Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
press, but they approached public diplomacy and engagement as tools to pursue alongside espionage, sabotage, and military coercion. This might be why John F. Kennedy, then a congressman from Massachusetts, remarked, “The barbarian may have taken the knife out of his teeth to smile, but the knife is still in his fist.”29
Twelve years later, when President Lyndon Johnson met Alexei Kosygin, Khrushchev’s successor, in Glassboro, New Jersey, the Western press was quick to evoke “the spirit of Glassboro.”30 Again, diplomacy’s promise proved illusory. Little more than a year later, Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring and North Vietnam launched its Tet Offensive.31
Reaching out to enemies is not always for naught. The Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Israel symbolizes the power of diplomacy to bridge enmity and to solve seemingly intractable disputes peacefully. It was a bold move, but it must be understood in context: Sadat sought engagement only after trying war. Only after he failed to destroy Israel by military means did he seek to achieve more limited aims through dialogue.
An enthusiastic press extolled the romance of dialogue with enemies. Averting war is a noble aim, and diplomatic careers are made by breaking through barriers. President Nixon’s trip to China is as much his legacy as Watergate. President Reagan’s diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev figures large in his presidency. Following a summit with the Soviet premier in 1985, Reagan told Congress, “We agreed on a number of matters. We agreed to continue meeting. There’s always room for movement, action, and progress when people are talking to each other instead of about each other.”32 Although the summit produced nothing concrete, it helped forge a relationship between the two men that proved pivotal in ending the Cold War.
Too often, however, proponents of engagement decontextualize triumphs such as Nixon’s or Reagan’s. As Kissinger explained, “Only extraordinary concern about Soviet purposes could explain the Chinese wish to sit down with the nation heretofore vilified as the archenemy.”33 Reagan pursued engagement—sometimes against the advice of trusted advisors—but he worked hard to set the right circumstances. Had it not been for a multiyear and multibillion-dollar arms buildup and the willingness to use force against Soviet proxies in Grenada, Angola, Nicaragua, and elsewhere, he could not have achieved a position of strength to enable diplomacy to succeed.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in a period of unprecedented optimism. Ascending the podium at the United Nations, Mikhail Gorbachev declared, “We must look for ways to improve the international situation and build a new world, and we must do it together.”34 The political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously announced “the end of history.” Rogue regimes soon spoiled the party, however. While democracy swept away the former communist regimes of Eastern Europe, North Korea stubbornly refused to get the message, but instead escalated its saber rattling and accelerated its drive to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait reminded the world that Middle Eastern rogues were alive and well. Iran continued putting on weekly “Death to America” rallies. Rather than end Palestinian-Israeli violence, the Oslo Accords arguably worsened it. The Soviet Union might have exited stage left, but the curtain did not come down; instead, rogue regimes took center stage.
Both engagement and containment became strategies of choice. The Clinton administration embraced a policy of “dual containment” against Iraq and Iran, and it embargoed Libya, but meanwhile engaged the Palestine Liberation Organization, North Korea, and even the Taliban.
George W. Bush campaigned largely on domestic issues; he attacked Clinton’s entanglements in Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo, and spoke scornfully of nation-building initiatives. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington forced a paradigm shift. For the first time since 1812, a foreign enemy had struck the American mainland. The 2002 National Security Strategy encapsulated the paradigm shift, fleshing out a concept not only of deterrence but also of preemption against rogue regimes and terrorist groups.
Congress and the American people united around military intervention in Afghanistan, but the Bush administration’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq was far more polarizing. Although Bush entered Iraq with bipartisan support, the war turned into a political football. Critics attacked Bush’s position on Iraq and his national security doctrine more broadly. The multibillion-dollar Iraq War demonstrated the cost in blood and treasure of abandoning engagement, even when it came to a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein. Whereas Bush’s policies toward rogue regimes mirrored those of his predecessors, they soon became the subject of fierce debate, particularly in the run-up to the 2008 election. On July 23, 2007, the broadcast journalist Anderson Cooper asked Senator Obama whether he would agree to meet the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea in his first year as president. Obama responded affirmatively, saying, “The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them . . . is ridiculous.”35
Obama wasted no time in making engagement the central pillar of his foreign policy. “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history,” he declared in his inaugural address, but, he added, “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”
Scholars applauded Obama’s approach. Professor Charles Kupchan of Georgetown University argued that engagement, often coupled with concession, was the best way to reconcile with adversaries. “Obama is on the right track in reaching out to adversaries. Long-standing rivalries tend to thaw as a result of mutual accommodation, not coercive intimidation.” While Kupchan recognized that the United States might still need to isolate some “recalcitrant regimes” that refused to engage, he was optimistic. “Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Myanmar have all demonstrated a least a modicum of interest in engagement with the United States.”36
Kupchan, however, made a common mistake: Interest in engagement does not necessarily correlate to interest in reform, especially when the incentives gained and time wasted in diplomacy are the rogue regime’s only goals. Negotiation has resolved past rivalry, but rogue regimes are not simply adversarial governments. In 1966, diplomacy may have helped Malaysia and Indonesia step back from the brink of war, but both had responsible governments that embraced diplomacy as a mechanism of conflict resolution. Conflict between North and South Korea, or for that matter the United States and the Taliban, continues not because of an absence of engagement, but rather because neither Kim Jong Un nor Mullah Omar has demonstrated a willingness to abide by the norms of international diplomacy.
Obama may have breathed new life into diplomacy with rogue regimes, but he did not end the debate about the wisdom of such a strategy, either in the United States or in Europe.
America vs. Europe
Through much of the twentieth century, partisan debates seldom shook the foundations of U.S. foreign policy, but disagreements as to diplomatic strategy often strained American relations with European allies.
American isolationism may have led to pitched battles over U.S. involvement in war, but after the sinking of the Lusitania and after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, politicians united behind the president. During the Cold War, the necessity of countering Soviet designs was a bipartisan assumption. When politicians did treat national security as a political football, such as during the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate, it was more often to demonstrate hawkishness than to express fundamental disagreement. While conservatives lambast Jimmy Carter and liberals pillory Ronald Reagan, the two administrations maintained a common position against Soviet expansion, in favor of a strong alliance with Israel, and suspicious of Chinese intentions.
Carter may have embraced diplomacy with rogues, yet he understood that the Soviet Union had “little intrinsic interest in restraint.” Western Europeans were not so certain, however. “Most European governments have the far more modest expectation that a shrewd, businesslike political and economic relationship will bolster the position of those in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who stress the need for economic modernization over military expansion,” explained Peter Langer, a research associate at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. “By treating the Kremlin as a negotiating partner, this approach will give Soviet leaders a stake in long-term détente.”37
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