Jeffrey Sachs 外交结束战争

外交的紧迫性

https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/w8jwrwhcnmf9bf2dmwfy57l85r47af

2024 年 3 月 21 日

现在是进行谈判的时候了，这将使我们更接近和平，远离一场看不到尽头的致命和破坏性战争。

美国和俄罗斯之间的外交彻底崩溃，美国和中国之间也几近彻底崩溃。 为了自身利益而过度依赖美国的欧洲只是遵循华盛顿的路线。 外交的缺席会造成局势升级，从而导致核战争。 全球和平的首要任务是重建美国与俄罗斯和中国的外交关系。

乔·拜登总统不断对俄罗斯和中国同行进行人身侮辱就体现了这种状况。 拜登没有关注政策，而是关注与总统弗拉基米尔·普京的个人关系。 最近，他称普京总统为“一个疯狂的SOB”。 2022 年 3 月，他表示“看在上帝的份上，这个人不能继续掌权。” 去年秋天与中国国家主席习近平会面后，拜登称他为“独裁者”。

这种复杂的超级大国关系的粗暴个性化不利于和平与问题的解决。 此外，这种言辞的粗鲁和缺乏严肃的外交，打开了令人震惊的不负责任言辞的闸门。 拉脱维亚总统最近在推特上发布了“Russia delenda est”（“俄罗斯必须被摧毁”），解释了老卡托呼吁罗马在第三次布匿战争之前摧毁迦太基的古老格言。

在某种程度上，这些完全幼稚的言论都让人想起约翰·F·肯尼迪总统的警告，他从古巴导弹危机中吸取了最重要的教训，即需要避免羞辱拥有核武器的对手：“最重要的是，在捍卫我们自己的国家的同时， 为了切身利益，核大国必须避免那些导致对手选择羞辱性撤退或核战争的对抗。 在核时代采取这种做法只能证明我们的政策破产，或者表明我们对世界抱有集体死亡的愿望。”

但还有一个更深层次的问题。 目前美国所有的外交政策都是基于断言对方的动机，而不是与他们进行实际谈判。 美国的说法是，不值得信任对方进行谈判，因此不值得尝试。

今天的谈判被指责为毫无意义、不合时宜，而且是软弱的表现。 我们一再被告知，英国的内维尔·张伯伦在 1938 年试图与希特勒谈判，但希特勒欺骗了他，今天的谈判也会发生同样的情况。 为了强调这一点，美国的每一个对手都被贴上新希特勒的标签——萨达姆·侯赛因、巴沙尔·阿萨德、弗拉基米尔·普京、习近平等人——因此任何谈判都将是徒劳的。

问题在于，这种对历史和当今冲突的轻视正在将我们引向核战争的边缘。 世界比以往任何时候都更接近核世界末日——根据世界末日时钟，距离午夜还有 90 秒——因为核超级大国没有进行谈判。 根据对《联合国宪章》的遵守程度来比较，美国实际上已成为所有联合国成员国中最不外交的国家。

外交至关重要，因为大多数冲突都是博弈论学家所说的“战略困境”。 战略困境是指和平（或者更一般地说，合作）对双方都有利，但双方都有动机在和平协议上作弊以利用敌人。 例如，在古巴导弹危机期间，和平对美国和苏联来说都比核战争更好，但双方都担心，如果同意和平结果，对方会作弊 — — 例如通过核优先 — — 罢工。

在这种情况下，实现和平的关键是遵守机制。 或者正如罗纳德·里根总统在与苏联总统米哈伊尔·戈尔巴乔夫谈判时所说的那样，重复一句古老的俄罗斯格言：“信任但要核实”。

建立信任的机制有很多。 从根本上讲，双方可以提醒对方，他们正处于一场“重复博弈”中，这意味着两国之间经常出现战略困境。 如果今天一方作弊，就会扼杀未来合作的机会。 但还有许多额外的执行机制：正式条约、第三方担保、系统监控、分阶段协议等。

肯尼迪坚信，他于 1962 年 10 月与苏联领导人尼基塔·赫鲁晓夫谈判达成的结束古巴导弹危机的协议将会得到遵守 — — 事实也确实如此。 后来他相信他在 1963 年 7 月与赫鲁晓夫谈判达成的《部分禁止核试验条约》也将继续有效 — — 事实也确实如此。 正如肯尼迪在谈到此类协议时指出的那样，它们取决于谈判达成一项符合双方共同利益的协议：“为此目的达成的协议

符合苏联和我们的利益——甚至可以信赖最敌对的国家接受并遵守这些条约义务，而且只有那些符合其自身利益的条约义务。”

博弈论学家研究战略困境已有 70 多年的历史，最著名的是囚徒困境。 他们一再发现，在战略困境中实现合作的关键途径是通过对话，甚至是非约束性对话。 人与人之间的互动极大地提高了互利合作的可能性。

1938 年张伯伦在慕尼黑与希特勒谈判是否错误？ 不。他在细节上是错误的，达成了希特勒并不打算遵守的不明智的协议，然后天真地宣称“我们时代的和平”。 但即便如此，张伯伦与希特勒的谈判最终还是导致了希特勒的失败。 通过向世界公然揭露希特勒的背信弃义，失败的慕尼黑协议为坚定的温斯顿·丘吉尔在英国掌权铺平了道路，并在英国和全世界获得了深刻的平反和公众支持，最终为英美两国奠定了基础。 - 苏联联盟击败希特勒。

无论如何，对 1938 年的反复类比是完全简单化的，在某些方面甚至是落后的。 乌克兰战争需要俄罗斯、乌克兰和美国等各方进行真正的谈判，以解决北约东扩和冲突各方共同安全等问题。 这些问题构成了真正的战略困境，这意味着美国、俄罗斯和乌克兰等各方都可以通过结束战争并达成双方都满意的结果来取得进展。

此外，破坏协议、拒绝外交的正是美国及其盟友。 美国违背了向苏联总统戈尔巴乔夫和俄罗斯总统叶利钦作出的北约不会东移一寸的庄严承诺。 美国通过支持基辅暴力政变来推翻乌克兰总统亚努科维奇而作弊。 美国、德国、法国和英国双重拒绝支持明斯克II协议。 美国于2002年单方面退出《反弹道导弹条约》，并于2019年单方面退出《中导条约》。2021年12月15日普京提出俄美安全保证条约草案时，美国拒绝谈判。

事实上，自2022年初以来，拜登和普京之间就没有进行过直接外交。而当俄罗斯和乌克兰在2022年3月直接进行谈判时，英国和美国介入阻止了一项基于乌克兰中立的协议。 普京上个月在接受塔克·卡尔森采访时重申了俄罗斯对谈判的开放态度，最近又再次这样做了。

战争仍在继续，造成数十万人死亡，造成数千亿美元的损失。 我们正在接近核深渊。 是时候谈谈了。

肯尼迪在就职演说中的不朽名言和智慧是：“让我们永远不要出于恐惧而进行谈判。 但让我们永远不要害怕谈判。”

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/ukraine-war-diplomacy

https://www.other-news.info/the-urgency-of-diplomacy/

The Urgency of Diplomacy

https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/w8jwrwhcnmf9bf2dmwfy57l85r47af

March 21, 2024

Now is the time for talks that will bring us closer to peace and away from a deadly and destructive war with no end in sight.

There has been a complete collapse of diplomacy between the US and Russia, and a near-total collapse between the US and China. Europe, which has made itself far too dependent on the US for its own good, simply follows the Washington line. The absence of diplomacy creates a dynamic of escalation that can lead to nuclear war. The highest priority for global peace is to re-establish US diplomacy with Russia and China.

The state of affairs is encapsulated by President Joe Biden’s incessant personal insults of his Russian and Chinese counterparts. Instead of focusing on policy, Biden focuses on the personal vis-à-vis President Vladimir Putin. Recently, he referred to President Putin as “a crazy SOB.” In March 2022, he stated that “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Just after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last fall, Biden called him a “dictator.”

This crude personalization of complex superpower relations is inimical to peace and problem solving. Moreover, the crudity of this rhetoric and absence of serious diplomacy has opened the floodgates of shocking rhetorical irresponsibility. The President of Latvia recently tweeted “Russia delenda est” (“Russia must be destroyed”), paraphrasing the ancient refrain of Cato the Elder in calling for the destruction of Carthage by Rome prior to the Third Punic War.

At one level, these utterly puerile statements all recall the admonition of President John F. Kennedy, who drew the most important lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis as the need to avoid humiliating a nuclear-armed adversary: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

But there is an even deeper problem at hand. All of US foreign policy is currently based on asserting the motives of the counterparts rather than actually negotiating with them. The US refrain is that the other side can’t be trusted to negotiate, so that it’s not worth trying.

Negotiations today are denounced as pointless, untimely, and a show of weakness. We are repeatedly told that Britain’s Neville Chamberlain tried to negotiate with Hitler in 1938, but that Hitler tricked him, and that the very same would happen with negotiations today. To underscore the point, every US adversary is branded as a new Hitler -- Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and others – so any negotiation would be in vain.

The problem is that this trivialization of history and of today’s conflicts is leading us to the brink of nuclear war. The world is closer to nuclear Armageddon than ever before – 90 seconds to midnight according to the Doomsday Clock – because the nuclear superpowers aren’t negotiating. And the US has actually become the least diplomatic of all UN member states, comparing the states according to adherence to the UN Charter.

Diplomacy is vital because most conflicts are what game theorists call “strategic dilemmas.” A strategic dilemma is a situation in which peace (or, more generally, cooperation) is better for both adversaries but in which each side has the incentive to cheat on a peace agreement in order to take advantage of the foe. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, peace was better for both the US and the Soviet Union than nuclear war, but each side feared that if it agreed to a peaceful outcome, the other side would cheat – for example through a nuclear first-strike.

The keys to peace in such cases are mechanisms for compliance. Or as President Ronald Reagan said of negotiating with the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, repeating an old Russian maxim, “Trust but verify.”

There are many mechanisms for building trust. At a basic level, the two sides can remind each other that they are in a “repeated game,” meaning that strategic dilemmas are regularly arising between them. If one side cheats today, that kills the chance for cooperation in the future. But there are many additional mechanisms for enforcement: formal treaties, third-party guarantees, systematic monitoring, phased agreements, and the like.

JFK was confident that the agreement to end the Cuban Missile Crisis that he negotiated with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in October 1962 would stick – and it did. He was later confident that the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that he negotiated with Khrushchev in July 1963 would also stick – and it did. As JFK noted about such agreements, they depend on negotiating an agreement that is in the mutual interest of both parties: “Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours — and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.”

Game theorists have studied strategic dilemmas for more than 70 years now, most famously the Prisoner’s Dilemma. They have repeatedly found that a key path to cooperation in a strategic dilemma is through dialogue, even non-binding dialogue. The human interaction dramatically raises the likelihood of mutually beneficial cooperation.

Was Chamberlain wrong to negotiate with Hitler in Munich in 1938? No. He was wrong on the specifics, reaching an ill-advised agreement that Hitler did not intend to honor and then naively proclaiming “peace for our time.” Yet even so, Chamberlain’s negotiation with Hitler ultimately contributed to Hitler’s defeat. By plainly exposing Hitler’s perfidy to the world, the failed Munich agreement paved the way for a resolute Winston Churchill to take power in Britain, with deep vindication and with deep wellsprings of public support in Britain and worldwide, and then ultimately for the UK-US-Soviet alliance to defeat Hitler.

The repeated analogy to 1938 is in any event utterly simplistic, and in some ways even backward. The war in Ukraine requires real negotiation among the parties – Russia, Ukraine, and the US – to address issues such as NATO enlargement and mutual security of all parties to the conflict. These issues pose true strategic dilemmas, meaning that all parties – the US, Russia, and Ukraine -- can come out ahead by ending the war and reaching a mutually satisfactory outcome.

Moreover, it has been the US and its allies that have broken agreements and refused diplomacy. The US violated its solemn pledges to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and to Russian President Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward. The US cheated by supporting the violent coup in Kiev that toppled Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych. The US, Germany, France, and the UK, duplicitously refused to back the Minsk II agreement. The US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and from the Intermediate Force Agreement in 2019. The US refused to negotiate when Putin proposed a draft Russia-US Treaty on Security Guarantees on December 15, 2021.

There has in fact been no direct diplomacy between Biden and Putin since the beginning of 2022. And when Russia and Ukraine negotiated directly in March 2022, the UK and US stepped in to block an agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality. Putin reiterated Russia’s openness to negotiations in his interview with Tucker Carlson last month and did so again more recently.

The war rages on, with hundreds of thousands dead and with hundreds of billions of dollars of destruction. We are coming closer to the nuclear abyss. It’s time to talk.

In the immortal words and wisdom of JFK in hisInaugural Address, “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/ukraine-war-diplomacy
https://www.other-news.info/the-urgency-of-diplomacy/