The most serious impairment is the incessant urging by domestic critics that the U.S. administration should not show any of the flexibility that may be necessary to close the last few inches of the remaining gap between the parties and to avoid having the whole negotiating enterprise suffer a crashing failure.

The negotiations taking place in Vienna right now may be viewed as what game theorists call a game of chicken—named originally after the street competition in which daredevil hot-rodders speed toward each other to see who would swerve first. The logical structure of the game theorists' chicken game is one in which a player who does not cooperate scores some sort of points over a player who does (i.e., who swerves, or concedes), but in which non-cooperation by both players results in the worst possible outcome for both (a crash, or a lack of agreement).