Here is an unusually astute piece by Aaron David Miller at Foreign Policy looking at key negotiation mistakes made at the 2000 Camp David Peace Talks which he followed at first hand.

You’ll need to read the whole thing to get the breadth of his argument. What is good is that he boils things down to manageable categories:

Mistake 1: Don’t issue the invites before you brief the president and gauge your chances

To this day, the more I think about this, the more extraordinary it seems. Before we had a chance to actually sit down with Clinton to determine where the gaps on the key issues were, to assess whether they could be bridged, and whether the president was prepared to develop a strategy to bridge them, we had already issued invitations to the party…

Maybe. Of course it is risky to put the President’s personal authority on the line without working out potential downsides. But sometimes you need to make power-plays to capture the imagination of people and try thereby to seize the moment. The very fact of calling the meeting brings new energy and compels the parties to look hard at some basic issues, perhaps as never before.

Still, he gives a good answer on this one:

Risks are part of the job description, as are moving forward often with imperfect options. But gauging those risks honestly and weighing the consequences of failure are critical. And it wasn’t done. I blame myself plenty: I remember how impressed I was by Clinton’s comment after the briefings that trying and failing was better than not trying all.

But what was I smoking? This was a presidential summit. And while it was long on good intentions, it was short on honesty, clarity, and good analysis. The president’s credo was appropriate for high school and college sports; it can’t be the working assumption on which the world’s greatest power bases its approach to negotiations or foreign policy.

Clinton had a great relationship with both Arafat and Barak. He should have said separately to each leader before the invitations went out: Give me your bottom lines in confidence on the core issues. And while both would have held something back, to be given up only in the heat of the summit, we would have had a pretty good sense of where the gaps were.

At that point, we could have assessed whether those gaps could be bridged and whether the president was willing to try. If the answer was no, they can’t be bridged, Clinton could have said to both: We need more time; or he could have said: We’ll have a different kind of summit, with the expectation that we can meet again if we can’t work matters out. But neither of you will blame the other…

Mistake 2: Don’t coordinate with one side only

America has a special relationship with Israel. You can hate that fact or revel in it, but it’s unlikely to change anytime soon. A unique confluence of shared values, moral obligation, domestic politics, and strategic concerns have created a unique bond quite different from America’s ties with just about any other country, with the possible exception of Britain.

Yet, to be an effective and successful mediator, even facilitator, you need detachment, credibility, and enough impartiality to get all sides to trust and do the deal. In every example of successfully brokered U.S. diplomacy — Henry Kissinger’s disengagement agreements of 1973 to 1975; Jimmy Carter’s 1977 Camp David Accords and the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; and James Baker’s 1991 Madrid peace conference diplomacy — the United States was able to play this role.

At the second Camp David summit, it didn’t. Not only did we consistently coordinate our positions with the Israelis, showing them our negotiating texts first — a practice I might add the Palestinians had come to expect — but we saw the issues largely from Israel’s point of view. I remember how impressed we all were when we learned that Barak was willing to concede 80 percent of the West Bank…

The Israelis’ red lines, which would later became pink ones, reflected our baseline, even if we were prepared to push them a bit further. We rationalized this of course by the historic nature of what Barak was prepared to give and by Arafat’s refusal to budge much off his need for 100 percent of everything. But the idea that the Palestinians would have to come down to Israel’s positions rather than the Israelis moving closer to theirs was built in to our negotiating DNA…

Fair enough.

That said, it might be argued that precisely because the Americans were so close to the Israelis the Palestinians may have seen opportunities that would not have been available had the show been run by a ‘neutral’ mediator.

NB The USA was a not a mediator in this problem. It was a power-player hoping to use its weight to bundle through a deal. All sides knew what was going on and took their chances accordingly.

Mistake 3: Don’t lose control

Camp David lasted 13 days, but the summit actually was over on the fourth day. That was the day we lost control of the negotiations and undermined our own credibility and respect as a mediator. Again, let’s be clear: This conflict isn’t owned by the United States, and the country isn’t going to be in a position to force either side to do things it doesn’t want to do. But to succeed, the American side requires the respect of both sides and a refusal to be pushed around at key moments.

One of those moments arrived on the summit’s fourth day, and it involved something we never took seriously enough — a negotiating text. Samuel Goldwyn, the great Hollywood producer, once quipped that a verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

At the first Camp David summit, involving Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, and Carter, the Americans controlled the text — incorporating changes from each side, working through compromises, accepting some, and rejecting others. That text went through 20-plus drafts before an agreement was reached.

On that fateful fourth day, July 14, we had prepared a text designed to identify where the gaps were on key issues. We showed it to Barak first. He hated it, and we changed it to accommodate him. We then showed it to the Palestinians, and Arafat rejected it too.

The exercise was dead — and so, frankly, was our credibility.

I am not sure why this point is made in this way. Or why it meant that US credibility was lost once and for all. It’s not really explained. And the very idea of ‘control’ is controversial – unless the chair’s role is fully explained and accepted in advance, the control it thinks it has may turn out to be illusory.

The article concludes thus:

Jonathan Schwartz, our lawyer on the delegation and perhaps the most gifted mind in the negotiating business, said it best: We had no respect for the issues and how complex they really were. Perhaps, if there’s ever another Camp David summit, we will.

Nice. That’s the hardest thing in many tough negotiation situations – to get the issues (and underlying interests and needs) honestly and thoroughly articulated.

To do that means putting aside a lot of time at the start for listening in a way that is closer to ‘therapy’ than it is to politics. Only by working through that painful process can enough trust be built to create space for deep compromises.

And (usually) busy world leaders just don’t have the time – or the technical skill – to sit through all that.