Next weekend’s G7 summit in Hiroshima is, in part, a dealmaking retreat for leaders of different status. Each participant’s standing derives from some combination of their country’s size, GDP and military might, plus the leader’s charisma and electoral prospects. The biggest beast at the summit is always the American president.
Lowly pack members like Giorgia Meloni or Rishi Sunak face a problem familiar to almost anyone who has ever worked in a workplace or indeed shared a household: how to negotiate from a position of weakness? How do you ask for something from someone more powerful? Here are a few case-studies of how to do it, and how not to:
If you can’t speak your interlocutor’s language, at least speak excellent English. You’re insignificant. You’re not Xi Jinping, so the person you’re importuning won’t be straining to hear your every word through the interpreter. To make an impression, you need to sound natural in their language. Don’t be like the exiled Dutch prime minister in London during the second world war, who, when he finally got a moment with Winston Churchill, is said to have greeted him with, “Goodbye!” Churchill replied, “I would wish that all political meetings were so short and sweet.”
Don’t show off. When Adam Neumann was running WeWork, he scored a 15-minute meeting with Elon Musk. He used the opportunity to tell Musk that getting to Mars — Musk’s life’s ambition — would be the easy part. The hard part would be building a community on the red planet. That, said Neumann, was where WeWork came in. Musk impatiently corrected him: the hard part was getting to Mars.
Don’t lecture. In 2015, Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis went around telling European institutions and German diplomats that their prescription of austerity for his insolvent country was wrong. Germany’s “medicine”, said Varoufakis, was “part of the problem”. He was probably right, but beggars don’t get to give lessons.
Get it in writing. When Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew Soviet forces from eastern Europe, the US secretary of state James Baker famously told him that Nato’s borders wouldn’t “shift one inch to the east”. German chancellor Helmut Kohl echoed this. Gorbachev should have immediately made them put the promise in writing, notes Stephen Kinzer of Brown University. Gorbachev didn’t. The west then quietly rescinded the offer, which didn’t appear in the Final Settlement on German unity in 1990. The consequences resound to this day.
Understand your own weakness. British leaders approached their talks with the EU over Brexit from a mistaken premise: that this was a negotiation between equals. It wasn’t. The EU’s economy is much bigger, so the UK needed a deal more. Threats to walk away without a deal, or make the EU “go whistle” for its exit bill, therefore had no credibility.
The UK should have “zoomed in on a few asks rather than resisting the EU across the board with a mantra of sovereign equality”, writes one member of the EU’s negotiating team, Stefaan De Rynck, in his book Inside the Deal.
Persuade your interlocutor that you share their worldview. When Nelson Mandela was briefly let out of prison to meet South Africa’s hardline president PW Botha, he compared the black struggle for liberation with the Afrikaner struggle against the British in the Boer war. Botha, whose father and grandfather had been Boer fighters, was charmed, especially as Mandela said all this in Afrikaans.
“Zoom in” on a feasible ask. In 2008, during one of Argentina’s periodic crises, the country’s young economics minister, Martín Lousteau, visited the US treasury secretary Hank Paulson. Paulson was preoccupied with the global financial crisis. Lousteau showed him that Argentina’s economic indicators looked remarkably like the US’s during the Great Depression. He pointed out that whenever Argentina imploded, eccentric nationalists tended to benefit. He said: “The group of people who are outward-looking need political wins. The political win we need is to renegotiate our debt with the Paris Club [creditors] without the International Monetary Fund being involved.” Lousteau’s team had done its homework (an often neglected precondition of negotiating), and found that legally the IMF could be sidelined.
Paulson agreed. Lousteau flew home with his win — only to have it kiboshed by his president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, just back from Europe where she had told the Paris Club that Argentina wouldn’t pay.
The hardest negotiation typically isn’t with powerful outsiders. It’s with your own side.
Follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com
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