Why the United States

Is So Bad at Peace
Talks
Even when the country wants a deal, at least four largely
psychological impediments get in the way.
BY JOHNNY WALSH
| OCTOBER 18, 2019, 9:29 AM

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani speaks as U.S. President Donald

Trump listens before a meeting at the Palace Hotel during the 72nd
United Nations General Assembly in New York on Sept. 21,
2017. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the Afghan peace
process, closing off for the time being a rare opening to resolve a long,
stagnant, and unpopular war. Whatever one thinks of the specifics of the deal
that the U.S. representative at the talks, Zalmay Khalilzad, had nearly finalized
with the Taliban, the episode was a perfect demonstration of the conflicted,
often self-defeating view of peace agreements that mires U.S. foreign policy.

Trump’s decision followed months of criticism in Washington that the talks

were legitimizing the Taliban, delegitimizing the Afghan government, giving
away too much, extracting too little. Some of the critiques were reasonable.
Most ignored basic realities: Afghanistan is not a winnable war, the years-old
stalemate is unacceptable to most Americans and all Afghans, and a political
settlement—albeit one that requires painful compromises—is the only
remotely desirable way out of the dilemma. Yet when a possible path opened
to such an agreement, much of the American polity recoiled.
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The incongruity is hardly unique to Afghanistan. Most U.S. policymakers from

several administrations would like to see peace agreements end civil wars
across the Middle East and Africa. The same is true of nuclear pacts with Iran
or North Korea, if one defines these as peace agreements of a sort. (The latest
attempt at talks between Washington and Pyongyang on Oct. 5 broke down
after less than a day.) In each case, the United States is confronted with a
problem that has persisted for years or decades, and most U.S. officials by now
want to escape an unfavorable status quo.

Diplomatic efforts to do so, however, encounter similar criticisms: too much

offered, too little extracted, too kind to U.S. enemies, and too harsh to U.S.
friends. When such criticism swells, leaders tend either to abandon existing
agreements or to deprioritize diplomacy in favor of politically safer displays of
toughness. In turn, the United States tends to pour money into each standoff;
it tightens sanctions without halting an adversary’s nuclear and missile
programs; its troops kill and are killed, with little prospect of altering the
battlefield. Wars or lower-level conflicts grind on by the year and decade.
Talks do occur in each conflict but rarely as the top U.S. priority behind which
all levers of power align—and rarely with a realistic vision of the outcome.
That is what must change.

Even when the United States wants a peace deal in the abstract, at least four
largely psychological impediments tend to impede progress.

The first is the mirage of a perfect deal. The United States has good reasons to
want North Korea to denuclearize, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to resign,
Iran to pull back from the Arab world. None of this is plausible. An
administration that softens its demands, however, invites attacks that all too
often rest on magical thinking—that with the same amount of compromise by
the United States, talks could have yielded much greater sacrifice by the other
side. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu memorably told the U.S.
Congress about the Iran nuclear agreement, “the alternative to this bad deal is
a much better deal.” U.S. negotiators, however, are not incompetent. The
“better deal” is usually a chimera, the fantasy impedes tangible achievement,
and the perfect becomes the enemy of the good.

Combative half-measures too often simply

reinforce the undesirable status quo.
The second impediment is the allure of hard power. The American
public mostly opposes major new military commitments, especially for Middle
Eastern wars, but there is little political down side to ordering sanctions,
airstrikes, Special Forces raids, or carrier deployments that theoretically
squeeze an adversary. Officials can defend such moves as tough and
pragmatic, and the cost will not exceed public tolerance unless something goes
badly wrong. The problem is that these combative half-measures too often
simply reinforce the undesirable status quo. All the while, proliferators
proliferate, the defense budget spills across Middle Eastern battlefields,
American casualties increase, local casualties soar, and resolutions inch
further away.

The third problem is contempt for one’s adversary. It is difficult for a

superpower to sit down as apparent equals with leaders of a rogue state and
harder still with an overachieving local militia. To justify doing so, officials are
tempted to wrangle over who talks to whom—must the Taliban speak first to
Washington or to Kabul? Pyongyang to Washington or a multilateral
consortium? Tehran to Washington or an intermediary like Oman?
Sequencing and the “shape of the table” matter in each of these negotiations,
but they are never the core of a dispute. Too often the trifles of process prevent
for years any serious discussion of substance.

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Fourth is opposition from long-standing local partners who feel threatened.

For every example like South Korean President Moon Jae-in nudging the
United States toward diplomacy with North Korea, there are many more like
Netanyahu and the Gulf monarchies blasting the Iran deal, Afghan President
Ashraf Ghani condemning the Taliban talks, and the United Arab Emirates
and Egypt opposing any political settlement that makes room for Islamists.
These partners typically have more to lose than Washington does, and it is
reasonable that they fear a U.S. drift toward their adversaries. If merely
backing familiar allies could resolve these conflicts, however, peace talks
would not be necessary. Washington’s clients end up holding it hostage.

By contrast, the United States’ most important global allies are usually quick
to support peace agreements—and sometimes, so are its global rivals.
Washington’s tumultuous relationships with China and Russia have not
stopped both in recent years from assisting the Taliban talks, acceding to the
Iran deal, and joining the six-party talks when they were the main thrust of the
North Korea effort. European powers consistently backed all three. An earnest
peace effort can create remarkable bedfellows.

For all the obstacles, the United States needs peace agreements more than
ever. Wars are lasting longer. Stalled conflicts continually foster extremism
and risk larger regional conflagrations. Nuclear proliferators and local
insurgencies usually have time on their side. Washington’s ability to impose
terms continually shrinks as the unipolar moment recedes.

The United States has not lost the ability to secure extraordinary diplomatic
breakthroughs when it wants to. To do so, however, will mean defining peace
agreements as the United States’ top priority and exit strategy from legacy
conflicts and then trading what is necessary to get a tolerable agreement. This
might imply accepting, for example, that the United States can contain but not
dismantle the North Korean nuclear program; incorporate but not defeat the
Afghan Taliban; stabilize but not eliminate Iran’s influence in the Arab world.

Even such narrower objectives will require the United States to align all
instruments of national power in pursuit of them. The United States
eventually did this in Afghanistan; in 2018-2019 it began specifying a political
settlement—rather than the military campaign—as its top overall priority.
Within months, American diplomats transformed the peace process and
rallied the world behind it. The Obama administration likewise defined a
nuclear agreement with Iran as its main goal in the country and devoted
several years of diplomacy and sanctions policy to it. Whatever one thinks of
the resulting agreement, the strategy worked.

In Afghanistan, it is unclear whether the peace deal is truly dead or last

month’s cancellation simply reflects Trump’s idiosyncratic negotiating style.
The result of the near-miss, however, is to revert to a stalemate that every
month claims (depending on the estimate) thousands of Afghan lives, two
American lives, and almost $4 billion from the U.S. government. The Iran and
North Korea nuclear programs, and the proliferating wars of the Arab world,
have similarly dogged the United States for a generation. Vastly better
outcomes are achievable on each, but only if U.S. policymakers reject
unacceptable status quos, identify their priorities, and accept compromises to
achieve them.

Johnny Walsh is a senior expert