Kissinger the Negotiator: Lessons from Dealmaking at the Highest Level

As professors and practitioners with careers devoted to negotiation, we are often asked “Who are the world’s best negotiators? What makes them effective?” Inevitably Henry Kissinger’s name comes up as an elite, if controversial, negotiator from whom we can learn a great deal. At a time of rancorous divisions in American society, he helped to forge pathbreaking Asian, Soviet, and Middle Eastern agreements. These include the opening to China after decades of mutual hostility with the United States; détente and the first nuclear arms control treaty with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War; the Paris peace treaty with the North Vietnamese after years of bitter conflict; as well as Egyptian and Syrian disengagement accords with Israel following their 1973 war. Along with diverse political leaders, diplomats, and business executives, every U.S. President since John F. Kennedy—including President-elect Donald Trump in 2016—has sought Kissinger’s counsel. His geopolitical insights into foreign policy, statecraft, and world order have been widely discussed. Yet surprisingly, until this book, his impressive achievements as a negotiator have escaped systematic analysis. While specific cases have been examined in depth, no serious cross-cutting study of Kissinger’s overall approach has extracted its lessons for today’s negotiators. We have extensively interviewed Henry Kissinger about his most difficult negotiations. We studied his writings and those of many others who have analyzed these episodes. This has provided this book with valuable answers to several questions: How did he do these deals? What strategies and tactics worked and what failed? Why and under what conditions? What ethical challenges does this approach present? Is there an underlying logic and method to his approach that, well beyond the diplomacy of the 1970s, offers practical guidance for meeting today’s negotiation challenges—from diplomacy to business, finance, and law? Though Henry Kissinger is a controversial figure who played key roles in policies still marked by contention, our purpose in this book is neither to judge the man nor to set the historical record straight. Rather, by plumbing a career of extraordinary effectiveness, we have sought to learn as much as possible, extracting useful insights into the art and science of negotiation from Kissinger’s dealmaking at the highest level.