The Value of Dialogue Between Adversaries

It has been like meeting old friends. In recent weeks, I have looked anew at the Dartmouth Conference, a series of meetings that began at the height of the Cold War as an effort to get Soviets and Americans to talk to each other.  Dartmouth was the subject of my book, but it has been more than a decade since I last considered it in any depth.

The Dartmouth Conference is the longest continuous bilateral dialogue between Americans and Russians. Norman Cousins started it in 1960. He was the renowned editor of the Saturday Review. He was an anti-nuclear activist and believer in world government, a man the powerful wanted to speak to, including Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Khrushchev. Cousins believed that the United States and the Soviet Union had a common interest in not blowing each other up. He also believed that dialogue outside official channels could help prevent that holocaust.

How could it do that?  A naïf would argue that through dialogue we can dissolve differences. That is almost never the case. It was certainly not the case during the Soviet era when Soviet participants in Dartmouth like Georgi Arbatov and Yevgeniy Primakov, who became Russia’s prime minister, made their differences with American policy clearly known. The ability of Soviet participants to deviate far from official pronouncements was limited in any case.

What dialogue can do is to clarify the differences between the two sides. It can show what perceptions, experiences, and reasoning lead two sides to oppose each other on a particular issue. Or in general. It can also reveal what interests they share. During the Cold War, the two superpowers wanted to avoid nuclear war and nuclear proliferation at the same time that they were nearly coming to blows over Berlin and Cuba and fighting proxy wars in Africa and Afghanistan. The dialogues at Dartmouth did not paper over the differences—would one expect participants like Zbigniew Brzezinski to soft pedal what they saw as Soviet malfeasance?

But the participants at Dartmouth have also sought areas of common interest. And found them. In time, they came to propose ways to strengthen those common interests. Primakov “noted that we achieved considerable progress in designing measures to normalize the situation in the Middle East.” Policy makers don't always pay attention, as Primakov also noted. But they do sometimes and that can be important. In 1984, Secretary of State George Schultz used information gained from Dartmouth about Soviet attitudes to further an improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations from the cold freeze of the early Reagan years.

Dialogues like Dartmouth that involve people trusted by both sides and are sustained over time can also provide a ready-made back-channel for policy makers to use to send messages or, as Primakov put it, “to ‘test the water’ regarding ideas put forward by their governments.” Alexander Haig, Reagan’s first Secretary of State, was not the only one to do this with Dartmouth.

I’m pleased to be able to say that Dartmouth continues to meet and make recommendations that could help American policy as it deals with conflict across the globe. For example, the 19^th Conference, held in March this year, recommended that Russia and the United States “create a contact group to work on common approaches to such issues as controlling the flow of fighters [to Islamic State], financing and possibly sharing ideas on the sensitive issue of Turkey’s role in this conflict.” Who knows what influence that might have had on the mess we find ourselves in now in Syria.

Dialogues like Dartmouth are especially important at a time when regional expertise is devalued in academia and government and language skills are diminishing across the board in the United States. The chances that we might be trapped in the bubble of our own assumptions are increasing. History is rife with errors made by those who could not escape that bubble.

I spent much of an earlier part of my career, before I became involved in cybersecurity, cyberwar, and the like, looking at Dartmouth. For several years, I’m proud to say, I worked with Hal Saunders, a former Assistant Secretary of State and co-chair, with Primakov for a time, of the Dartmouth Regional Conflicts Task Force. I am a realist by nature and a pessimist about international relations, yet through that experience, I learned that if there is dialogue, there is hope that the worst can be avoided. The 20^th session of the Dartmouth Conference just ended. Long may it continue.