Voorhees, James. Dialogue Sustained: The Multilevel Peace Process and the Dartmouth Conference

Naval War College Review, Spring, 2004 by Rose Gottemoeller

Voorhees, James. Dialogue Sustained: The Multilevel Peace Process and the Dartmouth Conference. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2002. 470pp. $24.95

For over thirty years, the Dartmouth Conference has been a multifaceted arena for sustained dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union (later the Russian Federation). The conference, structured in plenary meetings and task forces, enabled the two superpower adversaries to edge slowly toward greater understanding. It was one of the earliest efforts to engage the Soviets outside of official channels, and it succeeded, although sometimes in Cold War fits and starts, by bringing together a consistent group of experts.

In his detailed history of the Dartmouth Conference, lames Voorhees connects first-person reflections and memories of the participants with documentation of Dartmouth planning and reporting. He also undertakes a thorough review of the literature and engages two long-time conference participants, Harold Saunders and Vitaly Zhurkin, to analyze the lessons learned.

All three are well placed to reflect upon the value of the Dartmouth process. Voorhees is an associate of, and Saunders is the director of international affairs at, the Kettering Foundation, the institution that funded the conference for many years and served as its intellectual "home." Zhurkin, director emeritus of the Institute of Europe in the Russian Academy of Sciences, began his participation with the conference in 1971.

The result is a book that brings the Dartmouth process alive against the backdrop of key events in the U.S.-Russian relationship, beginning in the 1950s and extending almost to the present day. In that respect, it is good reading for anyone interested in the history of the Cold War.

This work is also important because it describes the continuing value of the process. Yevgeny Primakov, a long-time participant, expressed this well when he wrote to Saunders during the book's preparation: "The whole history of the Dartmouth meetings demonstrates the usefulness of such non-official group[s]. ... [F]ormal contacts do not exclude the necessity of non-official exchange of opinions in particular between those people who have the capability to report their impressions and conclusions after such exchanges to the highest state officials."

Furthermore, the process has had valuable offshoots, such as the Inter-Tajik Dialogue, which Saunders cochaired from its inception. The dialogue has been effective in resolving what seemed to be an intractable civil war in Tajikistan. Dartmouth, in short, has given birth to some productive notions of conflict resolution, and Voorhees, Saunders, and Zhurkin describe their potential well.

The book's shortcomings are in two areas. First, its description of government policy making falls prey to oversimplification. Anyone who believes that political appointees stick to making policy and professional bureaucrats stick to implementing it has never watched the British television comedy Yes, Prime Minister, the classic program that chronicles relations between minister and mandarin in the British government. Its lessons apply equally well in Washington, and probably also in Moscow. That aside, if the book had acknowledged more of a symbiotic relationship between political appointees and bureaucrats in the policymaking process, it might have granted an even more influential role to the Dartmouth Conference. In other words, the meetings and briefings that the author recounts, involving many layers of the U.S. government, probably provided multiple points at which Dartmouth insights could enter U.S. policy.

The book's second problem is rather scant recognition that Dartmouth was largely a "closed loop system" on the Russian side, involving "the same, limited number of figures whom the Soviet authorities permitted to have this kind of access to Americans." Undoubtedly, the stalwarts of the cooperation from the Institute of the USA and Canada and other institutes had links into the Soviet policy-making system. Nevertheless, the limitations on who could participate meant that for many years the dialogue lacked access to key areas of expertise, such as arms control, on the Russian side--a fact that Voorhees freely acknowledges.

It is also worth considering whether the benefits of a close and continuing relationship with a few chosen people were, in the end, the dialogue's downfall. In the 1990s, as more and more Russian experts from a variety of institutions became available, they migrated into a plethora of international security and policy forums. Because it was full to capacity, however, the Dartmouth Conference was not always able to accommodate this "new blood." One Russian participant expressed the dilemma well: "We have lost our audience. The government isn't interested, and besides our institutes have lost their influence."

Despite these problems, the Dartmouth process clearly played a vital role in developing communications between the two superpowers during the Cold War. As this book makes clear, the conference's legacy will abide in the conflict-resolution techniques to which it gave life.