In the End, Every President Talks to the Bad Guys

You just can; it's done all the time. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman knew well about the sins of the Soviet Union, but they cooperated with the monstrous Joseph Stalin against an even bigger monster, Adolf Hitler. (Winston Churchill was similarly unsentimental: "If Hitler invaded Hell," he reportedly said, "I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.") President Richard M. Nixon was well aware of the tens of millions killed by Mao Zedong but figured that dealing with the Chinese leader would give him leverage against Moscow. Even Reagan married his condemnation of the Soviets with an all-out effort to negotiate far-reaching arms control agreements with them.

Only President Bush messed up this simple, effective two-step approach to diplomacy. In 2002, he famously blasted Iraq, Iran and North Korea as "an axis of evil." (They were evil, though certainly not an axis.) But unlike Reagan, Bush virtually blocked his own future diplomatic path by making regime change his goal toward these evildoers, thereby slashing incentives for the devils to negotiate with him. Why should they negotiate if Bush's aim was to overthrow them? The policy made no sense, and sure enough, it didn't work. Bush did indeed go to war against Iraq, but he entered into direct negotiations with Pyongyang and eventually wound up holding ambassadorial-level talks with Iran about the present situation in Iraq. Those reversals made Bush, rather than the bad guys, look hypocritical.

Should we insist on preconditions for talks, such as demanding that the bad guys agree in advance to give up their evil words and ways?

We could try, but it wouldn't work. They wouldn't throw in their cards before they negotiated any more than we would.

The toughest cases, of course, involve working out how to handle leaders and groups who have done Americans great harm before talks can begin or get serious. Take Libya. After a lot of pushing, Gaddafi's regime took steps to curb terrorism and agreed to compensate the families of the Lockerbie bombing victims. Libyan leaders ultimately came to understand that the destruction of a civilian airliner had been so shocking that Americans absolutely needed this tacit admission of guilt, but all other issues were left for negotiations.

Presidents played cat-and-mouse games for more than a decade with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, urging him to recognize Israel's right to exist. He always promised to amend his organization's founding charter to accept the Jewish state, but in the end, both the United States and Israel effectively settled for his willingness to openly negotiate with Israel -- and fudged the question of the charter.

Bush started on a similar path with Iran. He insisted that Tehran renounce its nuclear program before talks could start. But it's hard to find anyone who thinks this ploy will work.

So how should we conduct negotiations with the bad guys?

There's only way: Keep the pressure on, withhold any goodies until agreed tasks are performed and seriously work to ease the bad guy's principal worry -- holding onto power. That's the sad trade-off. The devils simply aren't going to do anything to jeopardize their power.

If Washington is truly alarmed about the nuclear ambitions of, say, Iran and North Korea, we can talk to these regimes about giving their programs up -- but it's not likely to work while we're also demanding regime change. And if it's relative stability Americans yearn for in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're going to have to talk to the bad guys and give them a share of power.