Philip D. Stewart

Modeling the 1973 Soviet Decision to Support Egypt

We present a contingency model of Soviet foreign policy making that focuses on decision making in the Politburo. The model is designed around three questions and shows how the answers to these questions determine the likely nature of the decision the Politburo will reach at any point in time. The questions are (1) Whose positions on the Politburo are critical to making a decision? (2) What are the positions or preferences of those who count on the issue under consideration? (3) How are disagreements among these individuals handled? The model is illustrated by examining the Soviet decision to increase significantly the numbers and types of weapons delivered to Egypt in early 1973. Of interest in this case is accounting for the shift in Soviet policy from refusing Egypt offensive weapons to providing them.

The First Test

As described in Chapter 7, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the RCTF decided in December 1992 to apply the dialogue process we had learned together to one of the conflicts that had broken out in former Soviet republics. So began the first test of the newly formulated five-stage dialogue process in Tajikistan.

Conceptualizing the Process

Analyzing and conceptualizing evolving experience provides the hypotheses to be tested in experiments essential to the development of a political process. Concurrent with my unfolding experience in the RCTF, I wrote about what I had learned in government and was learning in the task force.

Evaluation in an Open-Ended Political Process

Those judging achievement in Sustained Dialogue face complex challenges. On the one hand, participants need the encouragement of accomplishment along the way, and funders want “results.” On the other, progress in the transformation of relationships and deepening of personal capacities is difficult to measure. Specific objectives must be set by the interaction of dialogue — not arbitrarily before dialogue has begun. It is in the very nature of an open-ended political process that setting specific objectives too early can close off pursuing objectives that may become apparent and imaginable only midway in a dialogue. Objectives must be articulated, but they must come out of the dialogue.

The First Half-Century Setting and Timeline

This chapter’s purposes are twofold. At the start, it sets the historical stage — 1960–1982 — beginning with two parallel developments that would converge in the 1980s and 1990s. The first was the launching of the Dartmouth Conference by American and Soviet citizens in 1960. The second development mid-way through the 1960s was the academic work in London, which is now seen as comprising the first steps in developing the field of conflict resolution. The chapter then proceeds to preview the timeline after the founding of the Regional Conflicts Task Force (RCTF) in 1982 that provided the laboratory for Sustained Dialogue’s development until the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue was incorporated in 2002. As it happens, this manuscript was initially under preparation for publication at the end of the Dartmouth Conference’s first half-century in 2010.

Beginning a Dialogue

Looking back, we realize what an unusual experience beginning the Regional Conflicts Task Force (RCTF) was. The normal agonies of whether to talk with the enemy had been dealt with in 1959–1960, and again in the 1964–1969 hiatus. The first four meetings — especially the third during the Cuba missile crisis — seemed to establish the usefulness of nonofficial dialogue. But only after 1969 did participants settle into a regular pattern of meetings despite ups and downs in the relationship. At the end of 1979, instead of leading to another hiatus in the dialogue, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to a special “leadership meeting” in Italy to talk about the future. Participants decided to continue the series without interruption.

How to Talk about Problems and Relationships? The Struggle for Dialogue

Dialogue is a distinctive way of communicating. It is a process of genuine interaction through which human beings listen to each other deeply enough to be changed by what they learn. Each makes a serious effort to take others’ concerns into her or his own picture even when disagreement persists. No participant gives up her or his identity, but each recognizes enough of the other’ s valid human claims that he or she will act differently toward the other.1 Interaction is a broadly applicable, probing way of talking — and listening — different from negotiation, mediation, debate, legal argument, diplomatic exchange, or normal conversation. It is the essence of relationship.2

Talking, Listening, and Thinking Interactively Dialogue Experienced

By the fifth meeting — Leningrad, November 1984 — the group, in retrospect, seems to have matured to a point where it was ready to move to a deeper level of interaction, but not without some trauma or maybe because of it. In one of those unknowable experiences with cause and effect, this readiness coincided with the beginnings of a thaw in the Soviet-U.S. relationship, commencing in the summer of 1984.

Thinking Together about Acting Together

As genuine dialogue was consolidated and sustained, new experiments became possible; practices crystallized and were refined; and a political process for transforming relationships began to take shape. Interactions in the RCTF further deepened in the eighth in-series meeting in May 1987, and in the ninth, in February 1988. In retrospect, we were enriching our experience in what we would later call Stage Three of Sustained Dialogue, probing problems and relationships to set a direction.

Framework for Analysis Sustained Dialogue

Abrief overview of what Sustained Dialogue has developed into will help us look back with questions about why it is conceptualized as it is. I frequently observe that Sustained Dialogue is nothing more — and nothing less — than a conceptualization of what people do when they sit down as adversaries to resolve their conflicts. I believe that is why people respond positively. Is that observation correct?