Negotiating with Hostile States

Introduction

Deciding whether or how to engage with the leaders of hostile states has been a matter of debate among U.S. policymakers for decades. In the post-9/11 world, it has become increasingly controversial as national security officials weigh the merits of negotiating with states seen as pursuing weapons of mass destruction as well as non-state actors posing a threat to U.S. targets or U.S. allies. This debate rages continually in the foreign policy community, and during presidential election years like 2008, it has often burst into the open.

Containment and Contacts

Presidents have historically maintained diplomatic -- and summit-level -- contacts with adversarial states, although the timing and purpose of such engagement has sometimes met criticism. The most often-cited example is the Soviet Union. The United States was committed to maintaining dialogue with the Soviet Union from the early days of the Cold War while seeking to check Soviet influence and expansion -- the underpinning of the containment policy accepted by top foreign policy officials of both major political parties. But containment and the notion of maintaining high-level contacts with the Soviets, such as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1959 invitation to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to visit the United States, generated resentment from some U.S. conservatives. Conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr., told a rally at Carnegie Hall in 1960 that Eisenhower's "diplomatic sentimentality...can only confirm Khrushchev in the contempt he feels for the dissipated morale of a nation far gone, as the theorists of Marxism have all along contended, in decrepitude."

Critics of engagement also seized on President John F. Kennedy's meeting with Khrushchev in June 1961, five months after his inauguration, as an example of a poorly prepared summit. Some experts say the meeting gave the Soviet leader a chance to lecture the young president at length. Writing in a May 2008 New York Times op-ed, Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins suggest Khrushchev emerged from the encounter emboldened; he followed up by green-lighting the Berlin Wall and shipping nuclear missiles to Cuba. At the same time, historians say Kennedy's deft handling of negotiations with the Soviets during the autumn 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis averted a major confrontation. Within a year, the two nations established a "hotline" to improve communications and signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the first international agreement on nuclear weapons.

The Détente Experiment

Republican President Richard M. Nixon accelerated contacts with Soviet leaders in the early 1970s. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, introduced a policy of détente that aimed to establish new linkages on issues ranging from arms control to improved trade terms. The goal was to lessen superpower tensions as well as induce positive changes in Soviet international behavior. Kissinger writes in his book Diplomacy that Nixon's advisers "saw no contradiction in treating the communist world as both adversary and collaborator: adversary in fundamental ideology and in the need to prevent communism from upsetting the global equilibrium; collaborator in keeping the ideological conflict from exploding into a nuclear war."

The new contacts bore fruit in the signing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) in 1972 by Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. But within a year, tensions related to the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War showed superpower competition remained vigorous, at one point prompting a heightened nuclear alert for U.S. forces. In 1974, congressional critics of détente, led by Democratic Sen. Henry M. Jackson, sidelined a U.S.-Soviet trade agreement with the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which linked trade to emigration of Soviet Jews. Writing in Foreign Affairs, historian John Lewis Gaddis called détente a "sophisticated and far-sighted strategy" that Nixon and Kissinger failed to put across to their "own bureaucracies, the Congress, or the public as a whole." Robert S. Litwak, director of international security studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center, writes in his book Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy that the détente policy was hampered by the "Soviet leadership's ability to compartmentalize relations and frustrate the Nixon administration's efforts to establish linkages."

Some Cold War analysts say more effective as a counterweight to Soviet ambitions was the Nixon administration's simultaneous diplomacy with China, which led to the formal establishment of a dialogue with the 1972 Shanghai Communique. While not posing the direct threat that the Soviet Union represented, Communist China was viewed as no less odious by critics of the Nixon negotiations due to its intervention on North Korea's side in the Korean War, and because of massive human rights abuses, especially in the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. Despite such concerns, Nixon saw value in ending China's isolation. He wrote in an October 1967 Foreign Affairs article: "We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors."

In the years that followed, U.S. administrations held a number of adversarial states at arm's length, diplomatically. These states included Fidel Castro's Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, Libya, Nicaragua, Syria, and Sudan. In some cases, like Vietnam, diplomatic ties have been fully restored. In others, such as North Korea, dialogue has resumed over the issue of the country's denuclearization. Relations with Iran were severed after the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy, and diplomatic contacts have occurred only sporadically since then. High-level contacts with Cuba remained a remote prospect in 2008 as an economic embargo continued over U.S. concern at political repression.

President Ronald Reagan took office signaling a tough posture toward the Soviet Union and an intention to stanch communist support for rebellions in Central America. But Reagan also stepped up negotiations on nuclear arms control and participated in summits with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a practice continued by George H.W. Bush until the Soviet Union's collapse. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration pursued dialogue with Pyongyang and normalized relations with Vietnam, while seeking to contain and isolate Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, and Afghanistan's Taliban leadership.

Engagement with Iran

The issue of speaking to "rogue states" arose in the 2008 presidential campaign after Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) said in July 2007 that he would meet unconditionally with the leaders of states like Iran, Syria, and Cuba in his first year in office. He dismissed the Bush administration policy of withholding high-level talks as "ridiculous." Obama drew criticism from main Democratic rival Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and later from Republican candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), both of whom said his willingness for such talks betrayed a naiveté about summit-level discussions with adversaries. The debate, which intensified in mid-2008, has also drawn attention to the Bush administration's mixed record of engaging and isolating states deemed as rogues.

Iran, under international pressure to cease its uranium-enrichment program, represents an especially vexing case for U.S. policymakers. The Bush administration has conditioned broader talks with Iran on the country's agreement to suspend its uranium-enrichment program, which Washington and a number of Western states believe is cover for a nuclear-weapons program. Iran denies this and has refused to suspend its nuclear program. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in repeated interviews in May 2008 that the United States has created an ample framework for a full range of discussions with Iran: "The question isn't why we won't talk to Tehran," she said. "The question is why won't Tehran talk to us?"

As CFR President Emeritus Leslie H. Gelb wrote in an April 2008 op-ed: "The real issue is not whether to talk to the bad guys but how -- under which conditions, with which mix of pressure and conciliation, and with what degree of expectation that the bad guys will keep their word." A 2004 CFR Independent Task Force report on Iran called for selective engagement but also advised the executive branch to lay out the framework for formal dialogue with Tehran, along the lines of the Shanghai Communique.

But President Bush has raised doubts about dealings with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, pointing to his militantly anti-Israeli rhetoric. In a widely cited May 15 speech to the Israeli parliament, Bush cited the rhetoric of Ahmadinejad as well as leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah and made references to the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along, " Bush said. "We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."