Right now, Gov. Josh Green is dealing with two negotiations. One, involving military leases, is far along and very public.

The other is the Thirty Meter Telescope proposal, which has suddenly reappeared like a new season of a long-canceled TV series.

They’re so different in so many ways. With leases, the governor’s challenge is to keep the military from walking away from the table and never coming back because they can get what they want in other ways.

With the telescope, there currently is not even a table to sit down at.

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When One Side Can Walk Away

In the leasing case, military negotiators can walk away from the table with no costs and lots of benefits because legally they can simply condemn the land they want and take it.

Green’s negotiating strategy has been to operate as if this will not and should not happen, keeping all sides at the table as if the military has good reasons to work something out.

So, the governor’s strategy has been this: We’ll give you the leases you want in exchange for you giving us … That’s how working around the table goes in Negotiations 101.

The officials negotiating for the federal government have been, on the surface, friendly to this approach but noncommittal.

Native Hawaiian groups like the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, however, think that Green has been too friendly.

He’s responded by appointing a committee comprised mostly of Native Hawaiians to advise him

OHA Chair Kai Kahele calls the possibility of the federal government using eminent domain a “tired tactic colonizers have used for generations.” 

Strong language pushing all the right buttons, but more like bluster than strategy. Tired or not, the ability to claim land without negotiations is too ominous to ignore. Kahele and the rest of OHA can’t simply wish it away.

There are several reasons why the military negotiators might not just take what they want.

They may be influenced by Green’s strategy of keeping this a more personal and friendly rather than a legalistic matter. 

They may want to avoid the protests, civil disobedience and possible violence that could arise. 

Nevertheless, the option of just taking the land remains at least a veiled threat that gives a leg-up to the military that no one else involved has. It’s part of the governor’s equation, like it or not.

TMT’s Sudden Rebirth

Were you as surprised by this move as I was? Negotiating table? What table?

The governor wants to build the Thirty Meter Telescope on the site of a decommissioned telescope on Mauna Kea.

And while some scientists would be happy to do just that, others are now looking at other sites for the world’s next big telescope — like Chile.

So far, there are just teeny tiny steps in the direction of resurrecting TMT. Green and the entire Hawaiʻi congressional delegation sent a letter last month to the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory, a consortium of scientists that is still behind the project, promising to work with state officials to establish a permitting process for construction on the sites of decommissioned telescopes on the mountain.

Trying to get TMT back, Hawaiʻi is like what a bad boyfriend says to his long-suffering girlfriend who has had enough and finally dumps him: “I can change!”

Here’s a list of bad boyfriend-like changes that have to be made:

— A new permitting process must be developed.

— The new, mostly untested Manua Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority must buy into the idea.

Plus, the two really big ones:

— The opposition and civil disobedience from last time around won’t happen on the same scale again. 

— The state’s politicians, including our congressional delegation and Green himself, who as lieutenant governor bailed on the governor last time, will stay tough when the going gets tough.

The military lease negotiation is a product of necessity. Something will definitely come out of it. The negotiating table remains the center of things.

The TMT negotiation, on the other hand, is a product of the imagination. If the lease process is Negotiations 101, the TMT process with its mixing of reality and dreams is Surrealism 101.

TMT could very well stay that way. There is no negotiating table yet.

I can’t imagine Green pulling this one off, mainly because Hawai‘i is really asking the consortium scientists to imagine good outcomes before any of those outcomes can be guaranteed, if they ever could be.

I can easily imagine protests. I can’t imagine procedures becoming so effective and opposition becoming so diminished by this new and improved way of doing things.

But, really, imagination is part of both situations.

Imagine what will happen if the military walks away from the table.

Imagine what will happen if the scientists walk back in.