Talking to the Enemy: Negotiations in Wartime.

摘要

In the aftermath of the 1990-1991 war in the Persian Gulf, the Bush Administration has been criticized for having rejected the possibility of a negotiated settlement in favor of going to war. This criticism is misplaced, however, because it shows a misunderstanding -- widely shared in government, academia, and the public -- of the synergistic relationship between force and diplomacy in war. The purpose of this paper is to outline a theoretical approach to the problem of negotiating with the enemy in wartime. Americans have historically eschewed such negotiations as a general rule. Even when they undertook them in the Korean and Vietnam wars, officials saw negotiations as merely a species of diplomacy in general or at most as a form of 'coercive diplomacy.' By examining history, however, one sees that wartime negotiations are different in kind from both normal and coercive diplomacy. The difference is that between the threat and prospect of force and the fact of it. The author examines the use of wartime diplomacy during the U.S. Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991.