Neuvottelija.com

2026-07-15 · Negotiation · Insight

Negotiating with Power: What Putin's Russia and Trump's Middle East Deal Teach You About Leverage

Two counterparties, one lesson

I’ve recorded conversations about Russia and about the Middle East that, on the surface, share nothing. One is with a retired military intelligence colonel who spent thirty years reading Russian signals and now teaches intelligence analysis at the University of Jyväskylä. The other is with a sitting Member of Parliament who has spent years tracking the factions of Gaza, the West Bank, and Tehran. But talking with Martti J. Kari about Russian strategic culture and with Atte Kaleva about Trump’s Israel-Hamas diplomacy, I kept running into the same underlying point: some counterparties aren’t playing the game we think they’re playing. They aren’t optimizing for mutual agreement. They’re optimizing for power — who has it, who’s about to lose it, and what it costs to make someone else back down. If you walk into that kind of negotiation assuming shared norms of honesty and fairness, you’ve already lost the frame.

Reading the counterparty’s culture

Kari’s whole argument starts from a concept he calls strategic culture: how a state’s leadership perceives threats and structures itself in response, and how that pattern repeats across centuries regardless of ideology. His reading of Russia layers Mongol-era autocracy, the transfer of Byzantine church power to Moscow, Soviet communism, and Putinism into what he describes as a single continuous logic: the autocrat receives power from God (or, later, from the Party), so challenging the autocrat is never just political disagreement — it’s heresy. Failures get pinned on the boyars underneath him, never on the tsar. As Kari puts it about the war in Ukraine, the pattern held even as raids hit FSB headquarters and officers were arrested for feeding Putin bad intelligence: “the Tsar does not fail, the Tsar does not make mistakes” (16:21) — asked from a negotiation angle, about how fast a failure like that gets “wiped away by force or otherwise.”

The part that struck me most as a negotiator wasn’t the history — it was the linguistics. Kari explains that the Russian phrase for “fake news” translates literally as “hybrid truth,” gibridnaya pravda. In his reading: “tactical truth is a way to get out of an unpleasant situation, buy time, or mislead” (00:00). That’s not spin as failure of communication — it’s spin as a legitimate tool, sanctioned by what he calls “collective guarantee”: if a lie serves the group, in his account no one inside the group calls it out, even when the lie is obvious. His example is Putin denying, on camera, that unmarked soldiers in Crimea were Russian troops — and Russian soldiers reportedly reading that not as an insult to them, but as skillful tactical truth. I pointed out on air that this dynamic isn’t unique to Russia — negotiators everywhere treat what’s said to the outer circle differently from what’s said inside — but Kari’s point is that Russia runs on it structurally, not as an occasional tactic.

Coercion, not agreement

What follows from that reading, in Kari’s view, is that appeasement doesn’t buy safety. When I asked him — as a NATO supporter myself, testing the idea — whether Finland’s history of being the “well-behaved” neighbor might have offered it some protection, he didn’t hedge: “that is, in my opinion, like intellectual dishonesty, that we think that if we behave well or if we are hidden so the Russians won’t notice us. It doesn’t work like that; rather, for the Russians, there hasn’t been any operational need to attack here” (41:16). That’s a hard sentence for anyone trained in consensus-style negotiation to sit with: good behavior isn’t collateral against a counterparty whose whole strategic culture treats a neighbor’s weakness, not its manners, as the variable that matters. Kari’s broader argument — that Russia has repeatedly used smaller, low-cost “border wars” (Chechnya, Crimea) to keep the state disciplined without needing total dominance — reinforces the same idea: the culture isn’t negotiating for a shared outcome, it’s testing for resistance.

Trump’s transactional leverage

Kaleva’s account of Trump’s Gaza diplomacy reads, at first, like the opposite kind of story — dealmaking, not coercion. But it rests on the same premise: power, not consensus, is what moves the pieces. Kaleva’s description of Trump’s method is blunt: “Trump, after all, acts in foreign policy like in everything, kind of a bull-in-a-china-shop model, where he goes crashing through and sees how the pieces land. I have noticed a pretty clear pattern in his actions, that he first presents something completely insane, which is known to be impossible to realize, and then everyone is horrified by it, but after it is walked back a little bit, it already sounds much more realistic… Trump is a negotiator, he wants to make deals, he is a strongly transactional actor” (29:52).

Kaleva’s case for why this particular plan might work where the Oslo Accords didn’t is instructive. Oslo, in his account, left the surrounding Arab states out of the process entirely and collapsed partly because a wave of ultra-Orthodox settlers newly arrived from the Soviet collapse simply wouldn’t accept any deal with Arabs. Trump’s 20-point framework, by contrast, pulls in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Egypt and Jordan simultaneously — because, as Kaleva notes, pressure has to land on both sides at once, and “the only person in the world who can pressure Netanyahu is the President of the United States” (20:15). He goes further, describing Netanyahu’s position in explicitly coercive terms: Trump is, in Kaleva’s phrase, capable of making Netanyahu “an offer he can’t refuse” — not because Trump is more persuasive, but because Trump’s unpredictability itself functions as leverage. Kaleva’s reading of Hamas is even starker: he doesn’t think Hamas has any real incentive to lay down arms voluntarily, since the October 7th attack already delivered what its planners wanted — European recognition of Palestine — so what moves them, in his account, is the credible threat of “continuing with Netanyahu on that path” if they refuse the deadline.

When consensus-style negotiation fails

Put the two conversations side by side and a pattern emerges that’s genuinely useful outside geopolitics. Western consensus-style negotiation assumes a shared floor: that both sides value the relationship, that lies told to preserve the deal are still lies, and that a fair process eventually produces buy-in. Kari’s Russia and Kaleva’s Middle East actors don’t share that floor. Kari’s “collective guarantee” explicitly permits tactical dishonesty as long as it serves the in-group — which means a negotiator who assumes the outer circle is getting the same honest treatment as the inner circle is negotiating on a false premise. And Kaleva’s account of Oslo suggests that even a genuinely well-intentioned framework fails if it doesn’t put real pressure on every actor who can veto it — pressure the West is often reluctant to apply because it looks, from a consensus-negotiation lens, like bullying rather than diplomacy.

Where I land

I don’t think either conversation hands you a template you can copy wholesale — Kari would be the first to say he studies Russia, not general negotiation theory, and Kaleva is a regional analyst, not a mediator. But both conversations sharpened something I already suspected from teaching negotiation: the inner-circle/outer-circle dynamic Kari confirmed exists everywhere, not just in Russia, but Russia runs it more explicitly than most cultures I’ve studied — and a negotiator who doesn’t know which circle they’re standing in is negotiating blind. When Martti Ahtisaari and I discussed Tony Blair’s Good Friday Agreement style for my negotiation work, the through-line was that Blair’s leverage came from the same place Trump’s does in Kaleva’s account — someone with enough standing on both sides to make saying no more costly than saying yes. That’s the piece I keep coming back to: power-based negotiation isn’t the absence of a deal, it’s a deal built on someone’s capacity to make refusal expensive, and pretending otherwise, against a counterparty who isn’t pretending, is the mistake.

Source episodes

Every claim in this essay is grounded in the following episodes; quotes carry timestamps linking to the original video. English subtitles and full transcripts are on each episode page.

← Negotiation · Markdown mirror: index.md