Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
the American and the European approach to diplomacy with rogue regimes and terrorists. As the Economist noted in 1982, “When Americans are nervous, they tend to get pugnacious. . . . They prefer strength to subtlety. When Europeans are nervous, they slide toward caution and call for patience and compromise.”38 A poll the following year found that 70 percent of the British public lacked any confidence in Reagan’s judgment on diplomatic issues.39 Vice President George H. W. Bush brushed off such skepticism when he visited Europe in February 1983. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The United States is the leader of the free world and under this Administration, we are beginning once again to act like it.”40
Likewise, European and American attitudes often differ with regard to engaging terrorist groups. American administrations of both parties tend to espouse American exceptionalism and embrace moral clarity. In Years of Upheaval, Kissinger ridiculed the notion of talking with terrorists. “We did not have a high incentive to advance the ‘dialogue’ with the PLO, as the fashionable phrase ran later,” he wrote, “not because of Israeli pressures but because of our perception of the American national interest.”41 Europeans take a more pragmatic approach. While American governments refuse to negotiate with terrorists to release hostages, for example, European governments often do it with a wink and a nod.
Why should the United States and Europe approach diplomacy with terrorists and rogue regimes so differently? History is one reason. The United States may have been party to the twentieth century’s great conflicts, but Europe was the battlefield. Americans in the United States sacrificed material comfort, but Europeans sacrificed their cities, farms, and homes. Another historical factor is Europe’s imperial ventures, which left a moral equivalence in their wake. In 1975, the British journalist Gerald Seymour coined the phrase “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” in his novel Harry’s Game, set during the height of the British conflict with the Irish Republican Army.
Geography is also a key. During the Cold War, while the threat of Soviet missiles hung over every American and European city, only the European populace faced the threat of Soviet tanks, artillery, and short-range missiles. It was Europe that was America’s strategic depth; the relationship was not reciprocal. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet threat may have evaporated, but Europe’s geographic challenge did not. Even in a globalized age, the Atlantic Ocean insulates the United States from chaos in the Middle East and Africa. Any instability let alone war in Libya could send tens of thousands of migrants across the Mediterranean into Europe.
Geography heightens the security threat to Europe. During the Cold War, it was far easier for Soviet-sponsored terrorist groups to operate in Europe than in the United States. Indeed, while Americans faced sporadic attacks by Puerto Rican nationalists, the Baader-Meinhof Gang terrorized Germany and the Red Brigades agitated Italy. At the height of the Palestinian terrorist campaign, the PLO and associated groups targeted airports in Italy and Austria; they hijacked or blew up planes from Great Britain, Switzerland, and France. In the first decade after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, revolutionary assassins killed eleven dissidents on French soil, sometimes hitting French citizens in the crossfire. Muammar Qadhafi retaliated against the 1986 U.S. attack on Libya by firing missiles at the Italian island of Lampedusa. Simply put, when the White House chooses violence, it is often Europe that must pick up the pieces.
Even so, the sharpest differences between European and American attitudes often boil down to trade. Many rogue regimes lie close to the European continent. Whether because of energy or exports or the fear of instability unleashing waves of refugees, European statesmen are loath to pursue any policy that could negatively affect their treasury, regardless of security costs down the road. The reason for this priority is that the U.S. taxpayer and U.S. military subsidized European defense throughout the twentieth century. Except for the British and the French, European taxpayers contributed little to the nuclear missiles, aircraft carrier battle groups, and submarines that preserved European freedom in the face of Soviet ambitions. The European public and diplomats are unaccustomed to the true cost of defense and do not understand that security’s price must sometimes be paid proactively. Hence, European governments often resist imposing economic sanctions, whereas American policymakers—whether Democrat or Republican—see them as a valuable and nonviolent way to coerce rogue regimes. As of 1999, the United States had sanctioned thirty-three countries unilaterally.42 European countries are much less likely to apply sanctions without UN direction, either on moral grounds or to penalize rogue behavior.43
The passage of the Helms-Burton Act in 1996 highlighted the clash between Washington and European capitals. The law extended U.S. sanctions on Cuba to foreign companies—including, of course, European companies—that traded with the communist state, and also sharpened penalties when those firms trafficked in property confiscated by Cuban authorities from U.S. citizens.
European and American public attitudes reflect the different approaches of their governments with regard to multilateralism and the application of sanctions on rogue regimes. A 1998 German Marshall Fund poll found that only 21 percent of Americans surveyed would make sanctions on Libya or Iran conditional on European participation, while 75 percent supported unilateral sanctions.44 Sixty-one percent of Americans polled also agreed that talk with autocratic leaders should be coupled with more punitive measures.45 Less than half of the British and French surveyed agreed with the concept of sanctions on principle, although slightly more than 56 percent of Germans supported sanctions. When the target of sanctions was Iran, support for sanctions among citizens of the three European powerhouses was even lower.46
It was largely in reaction to the more punitive U.S. approach to rogue regimes that Europeans promoted the concept of “critical dialogue” and “critical engagement.” Previously, European governments would informally say they were involved in diplomatic engagement if they had more than one meeting with an adversary, even if there were no regular, institutionalized contacts. In the 1990s, however, the European Union began to consider itself engaged in a dialogue only with the fulfillment of three conditions: First, EU ministers or political committees had to decide formally to engage. Second, so did the other side. Third, the dialogue had to be conducted regularly.47
The European Union had multiple motives to engage in dialogue with rogues. Dialogues became a convenient mechanism by which outside countries could attain more structured relations with the EU.48 Dialogues are easy to start; by 1997, the European Union was engaged in over a hundred regular dialogues.49 This proliferation arguably diluted their importance. Once started, engagements became self-perpetuating, with careers and whole bureaucracies growing around dialogue. Amidst the moral outrage of Beijing’s crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, European officials froze their dialogue with China, but it was not long before they resumed it.
Because of the European enthusiasm to engage, European officials have reached out to those whom their U.S. counterparts have considered beyond rapprochement. In the early 1990s, Europeans facilitated back-channel exchanges between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah, and also reached out to the Colombian president Ernesto Samper, whom the Clinton administration avoided because of his relationship with drug lords.
Europe’s largest critical engagement project revolved around Iran.50 Many European officials may have been sincere in their hope that they could encourage reform in Iran through dialogue and provide Tehran with economic incentives to bring its policies into conformity with the international community. Trade was a prominent concern, however. German officials especially hoped to protect an extensive trade relationship with Iran. From a strictly fiscal standpoint, sanctions can be self-defeating. When the European Union briefly worked to isolate Tehran after a German court concluded that senior Iranian officials were complicit in an assassination in Berlin, the Kremlin sought to profit. “We have good, positive cooperation with Iran, which shows a tendency to grow,” said President Boris Yeltsin. The Speaker of the Russian parliament, Gennadi Seleznyov, declared, “There is no court in the world which has the authority to pass sentence on a whole nation.”51
Many European leaders put a premium on the act of talking and refuse to acknowledge the symbolism of dialogue. On June 1, 2010, a year after the fraudulent election in Iran, accompanied by the worst unrest in thirty