John Duncan

NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION: NEW YORK MEETING CONCLUDES

Making the Best the enemy of the Good is a trap that multilateral diplomacy often fails to avoid. But we also have to prevent that easy slide to the lowest common denominator. This is the balance we have been struggling with in New York this week.

Those of you who have been following the discussions on TWITTER and Flickr will have seen that it was something of a roller coaster ride.

At the end of last week we had already broken open the 15 year deadlock where the Preparatory meetings had failed to agree the Agenda for the five yearly Review Conference. Suddenly with next year's Agenda agreed the way was open to get into a discussion of policy.

In the end we were not able to agree the chairman’s draft policy recommendations. This was a very ambitious thing to attempt to do in just 5 days. No-one has ever managed it before and we very nearly pulled it off. With such high stakes it is hardly surprising some of the discussions became quite heated. People often confuse diplomacy with tact, which is just one way of persuading people. When time is short and the issue important, theatre is just as much an element. The skill lies in knowing which approach to deploy, with whom and when This brings me back to my oft repeat theme in these blogs – diplomacy is about trying to understand other people. Finding out what will encourage them to agree with you and what will prevent them.  Having a well reasoned argument rarely works on its own

 So has it been a worthwhile 2 weeks? Definitely yes. We are out of the foothills of endless procedural wrangling and into the open grassland of the real debate. We have 12 months in which to deepen discussion of what really matters - how to elaborate a shared vision of the steps needed to achieve a World Free of Nuclear Weapons.

Posted at 01:36 16 May 2009 by John Duncan  |  Comments[2]