A week ago I had the opportunity to participate in a one-day
simulation of the broad international effort to address Iran's nuclear
program, sponsored by Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The participants were
divided into various teams (the United States, EU, Russia, China, Iran, Israel, and a "GCC"
team representing other Persian Gulf states), along with a control team that
supervised events (and played the role of the International Atomic Energy
Agency). Several prominent
journalists observed the proceedings and were also available to "leak"
information to. The
simulation was designed to begin on Dec. 1, 2009 and cover the next twelve
months, and various teams were able to negotiate face-to-face (bilaterally
or multilaterally), move military forces around, issue press releases, make
back-channel offers, etc.; in short, they could undertake virtually any action
that might have been possible in the real world.
The result, as has already been reported, was discouraging:
by the end of the game, Iran hadn't agreed to halt enrichment, the P5+1
coalition was collapsing, and the United States and Israel were having what
could politiely be called a "candid and frank exchange of views." The sole piece of good news was that there had been no recourse to military force by the time the game ended.
Several participants have recently published
their own "take-aways" from the experience, which they appear to have found
sobering. Writing in the Washington Post, David Ignatius (who was
one of the journalists in attendance) suggested that although it was only a
simulation, the game nonetheless "revealed some important real-life
dynamics-and the inability of any diplomatic strategy, so far, to stop the
Iranian nuclear push." The
head of the "Iranian team," former NSC aide Gary Sick, has offered reflections of
his own in a recent piece in The National,
noting that "By the end of the game, the Americans
had driven away all their ostensible allies, and wasted immense time and
effort, while Iran was better off than it had been at the beginning." Sick also suggests that "the moves of
the US team were quite similar to the strategy actually employed by the United
States over the course of the last three administrations."
I thoroughly enjoyed the
experience but drew a different set of conclusions from it. (I was on the U.S. team, and was
assigned the role of SecDef Robert Gates). My
conclusion at the end of the game was that one could draw no firm
conclusions from the experience, and my principal concern was that
participants would be tempted to do just that.
In my view, what one might
call the "external validity" of the game was limited by three unrealistic features.
First, the timetable of the
game was extremely compressed. In
effect, we were trying to simulate a full year of negotiations in a mere six hours. Thus,
each hour of the game covered
two months, which meant that a team could send a message to another
team and receive a reply in due course, only to discover that a month
or more had passed and
the original message was now effectively obsolete. More to the point, the breakneck pace of the game did not
allow for any time for reflection, for the weighing of alternatives, or even
the formulation of clear or novel strategies. (Each
team was given about twenty-five minutes to plan its
approach before the game began, and I like to think U.S. leaders do a
bit better than that in real life. Heck, Obama just spent several months deciding what to do in Afghanistan). Yes, time is a precious commodity and policymakers are often forced to
juggle multiple commitments, but I believe a more realistic timetable would have produced very different results.
Second, trying to simulate a
complex multiparty negotiation with four or five-person "teams" was problematic,
particularly when some team members (myself included), had to leave the game
temporarily to teach their regular classes. This constraint required me to be absent for 90 minutes, which in terms
of the game's timetable meant that the U.S. Secretary of Defense was
effectively incommunicado for three "months." The same problem sidelined the person who played the Secretary
of State for a similar period. Moreover,
given
that team members had no staff and thus no subordinates to give orders
to, there was no one to delegate to and it was impossible to conduct
continuous consultations with all of the relevant
parties, even when both sides may have wanted to. What must have looked
to some like Bush-era "unilateralism" was instead simply an unavoidable artifact of the game's structure.
Third, the composition of
the different teams was unavoidably slanted.
The U.S., Russian, Chinese, Iranian teams were all populated with and led by Americans,
while the Israeli team was made up entirely of Israelis and the EU team was
composed of Europeans. To have
confidence in the validity of the results, therefore, you have to assume that
each of the teams actually played the way that their real-life counterparts
would have. That might be true in
the case of the U.S., Israeli, and European teams (though I wouldn't assume it),
but it's obviously more of a stretch with the others.
These difficulties are not
the fault of the game's organizers, who faced obvious constraints in putting
the exercise together. Ideally,
such a simulation would have been played over a long week-end and covered a
shorter time period, but it would have been far more difficult to assemble an equally
impressive array of participants for an entire weekend. Putting together a genuinely
multi-national participant list (including appropriate Iranians?), would have been even harder if not impossible.
The bottom line is that one ought to be exceedingly wary about drawing any conclusions about
what this artificial exercise actually teaches. To
me, its real value is not as a crude crystal ball that allows us to
divine the
future, or even as an analytical device that helps us identify
particular barriers to resolving some thorny diplomatic problem. After all, it's not exactly headline news to discover that
resolving the Iranian nuclear issue isn't easy, that there are certain tensions
within the P5+1, or that Iran's objectives are at odds with those of the other participants.
Rather, the potential value of such
an exercise lies in forcing participants to take on different roles and see how a
problem looks from a wholly different perspective. With hindsight, I wish we had mixed things up a lot more:
with some Israelis on the Iran team, with real Russians, Chinese or EU citizens
playing on the U.S. or Israeli side, and so forth. That might have taught us about some of the
sources of misunderstanding that have made this issue so hard to resolve,
whatever the actual "outcome" of the game might have been.
JOE KLAMAR/AFP/Getty Image
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