Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
diplomats also identify more precise benefits. Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, trumpeted the intelligence value of engagement. He advocated engaging Hezbollah in order to learn more about the organization, its personnel, and its internal divisions.34 Likewise, Nicholas Burns argued that three decades without diplomatic relations with Iran had left Washington operating in the dark. “In the absence of diplomatic relations and the lack of a substantial American business or journalistic presence in Iran, we have no real basis to understand its government, society and people,” Burns told a Senate committee.35 Whether the intelligence gained in such diplomatic initiatives provides a net gain over sophisticated satellite pictures, phone intercepts, multibillion-dollar espionage services and broadcast media remains an open question.
The Uncertainty of Engagement
Diplomacy may provide opportunities, but it also imposes costs. Some are quite literal: diplomats often couple engagement with financial and material inducements, sometimes to the tune of billions of dollars. The results may or may not be worth the price. Had American officials not sat down to talk with North Korea’s leadership in the mid-1990s, American security would be no worse; indeed, the U.S. Treasury would be wealthier, and the American strategic position would be no worse.
Aid and inducements may actually create reverse incentives and effectively reward rogues for their defiance. The United States helped bankroll a nuclear reactor for North Korea and has offered technological assistance to Iran. Bribing adversaries with incentives can contribute to a squeaky-wheel syndrome. In 2001, for example, the United States provided Mali, one of the poorest countries on earth but at the time the freest and most democratic Muslim state in the world, just $33 million in development assistance, while Lebanon, a country with one-third the population and host to numerous terrorist groups, received 50 percent more. It was not until a coup ended Mali’s democracy and al-Qaeda took root in its territory that the State Department again focused on the West African country.
Successful engagement requires assessment of an adversary’s sincerity, weakness, and desire. Does the rogue leader truly seek a resolution or does he merely want to delay, to give diplomats reason for hope and hold off sanctions while he pursues other aims? Arguably, Muammar Qadhafi chose to engage sincerely only in 2003, several years into his dialogue with American and British officials. Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was not sincere in his dialogue leading up to the second Camp David summit, even if some of his subordinates were. Saddam Hussein seldom approached the negotiating table with sincerity. Whenever rogues engage insincerely, they can avoid accountability, consolidate their position, rearm, and make resolutions more difficult.
Engagement does not happen in a vacuum; circumstances matter. Neither the success of Nixon’s outreach to China nor Reagan’s détente with the Soviet Union was inevitable. Both were the result of a confluence of events that affected the thinking of policymakers in Beijing and Moscow. Diplomatic breakthroughs occurred on the Korean Peninsula and in the Middle East after the United States’ lightning victory against Saddam Hussein in 1991. The Soviet Union was gone, and rogues had few patrons. But when Iran backs Hezbollah and Pakistan supports the Taliban, engagement with either group often goes nowhere.
Calculations of strength and weakness play into the question of whether to engage. When Washington reaches an impasse with a rogue, does the threat of military force improve the chance for engagement to work, or does it set the United States down a slippery slope to war? If policymakers bluster but then back down, as Obama did after Bashar al-Assad’s regime used chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, is it possible to continue engagement with credibility, or will rogue regimes conclude that America is, in the words of Osama bin Laden, merely a “paper tiger”? When rogue actors do not take American threats seriously, how might the United States restore its credibility?
Perhaps the most difficult question with regard to engagement is also the most basic: When presidents or diplomats engage, how do they measure success? It is far easier to gauge military success, and the cost of military action is also easy to calculate in terms of blood and treasure. The success of sanctions is also quantifiable: If sanctions are imposed to change behavior, compel withdrawal from territory, or force the abandonment of terrorism, it is easy to judge both success and cost in lost business. With engagement, it’s trickier. Seldom does engagement lead outright to a rogue regime dismantling weapons programs or ceasing terror sponsorship. Diplomats often shy away from announcing metrics of interim success out of fear that politicians will lose patience for diplomacy if those are unmet. As important, diplomats seldom acknowledge that diplomacy can exact a cost in terms of lost momentum, lost credibility, or time that adversaries can use to develop weapons or plan terrorist attacks.
The Perils of Engagement
Talking to rogue regimes and terrorist groups makes headlines. Newspapers are far more likely to track the latest talks between American and North Korean diplomats than they are to report on the latest tête-à-tête between the United States and Sweden. Rogue engagement makes or breaks legacies. Had President Jimmy Carter left office after brokering peace between Egypt and Israel, he might be remembered as a brilliant foreign policy tactician. But the Iran hostage crisis sank his presidency and tarred his legacy. Clinton likewise gambled heavily on peace between Israelis and Palestinians in part to shape his legacy. Not only did his peace deal collapse, but it led to decades of further strife in the region.
Moral clarity is often the first casualty of diplomacy with rogues. Two years after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, Biden condemned George H. W. Bush’s attempt to engage China. “What President Bush and Secretary Baker have been seeking to engage is the world’s last major Communist regime,” he said; “it is a regime marked by brutality at home and irresponsibility abroad; and it is a regime the United States should now cease to court and must no longer appease.”36
If rogues are intractable, engagement may simply appease them. It was for this reason, at least rhetorically, that George W. Bush refused to engage rogue regimes. Speaking before Israel’s Knesset on May 15, 2008, the president said:
Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.37
Because diplomacy with rogue regimes has such high stakes, the decision to engage rogues often affects the way politics and policymaking work. Political appointees in the State Department serve at the pleasure of the president and their careers depend on political loyalty, so they have a stake in diplomacy’s success. Career diplomats may have policy agendas just as strong as those of their political counterparts, if not stronger—though they might react with indignation to anyone who questioned their integrity. Diplomats immerse themselves in raw intelligence to decide what their superiors see or do not see. If they bury evidence of an adversary’s insincerity, other officials may develop a false belief that diplomacy is succeeding. Often there is a reckoning when intelligence and reality diverge. In foreign policy, the price is paid in blood and treasure.
The State Department is especially susceptible to political manipulation. Many diplomats see engagement as their raison d’être and amplify any glimmer of hope, however contrived, into justification for new engagement. When Congress involves itself in foreign policy—making engagement conditional on a rogue’s cessation of terrorism, for example—diplomats avoid findings that might be the death knell for an initiative they believe in. It is not only a problem within the State Department. As administrations become invested in high-profile diplomatic engagement, many officials face the temptation of shaping intelligence to support the initiative and manipulating the metrics by which to judge the effectiveness of their efforts.
Diplomacy can also constrain other options. As the White House pursues rapprochement, it often pressures agencies to suspend parallel policy initiatives—covert operations, military preparation, and even human rights reporting—that might upset adversaries or cause the international community