The Wall Street Journal-20080214-Obama as Diplomat in Chief
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Obama as Diplomat in Chief
Full Text (1283 words)A central element of Barack Obama's plan to change American foreign policy is his intention, upon becoming president, to meet with foreign leaders of extremist regimes -- the type of rogue-state dictators that George W. Bush has generally shunned during his time as president.
Applied categorically, this would be a bad idea. Meeting with enemy heads of state is neither as original as Mr. Obama implies, nor as promising as he claims. As a specific option for dealing with difficult regimes, it has potential merit on a case-by-case basis, and should always be considered -- but only after a careful assessment of what the United States believes it can get out of such meetings and dialogues.
The would-be Obama doctrine has understandable roots. Upon becoming president, George W. Bush ended American efforts to promote a peace process in the Middle East, and Israeli-Palestinian violence worsened. He turned a cold shoulder to Kim Jong Il and North Korea wound up with perhaps eight more nuclear bombs. His administration successfully worked out a modus vivendi with Iran at the Bonn conference on Afghanistan in 2001, but Mr. Bush's subsequent "Axis of Evil" speech, pre-emption doctrine, and termination of contact with leadership in Tehran led to a deterioration in relations that has haunted us in Iraq and that worsened when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office in 2005.
However, just because Mr. Bush went too far in one direction does not mean these situations would be rectified by going to the other extreme. U.S. negotiations with difficult regimes may sometimes be catalyzed by presidential engagement, but they only tend to work when we are in a commanding negotiating position or when we are prepared to make trades with foreign leaders that serve their interests as well as ours. Implying otherwise risks being labeled as naive in the fall elections, with Democrats sounding like they believe ruthless dictators would behave better if only we took the time to try to understand them.
In fact, the U.S. has a long history of talking to unsavory extremist leaders. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Franklin Roosevelt, for example, talked often with Joseph Stalin during World War II. That helped in the allies' coordination of military activities, but this contact did nothing to mitigate the brutality and ruthlessness of Soviet expansionism in the aftermath of the war. U.S.- Soviet summitry achieved modest results during the 1960s and 1970s on specific issues like arms control, but big breakthroughs did not occur until the reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow and wanted a fundamentally new relationship.
American support for dictators -- from Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire to the Shah of Iran to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to various Latin American strongmen during the Cold War -- only occasionally improved the situation. Donald Rumsfeld's 1983 trip to Baghdad as a special presidential envoy did nothing to change the core character of Saddam Hussein.
In a more successful example of talking with the enemy, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon achieved the famous opening to China during the 1970s. But realpolitik, not personal chemistry, was the key to understanding their success. The U.S. and China had a common interest in checking the Soviet threat; Nixon and Mao Zedong would never have reached an entente without it.
Former President Jimmy Carter's 1994 trip to see ailing North Korean leader Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang helped resolve the nuclear crisis of the day and produce the so-called Agreed Framework. But these carrots produced a viable outcome only when combined with then Secretary of Defense Bill Perry's public threats that North Korea would not be allowed a nuclear arsenal. Furthermore, we now know that even as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright did Kim Jong Il the favor of a high-level official visit in 1999, North Korea continued to work on a new underground uranium enrichment project.
More recently, Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill's interim progress in convincing North Korea to dismantle its nuclear capabilities has resulted from a more flexible U.S. attitude -- combined with tougher Chinese and South Korean policies toward North Korea after its 2006 nuclear test -- not from presidential summitry. Direct bilateral contact has been a necessary precondition to progress with the North Koreans, to be sure. But high -level engagement has not been the chief explanatory variable for predicting success or lack thereof.
After Moammar Gadhafi sponsored several airplane bombings in the 1980s, the international community imposed sanctions on Libya, which bit increasingly hard over the years and ultimately led to a dramatic reduction in Tripoli's support for terrorism. Quiet, low-level talks in the late-1990s and early years of this decade then resulted in the 2003 denuclearization deal, paving the way for Libya's abandonment of its nuclear capabilities and its re-entry into the international community. It was the sanctions of the 1990s, and then the incentives offered to Libya by the Bush administration this decade, that led to the breakthroughs. No American president had to sip tea with Mr. Gadhafi under a tent in the Arabian desert to get the deal.
By contrast, when the Clinton administration treated Yasser Arafat as a full-fledged negotiating partner in a peace process leading up to the Wye Plantation talks in 2000, we were ultimately left at the altar. Not only did Bill Clinton give the Palestinian leader the honor of personal meetings, he rolled up his sleeves and invested countless hours in the common pursuit of a deal both Arafat and the Israelis could support. By almost all accounts, the resulting framework was fair and serious, and accompanied by all the pomp and prestige of the American president's constant engagement. Arafat refused it anyway.
A nice dual test of the theory that talking to extremist leaders can soften their behavior comes from how we have handled President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and President Vladimir Putin in Russia this decade. In the first case, we played the usual game of trading insults and giving cold shoulders, and got nowhere -- seemingly validating Sen. Obama's argument. In the other case, our president looked into the foreign leader's eyes, saw a soul he thought he could work with, engaged in Texas ranch diplomacy and other such direct consultations, and was sorely disappointed by the trajectory of the relationship nonetheless. If the Bush administration failed on this one, it was not for Mr. Bush's lack of willingness to talk.
Perhaps an even better test is the post-9/11 U.S. relationship with Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. Few would call our bilateral contacts successful. But after multiple summits in Washington and Islamabad involving presidents, top military leaders, and American cabinet officials, a lack of high-level engagement is hardly to blame for the poor results.
Mr. Obama is not wrong about the utility of negotiations with unsavory regimes. They are often useful, and they need not amount to appeasement or even a false raising of hopes. If handled carefully, they can be done in a manner that minimizes the prestige accorded a foreign leader we do not wish to risk strengthening. But such high- level contact is not a new tool of American foreign policy, nor does it guarantee success.
If elevated to a doctrine, reliance on presidential-level diplomacy is a mistake. It risks rewarding foreign leaders who cause the most trouble, creating perverse incentives for those desiring the attention of the U.S. It also can confuse us about the nature of diplomacy. Foreign leaders, nice or not, make deals based on assessments of their interests, and any new diplomatic doctrine that fails to recognize as much would ignore centuries of history and potentially damage American security.
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Mr. O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
