Ury tried to think of a parallel. “We’re in the same rowboat, and one person says, ‘If you don’t give me that last loaf of bread, I’m going to shoot a hole in the boat, and we’ll both sink.’ ”
Such a drastic threat, he said, could put Boehner in a box. If he carries through on his threat, Republicans could suffer politically. But, if he takes this hard line and then compromises, he could take heat from his own party.
For that reason, Ury said, Boehner might feel comfortable only relenting just before a deadline. That might be too late to avoid spooking Wall Street.
“The odds are that it will be close to the last minute,” he said. “Because each side will want to show their constituents that they did their best.”
On Tuesday, a spokesman for Boehner said the speaker knew what he was doing. “Boehner stated his position. That’s how negotiations start,” spokesman Michael Steel said in an e-mail.
But Chris Voss, a former hostage-negotiator for the FBI, said something Boehner did in the last negotiation could also threaten his hand in this one. That time, many conservatives supported the deal that Boehner struck to avoid a government shutdown — only to find that the spending cuts he won were smaller than expected.
Now, he said, the same conservatives are likely to be even more demanding. These are the metaphors that hostage-negotiators use: Voss thought of “jumpers,” the people whom he was called to talk down from bridges and rooftops.
In these cases, he said, it was usually necessary to say yes to some of their demands. Because, if they came down and found that the promise was false, another crisis would follow.
“If you get them down, and they don’t get some resolution to what they wanted in the first place, they’re going back up there,” Voss said. “They haven’t forgotten what was promised to get them down.”
On the Democratic side, Vice President Biden is leading a bipartisan team of legislators who are working on a solution to the crisis. But on Tuesday, press secretary Jay Carney told reporters that Boehner’s approach improperly tied spending cuts to the debt-ceiling vote: “To hold one hostage to the other remains extremely unwise.”
But even actual hostage-negotiators say the best way to settle a dispute like this is to avoid saying bad things about one’s opponents.
A statement like Carney’s “inflames the situation. You’re saying ‘He is a bad guy,’ ” said Gary Noesner, the FBI’s former chief hostage-negotiator. Carney also voiced more hopeful sentiments, saying that Obama and Boehner agreed that deficits should be reduced, and that the White House was optimistic that a deal would be done.
Noesner also said he worried the problem wouldn’t be resolved until the last minute. He said that years of dealing with these standoffs have taught that often, even confident-sounding people are unsure how to get themselves out of their fix.
“My experience is, more often, they have no idea what they’re doing,” said Noesner, who just wrote a book about his career at the FBI titled “Stalling for Time.” “It’s much easier to get into [a standoff like this] than to get out of it.”
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