Possible, p.18
Possible, page 18
“I’ll pass it upstairs,” he said, pointing his thumb up.
Two weeks later, to universal surprise, Donald Trump had a quick informal summit with Kim Jong Un at Panmunjom. South Korean president Moon joined them after their bilateral meeting. The iconic photo from eighteen months earlier became a reality.
When the unexpected summit took place, I received an email from the South Korean nuclear negotiator who had just returned from the historic meeting:
“Congrats! Your idea has come true. I have in front of me the photo of the three leaders that you gave me.”
PUT THE “GOLDEN” IN GOLDEN BRIDGE
Attracting puts the “golden” in the golden bridge.
To appreciate the power of attracting, a power available to each of us, you may find it helpful to apply it to a conflict of your own. I invite you to ask yourself:
If trust is an issue, what steps might you take to create trust—and what steps might the other side take? What would a trust menu look like that could begin to transform a strained relationship?
If you were to choreograph your own play, what would be the sequence? If you had a magic wand, what would you make happen?
Can you imagine a shared victory? What would an iconic photo look like?
Imagining yourself as the playwright might open up new possibilities that you had not imagined before.
This brings us to the last of the three victories to achieve on the path to possible. If we are to succeed in transforming the polarizing conflicts of today, we need to go beyond the balcony and the bridge. We need to engage the third side.
Third Victory
Engage the Third Side
The US-Soviet War of October 1962 was the most catastrophic war in human history that didn’t happen.
In October 1962, I was just nine, but I remember the frightening headlines and the feeling of deep unease and dread. President John F. Kennedy made a riveting speech to the nation on the evening of October 22:
This secret, swift, and extraordinary buildup of Communist missiles . . . in violation of Soviet assurances . . . cannot be accepted by this country.
He announced a naval blockade of the island of Cuba to stop the Soviet ships from landing their nuclear cargo and urged Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev “to move the world back from the abyss of destruction.” He declared ominously:
We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth—but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.
He ended his speech by somberly warning Americans to brace themselves for the worst:
Let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can see precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred.
A quarter of a century later, in January 1989, I was in Moscow in the icy depths of winter to find out what had really happened and how close to Armageddon we had come. A group of Soviet and American former policy makers and experts came together to try to piece together the full story of those tense thirteen days in which the world’s survival hung in the balance. What had been going on behind closed doors in Washington and Moscow as the leaders pondered life-and-death decisions for their nations and others?
Seated at the conference table around me were the surviving participants of the crisis. It was hard to believe. There they were: the main advisors to President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev. Robert McNamara, who had been Kennedy’s secretary of defense, was sitting next to McGeorge Bundy, who had been national security advisor. Khrushchev’s foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, was sitting across the table next to the former Soviet ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin. Khrushchev’s son and close advisor Sergei was there. So, too, was Sergio del Valle, the former commander of the Cuban armed forces.
If that crisis had escalated into war, there would have been no table and no people, either. All of us in the room, including my Harvard colleagues and me, would likely have been incinerated in an atomic blast or poisoned in its aftermath, joining hundreds of millions of other deaths in the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and around the world.
What my Harvard colleagues and I knew about the crisis was this: In October 1962, as President Kennedy was making his speech, US armed forces were preparing to launch an all-out invasion of Cuba to stop Russia from deploying its nuclear missiles. Southern Florida looked like a massive parking lot of military equipment. A tentative decision had been taken in Washington to invade if there was any interference with the US U-2 spy plane making its daily flyover to inspect progress on the installation of nuclear missiles.
Then it happened. On Saturday, October 27, at the very height of the crisis, the spy plane was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet ground-to-air missile. An invasion seemed imminent.
What my American colleagues and I learned at that meeting shocked us. The Soviets had already secretly succeeded in bringing nuclear weapons to Cuba, 162 of them. Missiles had been activated and were ready for use.
“Had a U.S. invasion been carried out,” Robert McNamara burst out, with emotion in his voice, “. . . there was a 99 percent probability that nuclear war would have been initiated.”
As secretary of defense, McNamara knew what he was talking about. He also knew that the only thing that had stopped the imminent invasion and a nuclear Armageddon was a last-minute deal negotiated between the president’s brother Robert Kennedy and Anatoly Dobrynin. Premier Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the Soviet missiles from Cuba; in return, President Kennedy pledged not to invade Cuba and made a secret commitment to withdraw US nuclear missiles from Turkey. Dobrynin read out to us the telegram he had sent to Moscow at the time detailing the secret deal.
As we learned at the conference from Sergei Khrushchev, his father was taken by utter surprise when the plane was shot down. He had not given the order, as Washington had naturally assumed. Instead, two Soviet generals on the ground in Cuba had made the decision to fire independently without any instructions from Moscow. As we received more details during that meeting, we understood that this had been just one of many miscommunications and miscalculations that had almost precipitated an unthinkable worldwide catastrophe.
I emerged from those freezing cold days in Moscow haunted by how close we had come to mutual annihilation and deeply appreciative of how lucky we had been to survive the Cold War. I found it hard to fully digest the reality of what had almost happened.
Thankfully, as the frank exchange of information during the meeting showed, the Cold War was coming to an end. We had dodged the proverbial bullet. But as an anthropologist concerned with the longer-term future of humanity, I was left wondering how we and future generations could continue to live on this planet, given our genius at devising weapons of mass destruction and our propensity to go to war. I felt a heightened sense of urgency to answer the question I had long asked myself: How can we deal with our deepest differences without destroying all that we hold dear?
In intense conflicts, it is not easy to go to the balcony or stay there. Nor is it easy to build a golden bridge. And what if leaders in crisis cannot reach agreement? Is war the only alternative—or is there another?
Where can we turn for help?
OUR BIRTHRIGHT
I did not need to wait long for a clue. Weeks after my trip to frozen Moscow, I departed for an anthropological research visit deep inside the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa. Ever since college, I had wanted to visit the indigenous peoples of that region, one of the most ancient surviving cultures in the world.
Until recently these peoples had lived as semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers, the way humanity had lived for more than 99 percent of its history. I had studied the anthropological literature about their culture, and I was eager to learn firsthand about their ancestral ways of managing conflicts. I had the privilege of visiting two groups—one in Botswana who called themselves the Kua and another in Namibia who called themselves the Ju/’hoansi.
“It is natural for human beings to have disputes,” the Kua elder Korakoradue told me as we sat around his campfire in the middle of the desert.
“When disputes happen, all of the friends and relatives of the parties are approached and asked to put in a calming word.”
The Kua, like us, are perfectly capable of violence. Indeed, each man has in his possession hunting arrows coated with a deadly poison. All it takes is one man getting angry at another for the first to pick up a poison arrow and shoot him. But the poison takes three days to kill the man, so he has plenty of time to take revenge. Things can easily escalate from there.
In a small-scale society of roughly twenty-five, with five active hunters, two or three deaths can wreak havoc on the group’s ability to survive. In terms of its potential impact, a poison arrow is the rough equivalent of a nuclear bomb. How, I wondered, do such groups deal with their disputes given the ever-ready access to weapons of enormous destructiveness?
I learned that whenever tempers rise and violence seems imminent, people near the disputing parties gather up the poison arrows and hide them far away in the bush. Meanwhile, others try to separate the antagonists.
That’s when the talking begins. All the men and women—even the children—gather around the campfire and talk and talk . . . and talk. No one is excluded, and each person has a chance to have their say. This open-ended process, which the Kua call a kgotla, can take days until the dispute is literally talked out. At night, the community gathers around the campfire to chant and dance so as to appeal to the gods for help and insight into how to resolve the dispute.
They all work hard to discover what social rules have been broken to produce such discord and what needs to be done to restore social harmony. They don’t rest until they find a solution that is good for everyone—not just for the parties but for the whole group. They frame the conflict as the community’s problem because any conflict threatens the community.
It is not enough to reach an agreement. They are keenly aware that if the underlying relationship is not healed, a dispute can easily erupt again. There must be a reconciliation of the parties through repair, apologies, and forgiveness.
If tempers run too high, the elders counsel the parties to go off and spend time with relatives at other waterholes. I recognized the technique; in labor-management conflicts I had worked on, we called it a “cooling-off period.”
It was with the Kua that I began to appreciate the full power and influence of the third side. Their secret to managing conflicts is the vigilant, active, and constructive involvement of the surrounding members of the community.
The community acts for the benefit of the whole. The whole is the good of the community, the children, the future. The third side is the side of the whole.
The third side is not just an idealistic vision; it has genuine power. As powerful as any one person might be, that person is not more powerful than the surrounding community if the community unites. In negotiation terms, the third side serves as the BATNA, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. The alternative to violence and war is the constructive intervention of the community.
The third side, I came to appreciate from my research into the anthropology of war and peace, is our most ancient heritage for transforming conflict. It is our birthright.
Many of our ancestors were, I suspect, practicing possibilists. It is how we survived and thrived.
My visits with the Kua and the Ju/’hoansi left me wondering how the third side could work in highly populated urban societies. My next clue began to emerge days later as I traveled next to South Africa.
HOPE FOR US ALL
For decades, South Africa had been the leading symbol of racial injustice in the world, governed by apartheid, a harsh and cruel system of discrimination and segregation based on the color of one’s skin. After decades of patient nonviolent resistance, the African National Congress (ANC) had turned to guerrilla warfare, bombings, and riots that the National Party government had met with massively violent suppression in which thousands of people had died.
“Awful things were happening in our land,” explained Archbishop Desmond Tutu, describing the moment. “People were dying as if they were but flies. Very many were predicting that the most awful racial confrontation was waiting to overwhelm our land—that we would be devastated by a racial bloodbath. We did seem to be on the brink, on the verge of the most awful catastrophe.”
“How long can this go on?” I asked a foreign ambassador whom I met in Capetown. He was one of the most informed and perceptive observers of the conflict.
“My best guess is we will see an end to apartheid in thirty years,” he ventured.
I had arranged to meet with a fellow anthropologist and university professor, David Webster, a determined opponent of apartheid, but just a few days before our scheduled meeting, he was assassinated on his doorstep in front of his partner by a government-sponsored death squad.
The conflict appeared almost irreconcilable. Yet to universal surprise, over a period of five short years, the conflict was dramatically transformed and the formal system of apartheid came to an end.
When I made a return visit to South Africa in January 1995, I felt as if I had entered an entirely different country. I had to pinch myself to believe that it was real. Nelson Mandela, who had been in a decades-long imprisonment on my first visit, was now president of the country. F. W. de Klerk, who had been president, was now serving as second deputy president to Mandela. At a dinner in Johannesburg, I listened to both leaders speak movingly about their experiences.
Bullets had given way to bridges. The immense changes seemed almost miraculous to South Africans and to the world community, but, as I came to understand, they resulted from the exact same phenomenon I had observed among the Kua: the engagement of the community, the third side.
“You must believe,” declared Archbishop Tutu, present at the dinner, “that this spectacular victory [over apartheid] would have been totally, totally impossible had it not been that we were supported so remarkably by the international community.”
Tutu was right. During the prior years, the world community came together to create a critical mass of persuasive influence. The United Nations provided political and economic support to the African National Congress. Eminent statesmen from many countries came to offer counsel and mediate. Governments agreed on financial sanctions, restricting trade and investment in South Africa.
Churches mobilized the public conscience. University students around the world carried out protests, demanding that corporations and universities divest from their investments in South Africa. Sports federations voted to ostracize South African teams operating under a system of racism.
Just as influential as the work of external thirdsiders was the work of internal thirdsiders—those inside South Africa. Business leaders, feeling the financial pressure of sanctions, sought to persuade the government to negotiate. So did leaders of faith and civic movements of women and students, who mobilized to reach across ethnic lines.
Under all these conditions, de Klerk was persuaded to release Mandela from prison after twenty-seven years and initiate negotiations with the African National Congress.
Negotiations did not prove easy, however, and political violence continued. Business, labor, faith, and civic leaders then worked together with the government and the ANC to create the National Peace Accord. The Accord formed an unprecedented network of committees across the country, made up of citizens of all races and classes. The committees worked together with the police to interrupt and reduce the violence in the streets so that a genuine and inclusive democracy could emerge. The third side was fully engaged.
While fighting staunchly for his cause as the leader of the ANC, Mandela became a third-side leader. The core of apartheid was exclusion. Ironically, the wound of exclusion was also felt by the white Afrikaner people, who carried the traumas of war and domination by the British. Mandela’s leadership genius was to reach out to include the Afrikaners and other white people. It was a bold third-side move.
To heal the deep wounds left by apartheid, he appealed to the traditional African spirit of ubuntu. Ubuntu means simply “I am because you are. You are because we are.”
Ubuntu is the essence of the third side, the recognition that we all belong to a wider community. Everyone is included; no one is excluded.
In his inaugural address, Mandela declared:
We have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of our people. We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity—a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.
Here in South Africa, I found a clue to the question I had found myself asking after that deeply sobering meeting in Moscow. Violence and war have traditionally served as the last—and sometimes the first—resort when two parties cannot agree. Could there be a viable alternative? The South African people and their leaders had taken our oldest human heritage for dealing with conflict—the third side—and re-created it in a large-scale society to deal with a deep-seated, intractable conflict.
A whole country had seen, created, and acted on new possibilities. Its citizens had shown how, within the container of the larger community, even the most difficult conflict can be contained and slowly transformed. They had demonstrated in the clearest way how we today might choose to interrupt the pattern of destructive fighting that exists today at home, at work, and in the world.
When we get caught up in a heated conflict, we tend to think small, reducing it to two sides: us against them. Everyone else is expected to take one side or the other. “Which side are you on?” becomes the salient question. With two-sided thinking, it is so easy to get trapped in an escalating, destructive power struggle.
