It would be a mistake for the United States to retreat from its leadership role in global politics, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a May 5 talk at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) co-sponsored by the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School (HLS). “If America doesn’t lead, the world is forlorn,” he said. Other U.S. allies, he went on to say, lack the strength to defend democracy across the globe.
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Pompeo appeared as part of the American Secretaries of State Project, which brings past secretaries, including James A. Baker III, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton, to campus to review key negotiation lessons from their tenure. The project is co-sponsored by PON and the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project at HKS.
Before being appointed secretary of state, Pompeo served as Trump’s CIA director from 2017 to 2018. He represented Kansas in the House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017. Pompeo graduated from HLS in 1994 after serving five years in the Army.
Revisiting the Abraham Accords
HKS professor Nicholas Burns, HLS emeritus professor Robert Mnookin, Belfer Center director Meghan L. O’Sullivan, and Harvard Business School professor James Sebenius engaged in the closed-door conversation with Pompeo.
The discussion focused on negotiations behind the 2020 Abraham Accords, a series of bilateral agreements that normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. According to Pompeo, the talks had several main goals:
- To signal the U.S. government’s commitment to Israel
- To lessen Iran’s influence in global politics
- To build better relations with Arab Gulf nations
After the agreements were signed, the signatories reached trade and security deals, including a lucrative one between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. The Abraham Accords have remained intact amid the Israel-Hamas war, but President Trump’s plans to broker a similar deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel have stalled.
Warnings on Iran and Russia
Pompeo criticized the 2015 multilateral Iran nuclear deal negotiated by John Kerry, President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, saying it gave Iran “too much leeway to enrich uranium,” according to the Harvard Gazette. The United States pulled out of the Iran deal soon after Pompeo became secretary. Iran has rapidly expanded its nuclear program in the years since.
At the Harvard event, Pompeo reiterated his belief that preventing Iran from building up its nuclear arsenal should be a top U.S. priority. “If the Iranians get any closer than they are, you’ll have proliferation in the region,” he warned. Trump recently has sent U.S. negotiators to Iran to attempt to negotiate a new bilateral deal on the nation’s nuclear power.
Speaking of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his pursuit of Ukrainian territory, Pompeo said, “We should never give an inch of Europe to him, and I regret that it appears that we’re headed that way.” He criticized fellow Republicans who he said were not working hard enough to explain to U.S. citizens “why it’s in America’s best interest to be the world’s leader, that the benefits far exceed the costs.”
Bilateral vs. Multiparty Negotiations
The conversation with Pompeo raises the broader question of when to engage in a series of bilateral negotiations versus a single set of multiparty negotiations. Trump has famously pulled the United States out of a variety of multiparty global deals, from the Iran nuclear agreement to the Paris climate talks. He is said to favor bilateral deals in the belief that he can win more concessions by negotiating with one counterpart at a time. Indeed, multiparty negotiations tend to give weaker parties opportunities to gain leverage through coalition building.
Multiparty negotiations are necessarily more complex than two-party deals due to the difficulty of balancing different parties’ interests and the fluctuating nature of each party’s best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA). “In a multiparty negotiation, you must recalculate your BATNA every time you imagine a new coalition that might strand you on the outside of an agreement,” according to MIT professor Lawrence Susskind.
At the same time, multiparty negotiations tend to promote more inclusive, collaborative agreements. Though more complex, the fact that they bring all parties to the negotiating table simultaneously can make them more efficient in the long run.
What conclusions have you drawn from engaging in bilateral versus multiparty negotiations?
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