Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
European states were powerful, and when European diplomats grew frustrated with the slow pace or the direction of talk, they would combine diplomacy with military coercion. The era of gunboat diplomacy was born. Indeed, while the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) suggested that “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means,” war in the nineteenth century had become inseparable from diplomacy as the West approached the East.
Sir Ernest Satow (1843–1929), a British diplomat posted to Japan in the mid-nineteenth century, saw an advantage in gunboat diplomacy, saying: “Questions were settled promptly that, without the application of pressure on the spot, have a tendency to drag on for months and years.” Still, he viewed this approach to diplomacy as “liable to abuse.”16 Impatient diplomats might call in the gunboats prematurely. Certainly, nineteenth-century gunboats, much like twenty-first-century drones, left resentment that simmered for decades.
Secret agreements and alliances were also a characteristic of diplomacy up until World War I, when the unprecedented carnage provoked popular anger at traditional diplomatic norms. Europeans and Americans alike applauded President Woodrow Wilson’s call for “open covenants of peace openly arrived at.”17 Around the same time, advances in communications—first the telegraph and soon afterward the telephone and radio—diluted the autonomy of diplomats and returned power to the rulers they represented. Finally, the airplane enabled summitry.18
Wilsonian ideals were embraced by the young British diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson (1886–1968). With the rise of democracy, he argued, professional diplomats must be responsive to the will of elected officials.19 Hence, in the United States, the Senate ratifies ambassadors. While Nicolson’s observation might seem rational, the rogue dynamic breaks down its logic. Groups like the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Taliban derive their authority from a willingness to use violence. When Western diplomats engage these rogues, they conduct diplomacy with agents who are not always representative of the people who inhabit the territories in question. For example, Western diplomats engaging the PLO after the outbreak of the first intifada bypassed local authority and empowered a more radical and recalcitrant terrorist organization. Likewise, a willingness to engage the Taliban disenfranchised more numerous but less violent factions within Afghanistan’s Pashtun population.
Henry Kissinger—perhaps the most famous diplomat of the Cold War era, serving under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—believed that the behavior of states had a historical basis.20 He argued that the twentieth century inaugurated a new kind of world system, one built upon nation-states rather than empires. “None of the most important countries which must build a new world order have had any experience with the multistate system that is emerging,” he noted. “Never before has a new world order had to be assembled from so many different perceptions, or on so global a scale.”21 Kissinger warned that “History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes” for how states should interact. “No academic discipline can take from our shoulders the burden of difficult choices.”22 Too often, diplomats who engage rogues have believed they could follow a formula, and have projected their own sense of history onto their opponents. This is a recipe for disaster.
The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, ratified by 189 different countries, codified the privileges and rights of diplomats and embassies. Diplomats won immunity and embassies became inviolate. Not every country has signed the Vienna Convention, however. States that lack full recognition are not signatories. Nor are groups fighting for statehood or some other ideological concern. Even countries that are signatories often contravene the convention. The seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by Iranian revolutionaries certainly violated both its letter and its spirit. So does the terrorist targeting of an enemy’s diplomats. There is no shortage of rogue actors.
Changing Attitudes on Engaging Rogues
While diplomacy has evolved over time, so too have attitudes toward engagement with rogue regimes. The twentieth century was marked by great evil, with two world wars and the rise of totalitarian regimes causing tens of millions of deaths. Since World War II, it has become a cliché to cite the experience of engaging Adolf Hitler in discussions of diplomacy with rogue regimes.
Comparisons between Hitler and today’s rogues may seem cheap, but the prologue to World War II nevertheless demonstrates both the promise and the perils of diplomacy. Germans resented the burdens placed upon them by the Treaty of Versailles. After Hitler violated the disarmament provisions of the treaty in 1935, the British foreign secretary John Simon rushed to Berlin, where the two hammered out a new agreement to limit naval forces. Hitler called the signing ceremony “the happiest day of my life.”23 The reason became clear in hindsight: Britain’s eagerness to negotiate convinced him that he could act with impunity. Indeed, British appeasement had become the rule rather than the exception. When Benito Mussolini declared his intention to conquer Abyssinia, the new British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, suggested that Mussolini might satiate his imperial ambition with Ogaden only. To sweeten the loss of Abyssinia’s southeastern region, Eden would offer the Ethiopian emperor a slice of British Somaliland. Appeasement failed, however. Eden’s willingness to compromise on Ogaden convinced Mussolini that he would suffer no serious consequence from fulfilling his ambition.
Of course, the most famous example of failed engagement is Chamberlain’s attempt to strike a deal with Hitler. Seeking to avert war, Chamberlain agreed to allow Germany to annex the Sudetenland in exchange for peace. Neither Berlin nor London paid any heed to the Czech government’s objections. Returning to London, Chamberlain declared that the agreement represented “peace in our time.” Six months later, German troops occupied Prague. Less than six months after that, the Nazis invaded Poland, initiating the bloodiest war in history.
To this day, opponents of engagement pillory statesmen and diplomats with analogies to Chamberlain.24 After the Iraq Study Group led by James Baker, the former secretary of state, urged engagement with Iran, the Hollywood producer and political activist David Zucker lampooned Baker as a latter-day Chamberlain, a charge which newspapers and magazines repeated.25
In the view of Paul Kennedy, a historian at Yale, this treatment of Chamberlain is unfair. “When do you know that these dictators’ appetites are never going to be fully sated by compromises within the existing international system?” he asked. History, after all, is replete with examples of successful compromise. Kennedy gives several, including London’s settlement of the disputed Canadian border to buy peace with Washington. The deal sacrificed land that may rightfully have been British, but it also freed the British military to focus on problems in Asia and the Middle East.26 The problem with Kennedy’s analysis, however, is that it conflates rivals and rogues. British officials may not have believed Washington’s positions to be correct or just, but they understood that American officials would abide by the terms of agreements once reached.
The willingness to negotiate and keep deals, even when they are not advantageous, was a major component of British strategy. Perhaps this was one reason why Winston Churchill, speaking at a White House luncheon on June 26, 1954, famously quipped, “It is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.” And, indeed, no matter how tense the rivalry between Cold War adversaries grew, engagement never ceased. Baker cited President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s engagement with Josef Stalin during World War II in disputing the claim that dialogue with enemies amounts to appeasement. “Talking to hostile states . . . is not appeasement,” he said. “It is good foreign policy.” Baker reasoned, “In a perfect world, we’d only work with Democracies, but the German threat justified” dealing with Stalin.27 Roosevelt’s acquiescence to Soviet designs over Eastern Europe at Yalta was appeasement, however, and a mistake that no subsequent U.S. president—not even Jimmy Carter—would replicate.
In July 1955, four heads of state—President Dwight D. Eisenhower; the Soviet premier, Nikolai Bulganin; the British prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden; and the French prime minister, Edgar Faure—met at their first postwar summit. The press spoke of “the spirit of Geneva.” Popular enthusiasm for engagement, however, did not equate to progress. Soviet troops crushed Hungarian freedom seekers the following year, and Khrushchev threatened to use nuclear weapons against Britain