Soviet Diplomacy and Negotiating Behavior

Whelan's study, prepared for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, sets out to explain how Soviet negotiators actually behave and what American officials should expect when they sit down across from them. It treats Soviet diplomacy as the expression of a distinct political system rather than as a set of personal quirks, tracing negotiating conduct back to ideology, to the closed and centralised machinery that decides positions in Moscow, and to a long institutional memory of dealing with the West. From that base it builds a picture of recurring method: patience used as leverage, agreement withheld until the other side has moved, procedure and wording treated as substance, and the negotiating table understood as one instrument of state policy among several rather than as a search for common ground. The survey is historical and cumulative, drawing on the record of postwar encounters to show continuity across changes of leadership, and it closes towards the practical question named in its subtitle, the changed conditions in which United States diplomacy would have to operate. The volume is long, heavily referenced, and intended as a working reference for legislators and negotiators.

Written from the catalogue record for the Westview Press reprint of the Committee on Foreign Affairs study at the Internet Archive.

What this vault takes from it

Nothing yet. The title appears in the registry because it has been mentioned in passing, and no concept or person note currently draws on it.

Reliability

Not audited here. 0 notes in this vault draw on it.