BEN ZIMMER: THE TERRIBLE TRACK RECORD OF NEGOTIATED “GRAND BARGAINS”
A phrase that gained currency during the Cold War has been revived for budget negotiations—to the usual lack of success.
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When budget talks opened late last month between congressional Republicans and Democrats, the two sides couldn’t agree on much, but they did share one sentiment: The talks would yield no “grand bargain”—no comprehensive deal on taxes, spending and entitlements.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, for instance, said that suggestions of a “grand bargain” were mere “happy talk.” Perhaps it’s just as well, because the phrase “grand bargain” has, historically, been something of a curse. When potential deals acquire that name, they almost always seem to fall apart.
The phrase “grand bargain” first gained currency during the Cold War, when accords between the Soviet Union and Western powers were hard to come by. In 1961, an editorialist for the British newspaper the Observer noted that, while President Kennedy never “imagined the Cold War could be ended by one grand bargain,” he was nonetheless open to talking to his counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev.
During the détente of the 1970s, Henry Kissinger sought a grand bargain with the Soviets. But when Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, noted Seyom Brown in the journal Foreign Policy, “the grand bargain…was a nonstarter.”
A new Cold War bargain, focused on arms reduction, was envisioned in Ronald Reagan’s second term. Negotiators hoped that the Soviets would agree to deep cuts in their nuclear arsenal if the Reagan administration agreed to back off on the Strategic Defense Initiative, but time ran out on this grand bargain when Reagan left office.
Then, in 1990, two American experts, Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill, working with a young Soviet reformer, hatched a grand bargain along the lines of the Marshall Plan, exchanging Western aid for Soviet economic reform and democratization. The plan got some traction before the disintegration of the Soviet Union rendered it moot.
Meanwhile, on the home front, “grand bargains” (or sometimes “grand compromises”) have surfaced on Capitol Hill since the divided Congress of the mid-1980s. The phrase returned to Washington parlance when President Barack Obama took office. “Obama Targets a ‘Grand Bargain’ to Fix Budget Mess,” read a Wall Street Journal headline on Jan. 16, 2009.
While that grand bargain has thus far proved unattainable, it’s worth remembering that political negotiations do not always crumble and sometimes deserve lofty labels. Think back to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when large and small states broke a stalemate by agreeing on the composition of the two houses of Congress. Retrospectively, the breakthrough has been dubbed The Great Compromise. Surely that should provide inspiration for today’s grand bargain-hunters.
—Mr. Zimmer, a lexicographer, is executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus andVocabulary.com.
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