Constructive Ambiguity
Henry Kissinger is widely regarded as being the best negotiator of the 20th Century. Not in my book. Here’s one reason – he devised the practice of Constructive Ambiguity as a negotiating tactic. Constructive Ambiguity has a prosaic name – ‘Fudging’. Maybe ‘Lying’ would better fit the bill.
CA is the technique of making a statement which uses words which mean different things to the parties at the negotiating table, thus enabling them to claim victory, or at least concessions, that keep their respective constituencies on side. This can be very useful in allowing negotiations to continue even though there are fundamental differences between the parties, differences which might otherwise scupper further talks.
Classically, Kissinger used CA in 1972 to normalize the relationship between the US and China, when the US acknowledged that “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a province of China.” This enabled Beijing to believe that the US recognized its sovereignty over Taiwan, and allowed the Taiwanese to claim that Washington was siding with their view that Taiwan was the real and only China. But in reality, all that the statement said was that the US acknowledged a position; that is not the same as accepting it, or agreeing with it.
CA is like the Open Door technique. ‘Just suppose we could agree to that……’, or ‘If, hypothetically we could do that…..’ are certainly constructive statements that might enable other elements of a deal to be agreed, which then changes the mood between the parties and subsequently allows a deal breaker issue to become negotiable. But if the deal breaking issue is genuinely irresolvable, suggesting that it might be resolved will not change the reality.
It’s easy to confuse CA with