 Good afternoon. I'm Tara Sonenschein, Executive Vice President here at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and it is my great honor and privilege to welcome you to the official launch of American Negotiating Behavior by Richard Solomon and Nigel Quinney, and they are here in the front row. And I note that the second line of the book says Wheeler Dealers, Legal Eagles, Bullies, and Preachers, but if you want to find out which of the two of them fall into any of those categories you have to buy the book. And it also has a forward by Madeline Albright and Condoleezza Rice. I don't know if you could get any more stars into the book or into the room. Let me talk very briefly about what our own study came to, and let me by all means give recognition to Nigel Quinney, my colleague here. Nigel gave me his proxy to make these comments, but when we get to the Q&A session he really should be part of the discussion. Nigel has been with us through almost all this entire series of studies. He was an editor and put together two very important workshops, one in 2000 and one in 2007 that provided the intellectual grist for the American study, and I'll come do why we structured those workshops the way we did. If you want to understand any negotiating situation, there are really five factors you have to look at. One, the issues in play, and whether it's an economic or a political or a security issue, the substance of the negotiation is shaped by the issues. Secondly, there's the personal negotiating style of the counterpart official across the table. Now, for most government work, the turnover in senior officials is pretty rapid. So it isn't understanding the personality of the official across the table is not something that's easily done unless you're dealing with the Soviet Union and you have an Andrei Gromyko that's there for how many decades, Jerry or Joe and Lai, who was for four decades in one position, then it makes some sense. Thirdly, there are institutional procedures. Fourth, the geostrategic context, and fifth, the culture at play that affects the negotiating behavior. Three last issues that I've mentioned, the institutional context, the geostrategic position of the country, and the culture that are the things that have enough stability for you to really get off into. And I would just make one comment. There's a methodological trick to these studies, and that is you really can't ask someone if I wanted someone from China to tell me how what was unique about their negotiating style. They probably couldn't do it because culture is something like your personality. It's so intimate to you that you don't have the contrast. So the trick is to get observers from another culture, another country who will examine the record, witness a negotiating behavior, and say, hey, that's really distinctive about the way the Americans negotiate the way the Chinese, the Russians, whomever. I could, again, with more time, but I don't want to cut into our panel, point out at one silly little example, but it's interesting. And that's drinking behavior. The Chinese, we learned, want to get you drunk. And you may remember Joe Enlai during the Nixon visit. He went around the room and he toasted 178 American officials and one little fimble of that fiery, mal-tied liquor. If you go to Russia, they want to get drunk with you. I'm serious. And I've had that experience. And if you go to France, they want to impress you with the high culture of their wines, their vinaigrette culture. We could go on. And so you find these elements, these bits and pieces of the diplomatic process that tell you a great deal about the cultural dynamics of the particular country. Well, it was in that context that we asked over 50 foreign officials to come together in these workshops and to tell us how they saw us as negotiators. And we'll hear much more of it. But let me just briefly comment that in terms of institutional behavior, our structure of government, the division of powers, the competition between the Congress and the White House and the different government agencies has a major effect on our negotiating dynamic. And as Chan-Hen-Chi points out in her chapter, and we've heard from many others, Americans mostly negotiate among themselves. It's the interagency process that takes up 80 or 90% of the effort of any given official. But then there's the power of the presidency. The president is the leader, and he really does set the tone, either providing strong guidance and oversight of the negotiating process, or in some, and the Nixon administration was a good example of tight control, or the contrast Ronald Reagan, who was pretty much hands off and let his officials do the negotiating. And that has a big effect on the character of the interagency process. Election cycles have a major effect on negotiating. Our officials feel under real-time constraint that they know they only have four or maybe two years in which to achieve something, and so they're under a time pressure that countries that don't have that electoral cycle don't feel. And finally, one aspect of our system is what might be called lateral entry. Our foreign service, our diplomatic activity, brings in senior people, some political appointees, some brought in into the foreign service with a variety of professional experiences, lawyers, businessmen in particular academics, and one of the key points that Nigel emphasized in his contributions to the book is that we come across as having four distinctive facets, and that's why the subtitle of this book, Wheeler Dealers, Legal Eagles, Bullies and Preachers, reflects the different character of the officials who either are part of the foreign service or come in as political appointees. In terms of the geostrategic context, it's clear that we're seen as a superpower and to the discomfort of our own people, we're seen as at least hegemons, if not bullies. And finally, there's on the cultural side, sorry can I steal somebody's unopened water, thank you Tom, you will get you another one. What are some of the dramatic themes that come out on the cultural side? We're looking at the way that our diplomats are seen as serious professionals, well-prepared. They don't bluster, they don't bluff, they don't lie in the way that, I mean frankly on the Russian side there's a lot of bluster and then bluffing upon occasion. Our diplomats are seen as pragmatic as results oriented, interested in solving problems. transactional style of negotiating rather than a relationship building style of diplomacy, which is in the case of the Chinese and particularly the Japanese.