Weak Negotiation Skills: No Surprise

Joseph Holt, who teaches negotiation at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, argues in a commentary reprinted in today’s Beacon Journal that the often-heard claim that the president is a world-class negotiator has now been repeatedly demonstrated to be untrue.

“Donald Trump voters thought they were electing a tough negotiator who would stand up for U.S. interests against our adversaries, but after the president’s historically weak performance during his joint news conference Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, that myth can safely be laid to rest.”

Holt argues, while we do not yet know if Putin has damaging information on the president, “that claim is more credible than any lingering claim that Trump is a world-class dealmaker.”

“Trump’s failure to deliver in Helsinki should come as no surprise. Candidate Trump confidently promised to negotiate a health care deal, an immigration deal, a Middle East peace agreement and a replacement for both the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate accord. To date he has not negotiated a single major deal, domestic or foreign.”

Holt then outlines what a world-class negotiator would have done in Helsinki, and it is worth reading in full. In brief, he notes a skilled negotiator would certainly have (1) arrived prepared, (2) recognized and used his leverage to win concessions, and (3) striking the right balance between advancing our national interest and not harming (or even improving) relationships with counterparts. Trump failed on all three counts.

He inherited his wealth and has not increased the value of his inheritance beyond what a standard IRA investment would have yielded (according to a Washington Post analysis before the election), so claims about his negotiation skills have always been suspect…even in the private sector.

Multiple bankruptcies, failed marriages, and lying for years that Obama was not a citizen (before quietly admitting he was a citizen, without addressing why he lied about it so passionately for years) all should have warned us that this is not a man we can trust nor a man with the skills needed to lead. Holt helps us see this a bit more clearly in the wake of the president’s negotiation failures in North Korea, Helsinki, and with NATO.

Here is the full text of Holt’s analysis:

Donald Trump voters thought they were electing a tough negotiator who would stand up for U.S. interests against our adversaries, but after the president’s historically weak performance during his joint news conference Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, that myth can safely be laid to rest.

I don’t know if House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer were right to suggest afterward that Putin may have damaging information on Trump, but that claim is more credible than any lingering claim that Trump is a world-class dealmaker.

Trump’s failure to deliver in Helsinki should come as no surprise. Candidate Trump confidently promised to negotiate a health care deal, an immigration deal, a Middle East peace agreement and a replacement for both the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate accord. To date he has not negotiated a single major deal, domestic or foreign.

The president displayed supreme confidence (and great naivete) in May 2017 when he said that Middle East peace is “maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years.” But his dealmaking competence has fallen short of his confidence. If the president has great negotiation skills, he has concealed them with uncharacteristic modesty.

Here is what a world-class negotiator would have done in Helsinki.

First, he or she would have prepared extensively for such an important meeting. The president believes that his superior negotiation skills render preparation superfluous. At a rally in Montana earlier this month Trump dismissed concerns over his meeting with Putin, saying “I’ve been preparing for this stuff my whole life.”

By that the president presumably meant that he had been making deals his whole life. But years of closing real estate deals in New York have not prepared Trump to negotiate with Putin any more than years of walking have prepared him for an ultramarathon. The activities involve similar motions but a very different degree of complexity and difficulty.

Second, a world-class dealmaker would have recognized his or her leverage and used it more effectively. Leverage in negotiations is a question of who needs it more. As Trump (or his co-author) wrote in The Art of the Deal, “Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply cannot do without.”

Putin became an international pariah when he was booted out of the G-8 annual summit of industrialized nations after Russia’s brazen seizure of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. Both the United States and the European Union imposed harsh sanctions on Russia after that violation of international law and order.

Trump wanted a meeting with Putin badly, but not as badly as Putin wanted to come in from the cold of isolation. Trump should have used that leverage to advance U.S. interests involving Syria, Ukraine, Iran and our elections. But instead of using his leverage to win concessions from Putin, Trump gave the Russian president a huge propaganda win without getting anything meaningful in return.

Trump gave the same gift to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. After their Singapore meeting June 12, North Korean state media released a 42-minute propaganda video showing Trump nodding respectfully as he listened to Kim, saluting a North Korean general while Kim looked on and generally showing Kim as Trump’s fellow “supreme leader.”

One can only imagine what the Russian propaganda machine will do with footage from the Helsinki news conference in which Trump shamefully doubled down on a tweet he posted just before his Putin meeting by repeating that “the United States has been foolish” in its relationship with Russia. He spinelessly failed to take Putin to task for anything and shockingly expressed greater confidence in Putin’s denial that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election than in the considered finding of every U.S. intelligence agency that it did so.

Finally, a world-class negotiator would have insisted that his or her legitimate interests be met. The goal in a negotiation is to satisfy your interests while improving, or at least not harming, your relationship with your counterpart. World-class negotiators know how to strike the right balance between their own interests and their relationships with their counterparts.

Trump in Helsinki focused too little on U.S. interests and too much on establishing a good relationship with Putin — after last week focusing too little on maintaining a good relationship with the NATO allies whose support he needs to effectively counter Putin’s aggression.

A week ago, Saturday’s front page of the British tabloid Daily Mirror featured a photo of Trump sitting regally in Winston Churchill’s chair with the headline “How dare you.” Trump, after all, has coddled tyrants such as Kim and Putin while Churchill stood up to the despots of his time with an inspiring blend of conviction, clarity, courage and eloquence. That is what a world-class dealmaker and leader would do.

Holt teaches negotiations at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. This column first appeared in the Chicago Tribune.