Jimmy Carter clearly deferred to his secretary of state's pro-negotiation strategy initially. As Gary Sick notes, with only a couple of exceptions, ‘Secretary Vance and the Department of State thoroughly dominated the US decision-making process during the first two months of the crisis’. Vance argued with success that the administration needed to be patient, and that waiting it out would eventually pay dividends. Moreover, Vance and Carter utilized the same strategy of graduated threats which Lyndon Johnson had used earlier in the Pueblo case, described by Thomas Schelling as ‘graduated compellence’ in his classic work Arms and Influence. Under this strategy, if one step fails to achieve its intended objective, another (more severe) step is taken, in a slow but escalating series of stages until the desired goal is reached. At an NSC meeting on 23 November, Carter outlined his strategy as involving ‘a series of escalating steps, which he summarized with the words “condemn, threaten, break relations, mine three harbors, bomb Abadan, total blockade”’. As Richard Cottam has pointed out, ‘this tactical bargaining approach is a natural one, and there is no reason to believe the Carter administration was explicitly following Schelling's model’. Nevertheless, there is another explanation for this which Cottam does not mention; namely, that the decision-makers may simply have been following the lessons suggested by the Pueblo analogy.