It’s Tuesday, February 20th, 2024. From Peach Fish Productions, it’s the gist. I’m Mike Peska. Nikki Haley down massively in the polls in our home state of South Carolina, which has its primary this weekend, vows to stay and fight. She has upped her attacks on Donald Trump. She says she is, quote, far from dropping out. Fair enough, heartening even. But let us not mistake her eagerness to take it to the Republican frontrunner with a general commitment to truth-telling in every realm. While she ably calls out Trump’s falsehoods, that doesn’t accept her from the charge that she is still a politician and one who often says things that have little to no basis. In fact, here she was, in fact, on This Week This Week on ABC. First you have to talk about what should Joe Biden be doing. First of all, the reason you’re seeing America become more isolationist is at no point has Joe Biden had a conversation with the American people about why Ukraine is important. At no point has he had a conversation with him, with the American people, about the terrorist activity that’s happening with Israel and why Iran is so dangerous. At no point is he talking about the threats of China. And when you don’t talk about those things with the American people, they’re going to distance themselves from it. And so Joe Biden has failed on that front. Look, I get the rhythm of the at no point, at no point. You know, if you’re an OK retrotitian, you tell yourself that’s effective. But he did do it at some point. He did all those things and communicated all those things in many points. In fact, in fact, in fact, not only did Joe Biden have a conversation with the American people about why Israel matters, he had one with the Israeli people and they love him for it. He also, same with Ukraine, talked to us a lot about it, flew there, talked to them about it, came back and talked about it some more. He has talked about the importance of funding Ukraine, I’d say one or two hundred times. Since this war began, I’ve stood with President Zelensky, as I just spent about an hour with him, both in Washington and in Hiroshima and now in Vilnius, to declare to the world what I say again, we will not waver. And the United States has built a coalition of more than 50 nations to make sure Ukraine defend itself both now and is able to do it in the future as well. Ukraine. Ukraine. Ukraine. Ukraine. And it’s the same with China. China. China. China. China. I applaud China for stepping up, excuse me, I applaud Canada. You can tell what I’m thinking. Okay, that end, that end part right there, that might be a thing worth going after him with. But come now, Ambassador Haley, if the reason not to vote for Donald Trump includes that man’s dishonesty, I would say the best strategy to pursue your case against Joe Biden is not with words and charges that can accurately be described as dishonest. On the show today, can Donald Trump pay and how? And I mean that and how both ways. And how, but also and how. But first, with two major wars ongoing and countless other conflicts to resolve, it feels like a good time to sit down with someone who understands how to resolve a conflict. The Vanderpump Rules’ Tom Sandoval. No, I don’t even know if that’s an apt reference. Who I am talking to is much better than that guy. He’s William Ury, one of the world’s leading negotiation specialists. He has a new book out today, Possible, How We Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict. William Ury up next. Every story begins somewhere. For your child, it could begin with a Guardian bike. Built right here in the USA. Engineered for safety and designed for confidence. Kids of all ages are learning to ride in just one day. No tears, no frustration. It’s why Guardian is America’s favorite kids bike. And the New York Times and Wirecutter’s top pick three years in a row. 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And I have to say, before we started recording, we were talking a little bit about Abraham. I think the quote, hope is a passion for the possible, is one of those in the general category of he never really said it or he never really meant it. It’s taken from Fear and Trembling, and he talks a lot about Abraham’s negotiation with the Lord. And I don’t think that Kierkegaard was being overly optimistic. He was being very religious, and I don’t think you’d actually find that phrase in Fear and Trembling. But my question is, does that really matter, or are you really trying to get, say, the reader into a certain mindset, and by associating this great thinker, who they might not have read all the works of, you do your job? That’s a good question. First of all, being a possibleist doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being an optimist. I’ve spent 45 years wandering around in the world’s toughest, a lot of the world’s toughest conflicts, from the Middle East to the Cold War to Chechnya, Yugoslavia, Colombia, you name it. And people say, well, after all that, are you an optimist or are you a pessimist? And I like to say now, I’m a possibleist. I believe in human possibility. Why? Because I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes. I’ve seen the worst of human beings, but I’ve also seen the best of human beings. Possibility has no positive or negative valence. I mean, we think it does, but then you could apply it to Putin invading Ukraine. I don’t think it’s possible he would do it, and then he did it, or some of the great catastrophes and human rights abuses in the world. I didn’t think it was possible what they would do in that town. So it’s probably good to be a possibleist. It’s just a way of saying I’m a realist. It is. And possibleists, they look at negative possibilities. What are the negative possibilities? And then we use it to motivate us to look for the positive possibilities. And that’s, I think, what we need to do. We can’t put our heads in the sand. We need to look realistically what’s happening. But pessimism, I find, which is so easy to be pessimistic nowadays with everything. We live in this age of conflict with rising around us everywhere. It’s easy to be pessimistic, but that’s our worst enemy because pessimism often becomes self-confirming. As I think Henry Ford once famously said, if you think you can and if you think you can’t, you’re right. So in order for a successful negotiation to happen, does each side have to be exhausted or somewhat exhausted? Well, not necessarily, I would say. But in difficult conflicts, sometimes there’s really warring situations. They reach what a colleague of mine calls a hurting stalemate where they kind of reach a situation where neither can kind of move. And then there’s kind of a hard learning process of there’s got to be a better way to do this. I saw that happen in Northern Ireland or South Africa where there seemed to be impossible conflicts. They reached a kind of hurting stalemate where each side saw that trying to win was just leading to everybody losing. And then out of that comes an aha, like, well, maybe there’s a better way. And then they sit down and they negotiate. And then there’s a discovery that, hey, maybe through negotiation, we can each get our central needs met. And that’s the real aha. That’s the transformative part of a possibility. Right. So I have been monitoring some of your media appearances. And about two years ago, you were being called upon often to give your take on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And you talked about the possibility of conflict resolution. But I remember thinking at the time, well, we have to get to a point of close to stalemate or hurting or exhaustion. We’re a little bit premature if the Ukrainians are having these, at the time, what seemed like amazing odds defying successes on the battlefield. They’re not going to want to negotiate. They don’t perceive it as in their self-interest. And if Putin is not, it’s going to take him a while to accept the reality that the war wasn’t going as he thought it would. Now, maybe there’s a possibility of negotiation. You’ve been asked a lot about the latest conflict in Gaza. And I think that each side probably perceives themselves as still having gains to make on the battlefield. And so that, I mean, you mentioned Northern Ireland and South Africa. And I think Colombia and the FARC were a big example of this. When there are gains to be made on the battlefield, literal or metaphorical, you could take it in the business world, that seems to me a very inhospitable environment for negotiation. Is that right? It’s inhospitable for a negotiation for any kind of settlement. But there’s obviously always negotiation. I mean, right now, even in Ukraine, they’re negotiating about the exchange of prisoners and discussing about Ukraine. So in a funny way, in a way that we don’t perceive, negotiation goes on all the time. But in terms of what you’re talking about, in terms of really trying to end the war, then you’re right. It takes us, there’s a kind of a learning process. The truth is, in most of these situations that I’ve seen, we think we’re going to win, and we might win a battle, and we win another battle. But in the end, just about everybody loses the war. And actually, it’s not just both sides that lose the war, but the community, the innocents, everyone around them loses. And so, I mean, that’s what really motivated me in the very beginning to kind of get into the field of negotiation, was just thinking there’s got to be a more creative, we can use our creativity, our collaboration, our abilities to come up with better ways to deal with our differences than blowing the whole world to smithereens. Historically, do those micro-negotiations along the way, you mentioned Ukrainian grain, there was one round of actual hostage release in Gaza, do those often set the table and provide the template for the greater negotiation when it comes? They can, because they establish relationships, they establish channels. A lot of these negotiations, it doesn’t happen in the open. It happens through back channels. It happens through these confidential, often secret negotiations where you’re out of the limelight. And those back channels get strengthened during the process of things like the hostage negotiation. Yeah, what’s interesting to me, among the interesting things are you’re an anthropologist and you’re a psychologist and psychiatrist a little bit, but just the methods, the almost business school methods of negotiation that don’t come from reflecting on our shared humanity, more of a strategy, a clever strategy, an end around our psychology, that’s interesting to me. Was it the Camp David negotiations where they didn’t let the Israelis and the Palestinians directly negotiate with each other? They just had them critique 23 series of proposals until they got to the final one, which couldn’t be changed? Yeah, actually that was the Israelis and the Egyptians at the time, yeah. The 1978 Camp David, and yeah, absolutely. That was a great example of we use a lot of creativity in creating better software, hardware, whatever, but we can use the same creativity in trying to come up with better software for negotiation. And in that particular case, the two leaders, Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel, couldn’t get along. After the first few days, he kept them apart. But then they went back and forth and used what I would call wizards. And in other words, lower level people who are very – can get along with each other, technically knowledgeable about the subject, who can often explore possibilities that their leaders could not explore. But then they could bring those ideas back to their leaders for a final okay. Right. So interpersonal bonding among the leaders, that would be great. But you could still get to an historic Nobel Peace Prize winning negotiation in absence of that. Absolutely. Like Nelson Mandela and Frederic de Klerk also didn’t get along. But lower down, there was Cyril Ramaphosa, actually, who was an aide to Mandela, who is now the president of South Africa. And there was Rolf Meyer who, when negotiations would break off, there was a lot of political violence. These negotiations are often very difficult. They would meet together with their teams and try to figure out, okay, how do we solve this issue? How do we deal with this issue? And it’s those behind the scenes, back channel, wizard-like conversations that I think are essential to the success of an ultimate negotiation. Yeah. It’s also very instructive because even in Israel, there’s a constant complaint is, you know, the Palestinians have no Nelson Mandela. And Nelson Mandela has been elevated to this status where you could be convinced that if there isn’t such a sui generis individual, and just think about what the words or phrase sui generis means, there’s not going to be. But if there isn’t one in the conflict, you’re not going to have a solution. I mean, you’ve written a lot about the amazing personal qualities of Mandela and how so much of his mindset and what he taught himself in Robben Island translated to being a successful negotiator. But he wasn’t perfect. He didn’t get along with his adversary. There were still ways to, and the necessity of working around Nelson Mandela. I think that’s a really important lesson. Yeah. Very, very important. And I don’t think, you know, leaders are important. Leadership is vital. But, you know, in the end, like, for example, in the South Africa example, and what I noticed is in Northern Ireland too, it’s the mobilization of the community. I mean, there was the business community, the trade unions, the faith leaders, the women’s movement, the university students, the society as a whole came together as what I call a third side, which is, you know, like the side of the community, and backed by the international community. And that community effort is really what takes it across the line. It’s not just the leaders at the top making a deal. It really takes the involvement of everybody. The community can cut both ways. In Northern Ireland, the community of mothers bonding with each other, whose sons were lost to the troubles and the violence, that was really important. But I think of many negotiations where each negotiator, each side says, well, I could do this, but I have my public, and my public would either vote me out of office or possibly, you know, seek to assassinate me, or I couldn’t get away with it. Sometimes they’re right. They have a correct assessment of their public. Sometimes they just have the wrong assessment, or they’re being self-sabotaging, or it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. But how does the community, what you’re talking about, differ from this concept of negotiators being hemmed in by what the people that they perceive themselves to be accountable to? How do those two groups and constituencies differ in your conception? Yeah, the third side to me, it’s like we often approach negotiations, it’s always two sides. It’s union versus management, you know, sales versus manufacturing, husband versus wife, whatever it is, one party against another. What we don’t see is there’s a larger context, which is the community, which actually has interests as well, community interests. You know, what about the sake of the kids? What about the sake of the future? What about the larger sake of the family in the workplace? That’s the third side. What you’re talking about, though, is the constituency. You know, every negotiation, we tend to focus on that one central table where the two sides are, you know, Israelis and Palestinians are meeting, but actually what I’ve found in negotiations is that often the problem isn’t at that table, it’s the internal negotiations. There’s always three tables in a negotiation, the external table and the two internal tables, and oftentimes the problem is among Israelis or among Palestinians, and you’ve got to have those three negotiations. And for that, to me, this is why I like to begin any negotiation with what I call victory speech. Try to imagine the other side’s victory speech. In other words, do a little thought experiment. Imagine the other side has said yes to your proposal. They’re going to do what you want them to do. Now imagine they have to go back to their constituency, the people you’re talking about, and justify it. And what are their three key talking points? How are they going to say this was a victory for us to accept that proposal? If you can’t write that victory speech persuasively, then, you know, we’ve got work to do. So to me, it’s like start at the end and work backwards from that victory speech. Help them deliver that victory speech. I think you used that technique with Trump meeting with Kim Jong-un, right? Right. Tell me how that played out. Well, yeah, I mean, it was early 2017. Kim Jong-un, you know, Obama told Trump this is the most dangerous situation. I’m leaving you. And Kim Jong-un was busily testing ICBMs, nuclear weapons, and everything. And Trump said this won’t happen. And they started going out at hammer and tongs and fire and fury and I’ll eliminate you and little rocket man and vile. I mean, there was a lot to the point where experts and even Trump himself thought, you know, the odds of war were going up to close to 50% of a war that would be catastrophic because, you know, the first use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And so my colleagues and I just, okay, can we write a victory speech for Trump and can we write a victory speech for Kim in which they decide not to go to war just as an exercise? And, you know, for Trump, you know, it was like this had to be the deal of the century. You know, this is going to be the deal of the century. We’re going to save the world and kept America safe and didn’t spend a penny. For Kim, it was easy. Trump’s always giving victory speeches. You know, tariffs are easy and we built the wall. And yes, everything that happens, he could frame it into a victory speech. Right. But Kim was harder and, you know, no one knew anything about Kim. And the only person I could figure out who knew anything about Kim went on the web was Dennis Rodman. Sure. And so he was the only American who had really met Kim. So I, you know, tried all my connections and tried to get a meeting with Dennis Rodman so I could really hear him out. And it took a long, it took a while. This, you know, six degrees of separation, finally get there and, you know, and he’s, you know, he’s not there or whatever. But where’s he there? Where are you meeting him? I met him at a friend’s house in LA. He was staying with a friend and said, come on, kind of have pizza. And I showed up and he was out partying. But I caught him the next morning. Their friend said, you stay over the night. And he said, bad day, man. But then he told me he had a lot of insight into Kim. He had, you know, Kim had befriended him when he went on an exhibition game to North Korea to play basketball. And he had held Kim’s baby. And one thing that was just kind of a nugget, he said, you know, Kim once told me that his dream one day was to walk down Fifth Avenue with Dennis Rodman, go to Madison Square Garden, and watch the Knicks play the Bulls. Yeah. And that was kind of a little insight into Kim’s fascination with the West, his openness to being engaged by the West. And didn’t mean that, you know, you sit down and have peace, but it was like an opening. And so you could see that. By the way, there’s common ground right there. Fifth Avenue looming large in the metaphors of both Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un and the possibilities that Fifth Avenue suggests. For one, it’s a way to see a Knicks game. For another, it’s a way to shoot someone and get away with it. So in any case, that victory speech, you know, you could see a victory speech for Kim in which he could say, you know, we got safe, we got the respect we want, we’re engaging with, you know, we’re going to be the next Asian tiger. And so even though it looked very grim and dim at that time, there was the opportunity there for what actually happened a year later, which was the two met in Singapore. Now, did they resolve the whole conflict? No. But did the risk of nuclear war go down? Did the atmosphere change? Dramatically, yes. From, you know, maybe 50% chance of war to less than 1%. Yeah. And I do remember Trump as an inveterate negotiator saying these things that would please Kim, not just the personal compliments, but saying things like as a developer, I look at the coastline of North Korea and think about the possibilities of luxury hotels. So that was good. I do have a question about Dennis Rodman. Does he have a self-perception of himself as being this fulcrum of world affairs? The only person in America who really can crack the nut that is Kim Jong-un? Well, you know, the thing is, you know, just the psychology of it all is what I realized is that Kim, that Rodman, Kim and Trump all had something in common psychologically, which is they had a kind of reputation of being bad boys, of people underestimating them. And they were out to prove the world wrong about them. And that’s the kind of psychological ground in which they could meet and empathize with each other. Right. In some of the conflicts as an outsider, I would say to myself, Northern Ireland, what are you doing? Can’t we get past this? Can’t you see? I would say I’m not that knowledgeable about the FARC in Columbia. I just see that it’s going on for so long. It doesn’t seem that one side is going to gain an advantage or not. And we need something to change the dynamic, but are there counter examples? Are there examples of very successful negotiations where things didn’t seem to be stuck at a stalemate where either the participants might’ve said actually through violence, we can still, we can still make gains and yet a successful negotiation occurred? Well, I would say, I mean, I would say yes. I mean, in a lot of situations you can actually advance. I mean, like take South Africa. I mean, there was no reason South Africa had the military power, the whites, the apartheid government had the military power to stay in power for 30 years more. That was the estimate. But they decided that, okay, but 30 years from now, what kind of South Africa is there going to be? I mean, we’re going to have 30 years of civil war and so on. And just economically, morally, just socially, it didn’t make sense. So they decided, no, it’s better to cut our losses now and make a deal. That is William Ury talking about his new book, Possible, how we survive and thrive in an age of conflict. Our conversation, as you might be able to tell, did not end there. In fact, my next question for Mr. Ury about how to apply his philosophy and tactics to U.S. politics doesn’t have easy answers, but he has good sounding ones.