Panama canal negotiations

Early in my grad school career, I did a project with a fellow grad student looking at conflict behavior. We looked, among other cases, at the Panama invasion, and found, among other things, that one reason the Panama invasion happened was because the process of escalation made it difficult to back down even when backing down was possibly in everyone's best interest. Specifically, the US reached a point in negotiations where it decided to offer a deal which was believed to fulfill Noriega's minimum needs for a deal. But Noriega rejected the deal, likely because it was offered by Reagan (an outgoing president) and would need to be fulfilled by Bush (an incoming president who would be facing reelection.) The run-up process to invasion had shifted the domestic incentives. The invasion had been "sold" well enough that it's believed Noriega believed that Bush wouldn't be able to honor the deal Noriega wanted and Reagan was willing to offer. The US initially needed people behind an invasion so that it could threaten an invasion in order to get concessions; but having got concessions, it found it had been backed into a corner domestically.

It's amusing, then, to read that something similar almost happened in the bargaining that originally took place in 1902 around the initiation of the canal. In this negotiation, the US played Nicaragua off against Panama; it made a number of moves that showed a public interest in and preference for a Nicaraguan project. This successfully convinced France (which controlled the canal site) that there was a danger of losing the deal to a competitor, and secured concessions. But it had also successfully convinced US legislators, meaning the votes weren't there in the Senate once the US got the deal it was looking for!

How was this solved? Partly through direct persuasion, and partly through slander*. Howard Raiffa writes:

a week before the Senate vote there still were not enough Panamanian enthusiasts. At this point, a decisive role was played by a Frenchman named Philippe Bunan-Varilla... Three days before the deciding vote, he sent each senator a pretty Nicaraguan stamp showing a railroad wharf in the foreground and, in the background, Momotombo in magnificent eruption. 'What have the Nicaraguans chosen to characterize on their coat of arms and on their postage stamps? Volcanos!' Bunan-Varilla made his point. On June 19, 1902, Panama won the Senate...

--Raiffa (1982), The Art and Science of Negotiation

If Bunan-Varilla's postage stamp maneuver actually turned the tide, then I think what it mainly demonstrates is the real lack of any deep interest group maneuvering behind this decision. If senators' positions were so weak (and their background research so shallow) that their opinions could be reversed by "Hey, did you know Nicaragua has a volcano?", it's hard to imagine that anyone much on the domestic side had cared enough to put a lot of pressure on them to choose one way or another (other than the above-mentioned political machinations).

Also, China officially ahead in wind capacity now.


* Dear lawyer friends: I use the term in a colloquial rather than a technical sense.