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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 29, No. 2. 1966.
Negotiation
Negotiation
Now if there's to be negotiation replacing armed conflict, each party will have shown itself willing to use arms in pursuit of what it wants.
They are now willing to leave off using arms, but they still want whatever they wanted before. Consequently, one of the things they are negotiating about is the extent of each party's willingness to stop using arms: which means that the arms each has, its willingness to use them and its prospects of success with them, are stilt very much part of the situation, only partially modified by whatever has brought about willingness to negotiate.
If this is true even after both sides have got to the conference table, it can be title before it— when, for instance, each side is making declarations about the terms on which it would be willing to stop fighting and begin to negotiate. To talk like this is a form of negotiation: it is a means of stating what you want and what you are prepared to do for it; it is also,
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and at the same time, a form of war (so is negotiation).
One should not be unduly surprised if the terms proposed by each side are initially unacceptable to the other because this is just a way of saying that they have incompatible goals—if they did not there would not be a conflict.
The thing to watch for is whether and how the terms change as time goes by. That tells you how the war, and the negotiation, are going.
In conclusion
At the moment it is very early days, largely because the Vietcong are still under the impression that they are winning. The demands on both sides are still at the absurd stage, with each side demanding that the other shall give up the use of its armed strength as a prelude to negotiation.
Keep out of that, I suggest, as the most you can do by getting into it is to indicate which side you would prefer to see surrender to the other, and that isn't going to help anybody.
Nor is it yet possible to imagine what common ground they can find to negotiate about, or rather where the deadlock which will ultimately substitute for agreement will come.
It may well not come until some kind of confrontation, or deterrence dialogue, between American and Chinese power has come about; that after all is how cold wars are settled. But if, as I presume, the Americans have taken up a position from which they cannot be expelled at any price anyone is willing to pay, then negotiation has already begun and will end somewhere.