Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia be recalled in order to protect the “dialogue of civilizations” that the Iranian president Mohammad Khatami was promoting. In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, suspended postwar planning because she worried that preparing for conflict would mar the optics of diplomacy.
Engagement with terrorist groups brings its own unique costs. When diplomats talk to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, they legitimize the path to the negotiating tables that these groups have walked. The symbolism of such engagement might alter the political climate.
Even when engagement does not fail, success can be costly. As Serbs massacred Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia, Joe Biden criticized how “diplomatic intervention . . . compromised principle at every turn.”38 When Milosevic finally consented to cut a diplomatic deal, Biden was dismayed, saying he had “mixed emotions” about Milosevic’s agreement to a truce. “I believe he only understands force,” Biden explained. “I believe that he is the problem. I believe that, ultimately, force will have to be used. And, quite frankly, I wish we had just used this force.”39
The struggle over when and how to engage rogue regimes is not new. Fundamentally, it is interests that determine when to engage. As Kissinger noted, “If ideology necessarily determined foreign policy, Hitler and Stalin would never have joined hands any more than Richelieu and the Sultan of Turkey would have three centuries earlier. But common geopolitical interest is a powerful bond.”40 At the same time, a cost-benefit analysis colors the assessment of interests. If one lesson can be learned from the history of engaging rogue regimes, it is that diplomacy is never a cost-free strategy. Indeed, it can often be deceptively costly to American national security.
In any case, the United States no longer has the luxury of isolation. Rogue regimes, international pariahs, and terrorists who once focused their activities thousands of miles away are developing the means to strike anywhere in the world. Talking alone will not solve the problem.
Diplomacy, like war, spans cultures and centuries. Its origins are shrouded in time. “There came a stage when the anthropoid apes inhabiting one group of caves realized that it might be profitable to reach some understanding with neighboring groups regarding the limits of their respective hunting territories,” the British diplomat Harold Nicolson speculated.1
Both Babylonian and Pharaonic documents reveal regular exchanges of envoys with neighboring kingdoms.2 The Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (544–496 BC) did not speak directly of diplomacy in The Art of War, but he suggested, “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”3 Around the same time, Greek city-states exchanged ambassadors and negotiated truces, although embassies were weak, as Demosthenes noted: “Ambassadors have no battleships at their disposal, or heavy infantry, or fortresses.” The Athenian orator and statesman went on to describe the disadvantage that democracies suffer in diplomacy: they seldom react as quickly as a dictatorship does.4 Perhaps this is why the Romans preferred to conquer and impose their will, resorting to diplomacy only in order to subjugate others without the trouble of war, or to quiet frontiers while fighting elsewhere.5
Notions of diplomacy evolved separately in different cultures. Not every civilization shares Western assumptions about the use and value of diplomacy. In the eleventh century, the Persian vizier Nizam al-Mulk (1018–1092) described diplomacy as a cover for other activities in the Siyasatnameh (The Book of Government), a seminal text meant to be a manual for kings. “When kings send ambassadors to one another, their purpose is not merely the message or the letter which they communicate openly, but secretly they have a hundred other points and objects in view,” the vizier wrote.6 To this day, altruism and conflict resolution have little place in Persian notions of diplomacy. Before he was taken hostage in 1979, the American chargé d’affaires Bruce Laingen explained how Iranians negotiate. “Perhaps the single dominant aspect of the Persian psyche is an overriding egoism,” he wrote, adding, “One should never assume that his side of the issue will be recognized, let alone that it will be conceded to have merits.”7
Like Nizam al-Mulk, the Florentine statesman and writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) maintained a skeptical view of negotiation. It was during his life that the Italian peninsula’s various republics began to station resident ambassadors in rival states. Machiavelli did not write about diplomacy directly—he may not have felt it to be among the most important tools of statecraft—but he was well versed in it. His public position required him to issue instructions to Florentine diplomats, and he undertook a number of diplomatic missions himself, both within Italy and later in France and Germany. His experience may well have contributed to his famously cynical approach to international relations.8
While Machiavelli elevated strength of arms over the cunning of diplomats, he recognized that dialogue was a necessary delaying tactic while states consolidated their strength. “What princes have to do at the outset of their careers,” he argued, “republics also must do until such time as they become powerful and rely on force alone.”9 Diplomacy was often essential to delay rather than avert war. “The Romans never had two very big wars going on at the same time,” he observed. Rather, after they selected their chief military target, they would work “industriously to foster tranquility” among their other neighbors until such time as they could be confident of a military victory.10
The basis of modern diplomacy is the inviolability of agreements, but Machiavelli had little patience for such notions of honor. “A prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests, and when the reason which made him bind himself no longer exists,” he wrote.11 Western diplomacy may have evolved far from the time of Machiavelli, but it would be naïve to assume that twenty-first-century rogues have followed the same path of development. Too often, Western engagement of rogue regimes is akin to a matchup between Machiavelli and Neville Chamberlain. In such circumstances, Chamberlain seldom wins.
Machiavelli may have de-emphasized diplomacy, but his friend Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), a Florentine ambassador, was more willing to engage with rival states. At the same time, Guicciardini understood that diplomacy gone sour could discredit the supporters of negotiation and invite conflict.12 This view was challenged in the seventeenth century, when Armand Jean du Plessis (1585–1642), the Cardinal and Duke of Richelieu, advocated continuous diplomacy and suggested that negotiation could “never do harm.”13 This philosophy was wrong then, just as it is now. There is a very real cost to engagement, and a tremendous cost to continuous negotiation—diplomacy for diplomacy’s sake. As Geoff Berridge, professor of international politics at the University of Leicester, and his colleagues observed in their compendium of diplomatic theory, constant engagement raises “the risk of being committed to bad agreement by corrupt, incompetent or simply exhausted ambassadors.”14
During Richelieu’s time, the Thirty Years’ War provided the Dutch diplomat Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) with a backdrop for reflection in Three Books on the Law of War and Peace. Grotius touched on the issue of diplomacy with rogue adversaries and countered the notion, embraced by some of his peers and by many twenty-first-century proponents of engagement, that every state should receive diplomats from every other state, regardless of how distasteful their governments may be. While Grotius argued against refusing ambassadors without cause, he suggested that legitimate cause could lie in the ambassador himself, the nation sending him, or the purpose for which he was sent. There was no reason, he believed, to conduct diplomacy with representatives of “wicked” states.15
Through the seventeenth century and the eighteenth, across Europe, principles of diplomatic immunity and proper etiquette took shape. Wars came to be shorter as power politics displaced religious imperative. Simultaneously, European-style diplomacy began to spread into Asia, as European missions became permanent features in Persia,