves resolve problems.

The more you think about it, the more you realise that the majority of conflicts in the world do not begin as Liberal thinkers imagine they do, and so are not amenable to business-style negotiations. Many conflicts are, in fact, irreconcilable. This does not mean that nothing at all can be done, but it does mean that such crises can at best, only be managed, and their consequences limited as far as possible. Thus, in areas such as the Caucasus or the Levant, there is no actual “answer,” to the reality of the multifaceted crises, other than the abolition of nation states and the re-establishment of Empires, which has theoretical attractions, but is hardly feasible. In Palestine, for example, either I can live in your house or you can live in my house, but we can’t both live in my house, and one of us will have to be disappointed.

Solutions that last, at least for a while, tend to be based on a certain correlation of forces, and a recognition by each side of the limits of what can be achieved. So after initially acting as defenders of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland at the beginning of the “Troubles,” for example, the Irish Republican Army quickly returned to its historic objective of driving the British out of Northern Ireland, and creating a 32-county Socialist Republic. In the early 1970s it thought it could do this. By the mid-1970s it realised that it couldn’t, and adopted its “long war” policy of urban terrorism. When that failed to work, it began hesitantly to move towards a political solution, which eventually produced the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. In the end it ran into the brick wall of what was possible: the British (for all that they were weary of the conflict and generally disliked the Ulster Protestants) could not give way because the result would be a civil war much bloodier than anything that happened in the 1970s and 80s. Negotiations were thus inevitable. It looks as though much the same situation may be developing with the PKK and Turkey: dispirited, losing members and commitment and heavily attrited by Turkish drones, the PKK seems to have decided to seek a political solution.

It may now be clearer why pundits and politicians have been so confused about recent “negotiations.” For a start, the objectives of Russia and the West are simply not compatible, and, insofar as we can talk of “Ukrainian” objectives in the current confused situation, they are probably different again. Put simply, the Russian desire for security on its western border, for potential threats to be kept far away, and for nearby states to be strictly neutral, cannot be made compatible with the current situation, nor with current and potential future policies of the governments of those states. A neutral status, even for Ukraine, would be a shock to NATO which it would have difficulty surviving. The withdrawal of western stationed forces to the 1997 situation would be a terminal political defeat.

With the greatest of respect to diplomats, a caste I value very highly, there are some situations that you can’t negotiate your way out of. Ukraine cannot be semi-neutral. Neutrality goes well beyond formal membership of NATO or not, since any country can permit foreign troops to be stationed on its territory if it wants to. Even the type of formal neutrality practiced by Sweden during the Cold War (a de facto NATO ally but entirely in secret) would be unlikely to satisfy the Russians. They would want something rather closer to the old Finnish model, or indeed Ukraine as an informal ally for themselves. And to repeat, you cannot compromise on such things: it’s one or the other, and whether it is one or the other will be decided by the correlation of political and especially military forces. And when the Russians talk about the “underlying causes” of the War, which they are determined to deal with, this is what they mean.

There are some elements of the problem that can perhaps be negotiated, such as the size and composition of Ukrainian forces and the areas where they can be stationed: indeed there are historical precedents for this, and for inspections to verify compliance. It looks as though some progress was made in this area in the Istanbul talks in 2022, though the sides were still far apart, and it’s not impossible that those ideas could be picked up again. But as a whole, I don’t think those negotiations were ever going to work, because they mixed together objective things like troop levels with subjective things like neutrality. In practice, Russian troops would have had to stay in Ukraine, probably for years, while the Ukrainian political system was changed, laws were passed, the Constitution modified, and various military changes made. One of the problems with withdrawing troops after a peace settlement is that it’s much harder to send them in a second time, so the temptation would have been for the Russians to find excuses to stay, which would have had unpredictable but probably dangerous results politically.

So you can see why the West is so confused. Its Liberal-state model of negotiation takes as a point of departure that everything is indeed negotiable, that verbal formulas can always be found to paper over differences, and that somehow good sense and reason will prevail, since in the end conflicts are not about anything important. Thus the western obsession with control of territory, because it is both something they understand, and something tangible which can be negotiated about with the assistance of maps. The idea that there are demands which are non-negotiable, both in the sense that one side cannot compromise, and also in the sense that a state cannot be semi-neutral, for example, is more than the western system can swallow. Indeed, it’s doubtful whether the West, and probably Ukraine, could bring itself politically to actually negotiate about the “underlying causes” that the Russians want to discuss.

Thus, in part, the confusion about what the recent talks were, and were about. They were at most an exchange of prepared positions without commitment, and as much a public relations exercise as anything. It should be obvious that the conditions for any substantive negotiations don’t yet exist, and may not exist for a while, simply because of the nature of the Russian objectives. But the West and perhaps the Ukrainians, obsessed by decades of “peacemaking,” of rapid deals which look good, even if they go wrong, by proclamations of “peace” even when they are premature, and by statements of good intentions even when they are not followed up, is intellectually unequipped to understand what they are seeing. It simply cannot comprehend the mentality of a state which is seeking to definitively assuage its security concerns for the next 25-50 years, and is prepared to devote the time, resources and lives required to make that happen.

I’ve already mentioned the various formulaic and superficial efforts made by the West to settle conflicts around the world since the Cold War, which have often sought to dispose of intractable problems by adding successive layers of complexity to documents of which they are the authors, and which generally go wrong, and seeking wholesale and often abrupt changes in the way that economies and societies are run. In some cases (notably Iraq) the West has been so sure of itself that it has been prepared to use force to try to create the conditions for what it confidently imagines will be the flowering of a Liberal democracy. In others (notably Afghanistan) it has flooded the country with goodthinking Liberal initiatives, even while fighting is going on. And in still others, like Libya and Syria, it has charged into other peoples’ wars, hoping to dictate the outcome, and to later re-model the societies and economies that resulted. You may detect a certain consistent lack of success here.

None of this is going to apply to Ukraine. The Russians do not mean what the West means by “negotiation,” and they are unlikely to change. The trouble is, the West itself is unlikely to learn, so it will waste much time sitting around a half-empty table waiting for the Russians to turn up to discuss subjects they have no intention of talking about. Ironically, the election of Mr Trump, an actual businessman with experience of actual negotiations, uninterested in theory and the forcible imposition of Liberal political norms, might actually help here, and the age of rampaging Liberal adventurism, gun in one hand and copy of John Rawls in the other, may finally be coming to an end.