Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 3 | Track II Diplomacy, page 3

Evaluating Track II Success

Donald Zagoria, Professor of Government at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center and an NCAFP trustee, advances the idea that "Track II efforts can be particularly useful in what I would call the hard cases such as North Korea or Iran today...to facilitate U.S. communications with countries with which the U.S. [has] difficulty talking or understanding because of the lack of regular channels of communication. And ... can help those countries [that] lack official dialogue with each other, as in the case of China and Taiwan, to better understand U.S. policies and perspectives as well as the policies of the other side."

That is not to say that Track II is only efficacious when the going is tough. The process can also be useful when channels of communication are open. But in any case, says Zagoria, it must be "well timed, well organized and balanced in terms of participants who have access to key people in government."

For that reason, Zagoria is a major proponent of Track 1 because, he points out, it enables government officials, acting in "an unofficial capacity," to present "personal views that are not necessarily authorized by government ... this allows for some degree of candor. It is crucial to have government officials in the room, so that during coffee breaks and other breaks they can talk to each other."

While no one expects that a government official, even one acting "on a non-official" basis would stray too far from the official position, Zagoria notes that this role playing enables countries like North Korea "to dangle stuff," to float trial balloons, "and we want to feed their dangling back to the U.S. government and to talk about it ourselves, and to prod them in certain directions."

An important measure for evaluating Track II, then, is the level of achievement any session has in developing new ideas that are successfully transferred or transmitted back to policymakers for consideration at future Track I sessions.

"How do we measure success? How do we say that a Track II exercise is useful?" asks Terry Lautz, a Vice President at the Henry Luce Foundation, which is active in funding Track II exercises. "People in the private sector, people involved in Track II, have the luxury of taking the longer view. That's enormously important in terms of creating a climate in which government then can consider other options, can think conceptually about other possibilities--might be willing to take or consider risks that might not be possible in the day-to-day fray of the give-and-take of bureaucracy."

Susan Shirk, Director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, San Diego, is conducting a formal evaluation of Track II programs. "We are viewing Track II multilateral dialogues and diplomacy in the Asia Pacific since 1990 as an experiment," says Shirk. "And so the idea is to try to evaluate the results of that experiment. One goal is to have this be more than a religion: you know, 'It feels good so it must be good.' We need to be a little bit more rigorous about saying what [Track II] has accomplished and what it hasn't."

Shirk is uniquely qualified for this task having served as a Deputy Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific in the Clinton Administration and as the founder of North East Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), a Track II program operating since 1993 and consisting of the same six nations engaged in the multilateral nuclear talks with North Korea.

Initially, at least, she says her analysis will focus on four areas:

Socialization: The impact of Track II on the perceptions and attitudes of foreign policymakers, encouragement of more moderate views and dispelling of distrust.

Communication: Building informal back channels that can be used in crises.

Policy Innovation: Ideas arising in Track II being adopted in Track I.

Institution Building: Track II dialogues influencing the creation of permanent institutions.

"Many of us who've spent time with the North Koreans who come to these dialogues are impressed with how smart they're getting about these thing and how quickly," says Shirk. "But what we don't know is the communications link between them and the authoritative decision makers in Pyongyang."

Indeed, governments are frequently openly hostile to Track II efforts. "You can never expect a government to welcome Track II," says Ashton Carter, Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, who is also Perry's partner in Preventive Defense, a Stanford-Harvard coalition. "In certain circumstances the more enlightened among them may see that in the long run this is probably a good thing even though it's a nuisance in the short run. But it's just not in the nature of the things for the welcome mat to go out in these kinds of activities. And you have to be ready for a little bit of pushback from the government."

There are many reasons for this, ranging from petty resistance to sharing credit to justifiable fears that Track II could impede Track I efforts. For example, "You might legitimately argue that Track II efforts could literally dissuade North Korea from recognizing reality," says L. Gordon Flake, Executive Director of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation, which is concerned with U.S.-Asia relations. "This applies across the board, but particularly in the case of North Korea," he says, "where you have a country and government that is genuinely [incapable of] discerning what is real communication."

Next page: Krepon offers a set of six "standards and conditions for success" in Track II, which he notes can be most effective when dealing with "divided governments"

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