Engage your Enemies

By Samantha Power

John McCain and President Bush have double-teamed Barack Obama (whom I formerly advised), attacking his willingness to talk to adversaries like Cuba, Iran and Syria. Bush has invoked the "false comfort of appeasement," while McCain has said Obama's approach is "naive" and "shows a lack of experience." McCain is generally seen as a centrist Republican, but in this attack he appears to have embraced the view of a minority contingent of militant conservatives who over the past 60 years have howled virtually every time a President has taken the risky step of engaging hostile states.

The anti-engagers denounced Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy for engaging Nikita Khrushchev over disarmament. They yanked their support for Richard Nixon after he opened up talks with China. They even slammed the hallowed Ronald Reagan for negotiating with Mikhail Gorbachev. Thankfully, U.S. Presidents have generally had the good sense to assess each potential diplomatic foray on the basis of whether it might make Americans more secure. If the foot-stomping conservatives had been heeded at these critical junctures, they would have prevented negotiations that reduced tension, enhanced cooperation and may have prevented bloodshed.

While most Americans hail these summits and now decry the invasion of Iraq (a case study in what happens when the militant conservatives get their way), the anti-engagers proceed as though history has not happened. Their selective memory of Reagan's foreign policy is telling. They correctly recall Reagan's having denounced the Soviets as "evil," his vast increases in U.S. defense spending and his support for a missile-defense shield. What they conveniently block out is the turn Reagan took in 1983 toward negotiation, which played a key role in bringing about the end of the cold war. When Reagan decided to stop denouncing the "evil empire" and start pursuing arms talks, those who today mock Obama then derided their former hero. In an effort to scuttle the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty in Congress, the Conservative Caucus took out a newspaper advertisement likening Reagan's position to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's dealings with Hitler. "Appeasement is as unwise in 1988 as in 1938," the ad said.

Yet instead of caricaturing diplomacy by invoking the Munich Agreement as code for spinelessness, it is worth studying Chamberlain's failed effort in the Munich talks for lessons in how not to negotiate. He was unprepared, unsophisticated and ultimately unsuccessful in preventing World War II. Having never before boarded an international flight, he flew three times to Germany in 1938, appearing to play supplicant to a violent dictator. Chamberlain sidelined professional diplomats and neglected even to bring his own interpreter, relying instead on Hitler's. Chamberlain's desire to be the man to save Europe blinded him to the impossibility of brokering "peace in our time" with a man of Hitler's savage aims. He assured himself that Hitler could be trusted. According to British Cabinet minutes, Chamberlain argued that the German leader "would not deliberately deceive a man whom he respected and with whom he had been in negotiation."

Chamberlain also violated Part I of President Kennedy's golden rule: "We should never negotiate out of fear, but we should never fear to negotiate." Terrified by intelligence reports that exaggerated the reach of the German Luftwaffe, Chamberlain agreed to hand over 3 million Sudeten Germans, even though doing so was more likely to embolden Hitler than placate him. But while Munich was a sellout that showed Hitler how reluctant Britain was to return to war, it was not the cause of World War II any more than the breakdown in talks with Iran could be said to be the cause of Tehran's intensification of its uranium enrichment. The same people who rightly charge Chamberlain with underestimating Hitler seem to believe (naively) that a British threat of war would have rid the dictator of his desire to bring German minorities under one roof and wipe out European Jewry.

No U.S. President can afford to hold talks for talks' sake or rely exclusively on diplomacy in foreign policy. Anyone who invests the prestige of his office in a summit must know precisely why he is in the room and must anticipate--and guard against--harmful unintended consequences. But in a nuclear world where the U.S. cannot stamp out all threats militarily, our leaders should begin a pragmatic debate about when, how and for what to engage rather than reduce America's options to a false choice between appeasement and war.