Shuttle Diplomacy: Kissinger as the Indispensable Channel

The October 1973 war ended with Israeli forces across the Suez Canal, an encircled Egyptian Third Army, a superpower nuclear alert, and no diplomatic channel between the parties.

Henry Kissinger's response was to become the channel. Between November 1973 and September 1975 he conducted the negotiations personally, flying between Jerusalem, Cairo, Damascus and Riyadh, carrying proposals in both directions. The Israeli-Egyptian disengagement was signed in January 1974 and the Israeli-Syrian in May 1974, after thirty-four days of continuous shuttling between Jerusalem and Damascus.

It worked. Two agreements were reached that the parties could not have reached in a room together, and the second in particular was regarded at the time as close to impossible.

It is also, structurally, an information monopoly, and this chapter is about what that permits.

When parties negotiate directly, each hears the other's position in the other's words, can judge tone and conviction, and can detect inconsistency. When all communication passes through an intermediary, the intermediary decides what each side learns about the other — including how firm a position is, what the alternatives are, and what the other side is really prepared to accept.

That control operates on the variable Fisher and Ury identify as the source of all negotiating power: each side's assessment of its best alternative to a negotiated agreement. A party that believes its alternative is bad concedes more. The intermediary is in a position to shape that belief in both directions simultaneously.

Sequential private meetings also permit tailored anchoring. Each side receives a different framing of what is achievable, and neither can compare notes, so the anchors of chapter 14 cannot be checked against each other.

The declassified transcripts, published by the National Security Archive and the State Department, show the technique in operation: Kissinger characterizing each party's position to the other with considerable freedom, and describing his own difficulties with the other side in terms that made him the ally of whoever he was sitting with.

Exhaustion was the third instrument, and it was applied to everyone including himself. Thirty-four days of continuous flying, sessions running late into the night, and constant time pressure. Decision fatigue is well documented, and its effect is specific: as deliberative capacity is depleted, people become more likely to accept a default, agree to a proposal on the table, or make an incremental concession rather than reopen a question.

Whether the outcome justifies the method is a real question and not one this chapter settles. Two wars were prevented from resuming. The parties were also, in a precise sense, managed.