My latest DIPLOMAT piece is up:

The UK’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) has an imposing suite of UK-based and e-learning training courses for British diplomats. Some aim at improving skills (Diversity; One Team, Many Cultures; Communication and Assertiveness; Performance Management; First Aid); others look at thematic policy questions (Advanced Human Rights; Energy and Climate Security; Understanding US Foreign Policy; Contemporary Islamic Issues).

You would expect to find a strong bloc of FCO training courses on diplomatic negotiation technique. These are core diplomatic skills. The British are wily, efficient negotiators, so they must learn that somewhere. But you would be disappointed. There are, in fact, precisely… none.

This is interesting. It seems so at odds with what I was once told that Russian diplomats were taught at the start of their careers: ‘Never move to accept anything proposed by the other side, especially if you agree with it, without exacting the best possible price for changing position!’

How do British diplomats make up for this complete lack of systematic training in negotiation skills?

In part they don’t. They are living on legacy reputation built up over decades when the UK closely shaped the rules of global order, and so could take power and influence for granted – it’s not hard to do well in negotiations if you have more power and influence than the other side.

On the other hand, new British diplomats are given significant responsibility from an early stage: tough learning-on-the job followed by years of gritty practical experience. Plus they enjoy a working culture based on unquestioned teamwork.

Many foreign ministries do not work well in terms of  distributing information internally. Information is seen by officials as being all about their own status and personal power, to be guarded against all-comers.

In the British model, hoarding information is strongly discouraged – professionally discourteous and an obstacle to career progress. Facts and analysis flow freely and widely, almost independently of hierarchy. This creates new problems of its own, but it allows swarms of experts from the FCO and Whitehall to attack a problem from all angles and identify clever ways of incorporating negotiating ‘fat’ (scraps of concessions to be thrown out when necessary). UK diplomats thereby often enjoy a real edge in complex negotiations at the UN and in EU meetings in Brussels.

It also helps that the UK has cunningly organised things so that English is the planet’s main shared language (even if the Americans often muscle in on that one): you never go wrong by being the first party to get eloquent draft conclusions in English circulated around the negotiating table…

Read the rest – examples of real negotiation in action include the doomed Copenhagen Climate Summit:

Amidst these machinations one special negotiation continued, namely a struggle for psychological pre-eminence between Washington and Beijing. China rejected any legally binding agreement and protected its ‘sovereignty’ from reliable outside verification. These hard-hitting Chinese tactics left Obama in a policy and presentational dilemma. At one point he and other leaders found themselves talking to a Chinese official after Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao stayed away from the discussions to show that any outcome would be on his terms alone.

The right move for Obama in terms of negotiating technique – and long-term substance – was to leave the meeting until Jiabao appeared. But the President didn’t want to return to Washington empty-handed after playing up the climate issue so strongly to get elected. He stayed put.

President Obama opted for modest gains on the day but thereby lost ground in a deeper US/China negotiation. Both sides departed knowing that Beijing had won that round, both on substance and on public powerplay presentation…