Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
More often, when the White House and Congress seek to look tough, they turn to sanctions. Jimmy Carter sanctioned the Soviet Union after the invasion of Afghanistan, Reagan sanctioned Poland after the imposition of martial law, George H. W. Bush sanctioned China after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, Clinton slapped sanctions on Iran because of the Islamic Republic’s support for terrorism, George W. Bush sanctioned Sudan because of Khartoum’s complicity in the Darfur genocide, and Obama sanctioned Syria and Zimbabwe on account of human rights violations.
Sanctions may be symbolically satisfying and wear down rogue regimes over time, but their effectiveness—in the near term, anyway—is questionable, and they are costly to ordinary people living under the targeted regime. Reagan opposed sanctions on South Africa at least in part because black South Africans would suffer more than whites. On the other hand, when Secretary Albright was confronted with reports of Iraqi suffering under sanctions, her response was, “We think the price is worth it.”15 While tales of starving Iraqi children had been greatly exaggerated, the statement was damaging nonetheless. Perception means more than reality on the international stage, and Albright’s words came to symbolize U.S. callousness. Public opinion turned against sanctions. Saddam Hussein may have been the true villain in Iraq, but it was the United States that the public condemned on the streets of London, Paris, and Berlin, as well as in the Arab Middle East. Policymakers then made narrow, targeted sanctions the economic tool of choice. But targeted sanctions elevate symbolism over effectiveness, and by avoiding discomfort they remove the potential for grassroots movements to change regime behavior. In any event, the business community often opposes sanctions, since less scrupulous Chinese, Russian, or French competitors do not hesitate to fill the gap when American companies step back.
Because of the problems inherent in other strategies, policymakers often conclude that their best option is to talk. That engagement must be a better strategy is a logical fallacy, however. Just because more coercive strategies have costs does not mean that less coercive strategies have fewer costs.
Diplomats make many arguments to advocate engaging rogues. The most basic argument is that it never hurts to talk. Within the State Department, there is a culture that treats engagement as cost-free. “We will be no worse off if we try diplomacy and fail,” said Nicholas Burns, formerly the under secretary for political affairs, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, throwing his support behind Obama’s outreach to Iran.16 Richard Armitage, who was his boss during George W. Bush’s first term, made a similar argument: “We ought to have enough confidence in our ability as diplomats to go eye to eye with people—even though we disagree in the strongest possible way—and come away without losing anything.”17
Officials often interpret a rogue’s willingness to talk as a sign that progress is possible. In 1999, for example, the State Department spokesman James B. Foley defended engagement with North Korea. “We don’t meet for the sake of meeting,” he said. “We believe that it is a positive sign that we and North Korea decide[d] to meet bilaterally, and we have such meetings because we believe progress can be achieved.”18 Joel S. Wit, a former State Department official and North Korea specialist, counseled the same approach early in the Obama administration. “Since Mr. Kim has said publicly that he is open to talks, the United States should do nothing to shut what may be a window of opportunity.”19 James Kelly, who led talks with North Korea for the Bush administration, argued that engagement provided the best hope. “Persistence, quiet resolve, and calmly working with allies and partners will serve U.S. interests better than loud speeches, threats or ineffective sanctions attempts,” he reasoned.20 Diplomats have likewise counseled unrestricted engagement toward Iran. “Diplomats should talk, even with our foes,” explained L. Bruce Laingen, the senior diplomat held hostage in Tehran after the Khomeini revolution. “That’s what we do. It doesn’t make sense for us not to talk.”21
Politicians also get involved in the game. Senator Arlen Specter was a vocal proponent of engaging rogue regimes, and he made flipping Syria his special goal. He never succeeded. After meeting one Syrian delegation in 2003, he admitted, “The only real agreement came on the utility of dialogue even in the absence of any agreement on any proposed solution.”22 But no matter: Specter saw the fact that the Syrians were talking at all as an achievement. The senator from Pennsylvania was no outlier in this regard; the belief that talk is useful as the alternative to isolation permeates American diplomacy. According to Charles Hunter, the top diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Damascus for much of 2010, “It is better to engage, discuss differences and try to overcome them, than to ignore or isolate.”23
Keeping the door open is not the only justification for engaging rogues. Prominent politicians saw engagement as an important component of national defense in the post–Cold War world order. “Diplomacy has become more important than ever as a vital front-line defense of American interests,” said Joe Biden, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in 1997.24 Engagement was seen as a way to avoid misunderstanding and prevent rogues from stumbling into conflict. In 2003, as evidence mounted that North Korea was cheating on its international commitments to curtail its nuclear weapons program, Biden declared, “Talking is not appeasement. It is the most effective way to tell North Korea what it must do if it wants normal relations with us. In fact, in dealing with an isolated regime and a closed-off leader, talking clearly and directly is critical if we want to avoid miscommunication and miscalculation.”25 Madeleine Albright echoed Biden’s view. “Talking is the way you deliver the message that you need to have received by the other side,” she told a Senate Democratic leadership news conference.26 Direct diplomacy can certainly facilitate communication, but the question for policymakers is whether it is possible to communicate positions toward rogue regimes without formally engaging them—for example, by means of a presidential speech.
Proponents of engagement also cite amelioration of rogue behavior as a benefit of engagement, even if talks ultimately lead nowhere. Negotiations can embroil adversaries in process. In the Middle East, much of the strategic logic of engagement with Palestinians in the 1990s was to entangle the PLO so tightly in a peace process that they would be unable to extricate themselves. Nicholas Burns adopted similar logic when he suggested that “negotiation may now be the most effective way to slow down Iran’s nuclear progress.”27 Leon Sigal, a former editorialist for the New York Times, suggested that dialogue with rogues was the best mechanism to manage their psychology. Reasoning that those states were “insecure,” he said that coercion and threats of force “may give them more of a reason” to seek nuclear arms.28
Henry Kissinger disagreed. Recalling Cold War talks with the Soviet Union, he observed, “When talks become their own objective, they are at the mercy of the party most prepared to break them off, or at least the party that is able to give that impression.”29 Still, Kissinger favored engagement with rogues under certain circumstances. He argued that continuing the nuclear stalemate with Iran, for example, “would amount to a de facto acquiescence by the international community in letting new entrants into the nuclear club.”30
If some diplomats use engagement as just a way to manage crisis, others believe that it offers real opportunity. In their study of the Arab-Israeli peace process, Daniel Kurtzer, a former ambassador to both Egypt and Israel, together with Scott Lasensky, a Middle East specialist recruited into the State Department during the Obama administration, argued that diplomats can take two general approaches to reconciling with enemies: They can wait for opportunities in which to seek peace, or they can use engagement to create opportunities.31 This was also Senator Chuck Hagel’s logic when he advocated more dialogue with Iran. “Engagement creates dialogue and opportunities to identify common interests,” he said.32 The State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley described the Obama administration’s Middle East peace strategy in similar terms:
We want to get this process started. Once we get into the process, we think that it has the potential to create a dynamic that will create some momentum. . . . We recognize that until you get into a process, it is almost impossible to make progress on these issues. So getting them started, beginning to address the specific issues at the heart of this effort, then we think that that dynamic—it will