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Cohen supplies a few "Soviet-style" ploys of his own: hanging up the phone in midsentence, for example, giving the impression you were cut off and thus gaming a little additional time to think things over. Then there is the "nibble": leading your opponent deep into negotiations, so that he has invested much time and effort in them: seeming to make a settlement, then demanding one last concession: a free neck tie, for example, to go with a couple of suits. There is a wonderfully grasping vulgarity in the ploy, an effrontery that should be greeted with admiration, at least in a clothing store. Sometimes the nibble can be immense and sinister—like the bite that Hitler took at Munich. In less apocalyptic negotiations, the nibble should generally be greeted with dignified amusement. If conflict is the natural state of the world, then negotiation may be an unnatural medium, one that goes against the centrifugal force of things. On the other hand, almost every human transaction (sex, marriage, politics, for example) and even human traffic with the divine (religion), is a form of negotiation, the everlasting mating dance of the quid pro quo. Those engaged in negotiation, even when they are the bitterest of enemies, are held together within a membrane of hope and desire and (presumably) enlightened selfishness.
Negotiations can be merely a smokescreen, of course: like the bargaining that the Japanese were conducting with the U.S. before Pearl Harbor. Sometimes negotiations are only empty dances of punctilio: at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, it took the delegates six months to decide in what order they would enter and be seated in the negotiating chamber; the U.S. and North Viet Nam held similarly intricate discussions about the shape of the table in Paris. Negotiations can produce their own tragedies, as Versailles did, as Yalta did. But without negotiation, things tend to fall more quickly of their own weight into patterns of force and submission, autocracy and abjectness. If the future is forever dark and fogbound, negotiation can sometimes fill the landscapes with better shapes and paths than they would otherwise contain.
—By Lance Morrow