Drawing upon the agreement signed between Mauritania and Senegal in June 2025, and seeking a deeper understanding of negotiation as a crucial sovereign tool, I dedicate this series of short articles to the theme: Strength and Weakness in Negotiation.
Experience has taught us that ink can bring down what battles failed to conquer, and history shows no mercy to those who draft their texts in moments of weakness, or without grasping the consequences of their signature.

In this context, we examine five major negotiating milestones in which the rightful owners of the land lost what they had not conceded on the battlefield:

1. UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967): The legal trap that cost the Arabs decades of wandering:
Bullets alone did not decide the outcome of the June War; an ambiguous sentence in a UN document reshaped the geopolitical landscape in Israel's favor for decades.
UN Security Council Resolution 242 was issued following the Naksa (the setback), yet it did not explicitly demand withdrawal from "the occupied territories," using instead a booby-trapped phrase:

The English text:
"Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict."

The Arabic text:
"انسحاب القوات المسلحة الإسرائيلية من أراض احتلتها في النزاع الأخير." (Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict)

The intentional omission of the definite article ("the") in the English text left the resolution open to interpretation, enabling Israel to claim it had withdrawn "from some" territories while retaining the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Shebaa Farms.
It was a negotiating moment in which the Arabs lost what they had not surrendered on the ground, having overlooked the linguistic trap and the workings of international law when crafted by major powers.

2. The October War of 1973: Engineering victory into negotiating isolation

At that historic moment, the Arab armies had shattered the myth of Israeli superiority, and the Egyptian armed forces had achieved a remarkable breakthrough across the Suez Canal.
Yet U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger leveraged this partial victory to forge a new regional coalition and contain the Arabs through hollow troop-disengagement talks—a gutless political compromise that stripped the victory of its substance and turned military supremacy into an ineffective truce.

Egypt was set on the path of bilateral negotiations, later joined by Jordan, while the PLO chose the path of Oslo without coordinating with Damascus, ultimately finding itself administering a limited authority under direct Israeli security oversight.
Instead of military triumph serving as leverage for sovereign negotiation, it became the launchpad for a regional containment project, under which the cause receded while the legitimation of Israel as a partner moved forward.

3. The Oslo Accords (1993): Recognition without reciprocation

The Oslo Accords were not a state-to-state agreement, but rather a fragile administrative arrangement focused on transit, movement, and security coordination arrangements rather than ending the occupation.
Fatah was transformed from the spearhead of confrontation into a security partner for Israel, trading national liberation for donor funding, and active struggle for bureaucratic posts.

4. The Dayton Agreement in Bosnia (1995): Concessions despite territorial control

Although the Bosnian Serbs controlled more than half the country with direct Serbian backing, they emerged from the negotiations recognizing the unity of the state, sharing power, and bowing to international conditions that would never have been imposed upon them had it not been for their flawed political positioning.
Serbia was not entirely defeated on the battlefield, yet it mismanaged the moment of negotiation, forfeiting at the table what it had not lost under fire.

5. The Geneva Accords after Dien Bien Phu (1954): When negotiation serves as a stepping stone to victory

North Vietnam did not achieve all its objectives by fighting alone, but it turned the agreement into a strategic springboard for a new war that ultimately culminated in the reunification of the country.
They prevailed because they understood that negotiation is not the end of the battle, but rather an evolution of its tools.

6. Angola and Mozambique: Independence won through politics, not merely on the battlefield

Fragmented liberation movements exhausted the colonial powers politically, not just militarily, emerging with independence agreements from the heart of transitional negotiations where the outcome was shaped not by military supremacy, but by political will and the legitimacy of liberation.

The conclusion is that the problem does not lie in negotiation itself, but in who conducts it.
He who lacks a sovereign mindset cannot wield a sovereign signature.
And whoever fails to anchor his country's vital interests on paper will eventually lose them on the ground, regardless of the sacrifices made on the battlefield.

Ahmed Ould M'Bareck
President of the Deyloul Center for Strategic Studies
Program: Spying on the Future