Case Studies | A new back channel to Moscow?
Historical case studies show the power of back-channel diplomacy to de-escalate tensions, particularly between superpowers.
2022 begins as 2021 left off, with the prospect of a new war on European soil, and no clear diplomatic solution. The Russian government continues to threaten further incursions into Ukraine, where Russian-backed forces have been engaged in fighting for the last seven years since the Kremlin launched an offensive into parts of Eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014.
A series of summits among U.S., Russian, Ukrainian, and other European diplomats last week failed to find a resolution. “The talks are stalemated, but there is general agreement that they will continue,” Angela Stent, director emerita of Georgetown’s Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and a veteran Russia expert, told ISD last week. Since then, tensions have only escalated in spite of further diplomatic efforts.
[Read ISD’s full analysis of last week’s U.S.-NATO-Russia talks]
In the short term, back-channel diplomacy can play a role to break the deadlock. Summits of world leaders in picturesque Swiss cities accompanied by international media coverage are diplomacy “made for TV”; but not all negotiations come with a photo-op and press conference, and secret talks can yield breakthroughs in tense situations.
Diplomatic back channels — conversations between representatives of different states that circumvent official channels of communication — are as old as diplomacy itself. Governments use back channels behind closed doors to approach particularly sensitive topics with a view to launch more formal negotiations later on, and to ease tensions on areas of long-standing disagreement or conflict. If officials are to pressure President Vladimir Putin to de-escalate the situation on the Russia-Ukraine border, back-channel talks must be part of the diplomatic toolkit. (Indeed, such efforts may already be ongoing.)
Informal interlocutors
Historically, political leaders have found trusted confidants — from inside or outside government — to be the most effective informal interlocutors in back-channel diplomacy. As Rick Moss, a historian at the U.S Naval War College, described in a diplomatic case study published by ISD last year, U.S.-Russia relations have long required secret diplomacy to manage risk, mitigate miscommunication, and cooperate productively where possible. During the Soviet era, the prospect of nuclear war necessitated secret channels of communication to prevent miscalculations and to de-escalate conflict.
While some channels in that period were official, such as the hotline between Washington and Moscow at the head-of-state level, others circumvented administration channels and could be disavowed by political leadership if their existence ever became public. In his case study, Circumventing the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy: Henry Kissinger, Anatoly Dobrynin, and Back-Channel Diplomacy, Moss analyzes the evolution of a multi-decade relationship between Henry Kissinger — President Richard Nixon’s national security advisor and later secretary of state — and Anatoly Dobrynin, longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States. The back channel was not without its problems, including a tendency to work at cross purposes to other lines of communication, even within the U.S. government. But it helped facilitate several de-escalations between the Cold War superpowers, including dissuading the Soviets from completing construction of a submarine base at Cienfuegos, Cuba — a kind of mini-Cuban Missile Crisis which took place in 1970. In a strange echo of the past, current Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned late last week that his government had not ruled out sending troops to Cuba or Venezuela to apply pressure in the United States’ own neighborhood.
Today, President Biden uses trusted emissaries in his efforts to understand the Kremlin’s bellicose positions and to communicate tough messages. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, a veteran diplomat and a primary U.S. negotiator of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, led the U.S. delegation to Europe last week. Biden has also sent Ambassador William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a career diplomat, to Moscow in November. News also emerged on Monday that he had visited President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainian intelligence officials in Kyiv last week. As a Russian speaker, skilled negotiator, and former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Burns could be just the trusted interlocutor Biden needs in future back-channel efforts. According to Happymon Jacob, a scholar of back-channel diplomacy in South Asia at the Nehru University in New Delhi, the personality of chosen interlocutors is crucial. They must have the “imprimatur” of the highest levels of political leadership, he said in a recent interview for ISD’s Diplomatic Immunity podcast.
Bureaucratic inertia
Recent tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats from the United States and Russia have limited avenues for more conventional engagement. Moss referred to these constraints as “bureaucratic inertia.” In an aggressive move, the Russian government expelled all U.S. embassy personnel who had been in the country for more than three years. This leaves the embassy with only 120 workers compared to around 1,200 in early 2017.
In addition to government officials, parliamentarians or civil society groups may also be participants in back-channel communications. For example, the Biden administration confirmed that in addition to Ambassador Burns’ recent visit to Ukrainet a bipartisan delegation of U.S. senators had met with President Zelensky on Monday to provide further signals of U.S. commitment to Ukraine’s security. Members of Congress use their standing as elected representatives to establish their own channels independently of the government of the day. However, in an era of political polarization, this can pose difficulties in presenting a unified message.
Experimental diplomacy
Back channels have a particular role to play in relations between the world’s most powerful nuclear-armed states. Although not strictly superpowers themselves, Pakistan and India are nuclear states, who share a border and have a major territorial dispute over the region of Kashmir. The issue is the greatest irritant in the two sides’ relationship, but, as Happymon Jacob explored in an August 2021 ISD case study, back channels have led to breakthroughs in the past. In what Jacob called a “great experiment” in diplomacy, trusted confidants built relationships over numerous rounds of meetings, kept their contents away from a divisive media, and insulated political leaders from backlash in the process.
The back-channel negotiations between Indian and Pakistani national security officials from 2004 and 2007 made the most significant progress of any efforts this century to resolve the Kashmir question. In his case study, Jacob draws on original interviews with participants in the negotiations to outline the political context that allowed negotiators to engage in talks, how the talks unfolded, and the constraints that prevented the implementation of a final agreement. This was the “best period in the bilateral relationship in years. Ceasefire violations reduced dramatically,” Jacob told ISD. Relations even improved to the point where a bus service was established between the two regions in 2005. However, these talks ultimately failed to produce a sustainable agreement, which Jacob attributes to domestic political developments in Pakistan during its 2008 presidential election. In a sign of increasing tensions since then, the cross-border bus service ceased in 2019.
Both Moss’s and Jacob’s case studies show how the back channels insulated the negotiators from political pressure, at least for the time they remained secret. This provides a lesson for any back-channel de-escalatory talks between U.S. and Russian officials today: the transition from secret to publicly-acknowledged talks is fraught with danger, and the two sides must ensure that messages parallel front- and back-channels do not contradict one another.
Back channels can insulate officials from undue political pressure, help them to compartmentalize sensitive issues, and facilitate out-of-the-box thinking and solutions.However, as Moss put it, back channels “take two to tango.” If the Russian government is not interested in a genuine off-ramp to this crisis through secret talks, and invasion is their ultimate aim, then all forms of diplomacy may be futile.
In the end, and most importantly for today’s tensions in Eastern Europe, back channels should “supplement not supplant official diplomacy,” Moss said. According to Jacob, “a back channel functions as an enabler. [It is] not an outcome in itself.”
Alistair Somerville is the publications editor at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy and editor of The Diplomatic Pouch. Follow him on Twitter @apsomerville.
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