Dancing with the Devil

The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes

Michael Rubin

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594037979
• eBook ISBN: 9781594037986
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The world has seldom been as dangerous as it is now. Rogue regimes—governments and groups that eschew diplomatic normality, sponsor terrorism, and proliferate nuclear weapons—threaten the United States around the globe. Because sanctions and military action are so costly, the American strategy of first resort is dialogue, on the theory that "it never hurts to talk to enemies.” Seldom is conventional wisdom so wrong.Engagement with rogue regimes is not cost-free, as Michael Rubin demonstrates by tracing the history of American diplomacy with North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, the Taliban’s Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Further challenges to traditional diplomacy have come from terrorist groups, such as the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s, or Hamas and Hezbollah in the last two decades. The argument in favor of negotiation with terrorists is suffused with moral equivalence, the idea that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Rarely does the actual record of talking to terrorists come under serious examination.While soldiers spend weeks developing lessons learned after every exercise, diplomats generally do not reflect on why their strategy toward rogues has failed, or consider whether their basic assumptions have been faulty. Rubin’s analysis finds that rogue regimes all have one thing in common: they pretend to be aggrieved in order to put Western diplomats on the defensive. Whether in Pyongyang, Tehran, or Islamabad, rogue leaders understand that the West rewards bluster with incentives and that the U.S. State Department too often values process more than results.

Chapter One

FROM MACHIAVELLI TO MUAMMAR

Diplomacy, like war, spans cultures and centuries. Its origins are shrouded in time. “There came a stage when the anthropoid apes inhabiting one group of caves realized that it might be profitable to reach some understanding with neighboring groups regarding the limits of their respective hunting territories,” the British diplomat Harold Nicolson speculated.¹

Both Babylonian and Pharaonic documents reveal regular exchanges of envoys with neighboring kingdoms.² The Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (544–496 BC) did not speak directly of diplomacy in The Art of War, but he suggested, “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”³ Around the same time, Greek city-states exchanged ambassadors and negotiated truces, although embassies were weak, as Demosthenes noted: “Ambassadors have no battleships at their disposal, or heavy infantry, or fortresses.” The Athenian orator and statesman went on to describe the disadvantage that democracies suffer in diplomacy: they seldom react as quickly as a dictatorship does.⁴ Perhaps this is why the Romans preferred to conquer and impose their will, resorting to diplomacy only in order to subjugate others without the trouble of war, or to quiet frontiers while fighting elsewhere.⁵

Notions of diplomacy evolved separately in different cultures. Not every civilization shares Western assumptions about the use and value of diplomacy. In the eleventh century, the Persian vizier Nizam al-Mulk (1018–1092) described diplomacy as a cover for other activities in the Siyasatnameh (The Book of Government), a seminal text meant to be a manual for kings. “When kings send ambassadors to one another, their purpose is not merely the message or the letter which they communicate openly, but secretly they have a hundred other points and objects in view,” the vizier wrote.⁶ To this day, altruism and conflict resolution have little place in Persian notions of diplomacy. Before he was taken hostage in 1979, the American chargé d’affaires Bruce Laingen explained how Iranians negotiate. “Perhaps the single dominant aspect of the Persian psyche is an overriding egoism,” he wrote, adding, “One should never assume that his side of the issue will be recognized, let alone that it will be conceded to have merits.”⁷

Like Nizam al-Mulk, the Florentine statesman and writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) maintained a skeptical view of negotiation. It was during his life that the Italian peninsula’s various republics began to station resident ambassadors in rival states. Machiavelli did not write about diplomacy directly—he may not have felt it to be among the most important tools of statecraft—but he was well versed in it. His public position required him to issue instructions to Florentine diplomats, and he undertook a number of diplomatic missions himself, both within Italy and later in France and Germany. His experience may well have contributed to his famously cynical approach to international relations.⁸

While Machiavelli elevated strength of arms over the cunning of diplomats, he recognized that dialogue was a necessary delaying tactic while states consolidated their strength. “What princes have to do at the outset of their careers,” he argued, “republics also must do until such time as they become powerful and rely on force alone.”⁹ Diplomacy was often essential to delay rather than avert war. “The Romans never had two very big wars going on at the same time,” he observed. Rather, after they selected their chief military target, they would work “industriously to foster tranquility” among their other neighbors until such time as they could be confident of a military victory.¹⁰

The basis of modern diplomacy is the inviolability of agreements, but Machiavelli had little patience for such notions of honor. “A prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests, and when the reason which made him bind himself no longer exists,” he wrote.¹¹ Western diplomacy may have evolved far from the time of Machiavelli, but it would be naïve to assume that twenty-first-century rogues have followed the same path of development. Too often, Western engagement of rogue regimes is akin to a matchup between Machiavelli and Neville Chamberlain. In such circumstances, Chamberlain seldom wins.

Machiavelli may have de-emphasized diplomacy, but his friend Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), a Florentine ambassador, was more willing to engage with rival states. At the same time, Guicciardini understood that diplomacy gone sour could discredit the supporters of negotiation and invite conflict.¹² This view was challenged in the seventeenth century, when Armand Jean du Plessis (1585–1642), the Cardinal and Duke of Richelieu, advocated continuous diplomacy and suggested that negotiation could “never do harm.”¹³ This philosophy was wrong then, just as it is now. There is a very real cost to engagement, and a tremendous cost to continuous negotiation—diplomacy for diplomacy’s sake. As Geoff Berridge, professor of international politics at the University of Leicester, and his colleagues observed in their compendium of diplomatic theory, constant engagement raises “the risk of being committed to bad agreement by corrupt, incompetent or simply exhausted ambassadors.”¹⁴

During Richelieu’s time, the Thirty Years’ War provided the Dutch diplomat Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) with a backdrop for reflection in Three Books on the Law of War and Peace. Grotius touched on the issue of diplomacy with rogue adversaries and countered the notion, embraced by some of his peers and by many twenty-first-century proponents of engagement, that every state should receive diplomats from every other state, regardless of how distasteful their governments may be. While Grotius argued against refusing ambassadors without cause, he suggested that legitimate cause could lie in the ambassador himself, the nation sending him, or the purpose for which he was sent. There was no reason, he believed, to conduct diplomacy with representatives of “wicked” states.¹⁵

Through the seventeenth century and the eighteenth, across Europe, principles of diplomatic immunity and proper etiquette took shape. Wars came to be shorter as power politics displaced religious imperative. Simultaneously, European-style diplomacy began to spread into Asia, as European missions became permanent features in Persia, China, and Japan. Western states, however, did not see their diplomacy in Asia and Africa as being practiced among equals. 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 m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Introduction: Pariahs to Partners: Bringing Rogues to the Table
• Chapter 1: From Machiavelli to Muammar
• Chapter 2: Great Satan vs. Mad Mullahs
• Chapter 3: Team America and the Hermit Kingdom
• Chapter 4: Lying Down with Libyans
• Chapter 5: Tea with the Taliban
• Chapter 6: Double Dealing in the Land of the Pure
• Chapter 7: Sitting with Saddam
• Chapter 8: Hijackers into Peacemakers
• Chapter 9: Is It Time to Talk to Terrorists?
• Chapter 10: Playing Poker with Pariahs
• Chapter 11: Corrupting Intelligence or Corrupted Intelligence?
• Chapter 12: Blessed Are the Peacemakers?
• Conclusion: Is Talking the Shortest Path to War?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index