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 may rightfully have been British, but it also freed the British military to focus on problems in Asia and the Middle East.26 The problem with Kennedy’s analysis, however, is that it conflates rivals and rogues. British officials may not have believed Washington’s positions to be correct or just, but they understood that American officials would abide by the terms of agreements once reached.
The willingness to negotiate and keep deals, even when they are not advantageous, was a major component of British strategy. Perhaps this was one reason why Winston Churchill, speaking at a White House luncheon on June 26, 1954, famously quipped, “It is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.” And, indeed, no matter how tense the rivalry between Cold War adversaries grew, engagement never ceased. Baker cited President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s engagement with Josef Stalin during World War II in disputing the claim that dialogue with enemies amounts to appeasement. “Talking to hostile states . . . is not appeasement,” he said. “It is good foreign policy.” Baker reasoned, “In a perfect world, we’d only work with Democracies, but the German threat justified” dealing with Stalin.27 Roosevelt’s acquiescence to Soviet designs over Eastern Europe at Yalta was appeasement, however, and a mistake that no subsequent U.S. president—not even Jimmy Carter—would replicate.
In July 1955, four heads of state—President Dwight D. Eisenhower; the Soviet premier, Nikolai Bulganin; the British prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden; and the French prime minister, Edgar Faure—met at their first postwar summit. The press spoke of “the spirit of Geneva.” Popular enthusiasm for engagement, however, did not equate to progress. Soviet troops crushed Hungarian freedom seekers the following year, and Khrushchev threatened to use nuclear weapons against Britain and France during the Suez crisis.28 Soviet premiers were willing to pose before the Western press, but they approached public diplomacy and engagement as tools to pursue alongside espionage, sabotage, and military coercion. This might be why John F. Kennedy, then a congressman from Massachusetts, remarked, “The barbarian may have taken the knife out of his teeth to smile, but the knife is still in his fist.”29
Twelve years later, when President Lyndon Johnson met Alexei Kosygin, Khrushchev’s successor, in Glassboro, New Jersey, the Western press was quick to evoke “the spirit of Glassboro.”30 Again, diplomacy’s promise proved illusory. Little more than a year later, Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring and North Vietnam launched its Tet Offensive.31
Reaching out to enemies is not always for naught. The Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Israel symbolizes the power of diplomacy to bridge enmity and to solve seemingly intractable disputes peacefully. It was a bold move, but it must be understood in context: Sadat sought engagement only after trying war. Only after he failed to destroy Israel by military means did he seek to achieve more limited aims through dialogue.
An enthusiastic press extolled the romance of dialogue with enemies. Averting war is a noble aim, and diplomatic careers are made by breaking through barriers. President Nixon’s trip to China is as much his legacy as Watergate. President Reagan’s diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev figures large in his presidency. Following a summit with the Soviet premier in 1985, Reagan told Congress, “We agreed on a number of matters. We agreed to continue meeting. There’s always room for movement, action, and progress when people are talking to each other instead of about each other.”32 Although the summit produced nothing concrete, it helped forge a relationship between the two men that proved pivotal in ending the Cold War.
Too often, however, proponents of engagement decontextualize triumphs such as Nixon’s or Reagan’s. As Kissinger explained, “Only extraordinary concern about Soviet purposes could explain the Chinese wish to sit down with the nation heretofore vilified as the archenemy.”33 Reagan pursued engagement—sometimes against the advice of trusted advisors—but he worked hard to set the right circumstances. Had it not been for a multiyear and multibillion-dollar arms buildup and the willingness to use force against Soviet proxies in Grenada, Angola, Nicaragua, and elsewhere, he could not have achieved a position of strength to enable diplomacy to succeed.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in a period of unprecedented optimism. Ascending the podium at the United Nations, Mikhail Gorbachev declared, “We must look for ways to improve the international situation and build a new world, and we must do it together.”34 The political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously announced “the end of history.” Rogue regimes soon spoiled the party, however. While democracy swept away the former communist regimes of Eastern Europe, North Korea stubbornly refused to get the message, but instead escalated its saber rattling and accelerated its drive to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait reminded the world that Middle Eastern rogues were alive and well. Iran continued putting on weekly “Death to America” rallies. Rather than end Palestinian-Israeli violence, the Oslo Accords arguably worsened it. The Soviet Union might have exited stage left, but the curtain did not come down; instead, rogue regimes took center stage.
Both engagement and containment became strategies of choice. The Clinton administration embraced a policy of “dual containment” against Iraq and Iran, and it embargoed Libya, but meanwhile engaged the Palestine Liberation Organization, North Korea, and even the Taliban.
George W. Bush campaigned largely on domestic issues; he attacked Clinton’s entanglements in Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo, and spoke scornfully of nation-building initiatives. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington forced a paradigm shift. For the first time since 1812, a foreign enemy had struck the American mainland. The 2002 National Security Strategy encapsulated the paradigm shift, fleshing out a concept not only of deterrence but also of preemption against rogue regimes and terrorist groups.
Congress and the American people united around military intervention in Afghanistan, but the Bush administration’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq was far more polarizing. Although Bush entered Iraq with bipartisan support, the war turned into a political football. Critics attacked Bush’s position on Iraq and his national security doctrine more broadly. The multibillion-dollar Iraq War demonstrated the cost in blood and treasure of abandoning engagement, even when it came to a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein. Whereas Bush’s policies toward rogue regimes mirrored those of his predecessors, they soon became the subject of fierce debate, particularly in the run-up to the 2008 election. On July 23, 2007, the broadcast journalist Anderson Cooper asked Senator Obama whether he would agree to meet the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea in his first year as president. Obama responded affirmatively, saying, “The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them . . . is ridiculous.”35
Obama wasted no time in making engagement the central pillar of his foreign policy. “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history,” he declared in his inaugural address, but, he added, “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”
Scholars applauded Obama’s approach. Professor Charles Kupchan of Georgetown University argued that engagement, often coupled with concession, was the best way to reconcile with adversaries. “Obama is on the right track in reaching out to adversaries. Long-standing rivalries tend to thaw as a result of mutual accommodation, not coercive intimidation.” While Kupchan recognized that the United States might still need to isolate some “recalcitrant regimes” that refused to engage, he was optimistic. “Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Myanmar have all demonstrated a least a modicum of interest in engagement with the United States.”36
Kupchan, however, made a common mistake: Interest in engagement does not necessarily correlate to interest in reform, especially when the incentives gained and time wasted in diplomacy are the rogue regime’s only goals. Negotiation has resolved past rivalry, but rogue regimes are not simply adversarial governments. In 1966, diplomacy may have helped Malaysia and Indonesia step back from the brink of war, but both had responsible governments that embraced diplomacy as a mechanism of conflict resolution. Conflict between North and South Korea, or for that matter the United States and the Taliban, continues not because of an absence of engagement, but rather because neither Kim Jong Un nor Mullah Omar has demonstrated a willingness to abide by the norms of international diplomacy.
Obama may have breathed new life into diplomacy with rogue regimes, but he did not end the debate about the wisdom of such a strategy, either in the United States or in Europe.
Through much of the twentieth century, partisan debates seldom shook the foundations of U.S. foreign policy, but disagreements as to diplomatic strategy often strained American relations with European allies.
American isolationism may have led to pitched battles over U.S. involvement in war, but after the sinking of the Lusitania and after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, politicians united behind the president. During the Cold War, the necessity of countering Soviet designs was a bipartisan assumption. When politicians did treat national security as a political football, such as during the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate, it was more often to demonstrate hawkishness than to express fundamental disagreement. While conservatives lambast Jimmy Carter and liberals pillory Ronald Reagan, the two administrations maintained a common position against Soviet expansion, in favor of a strong alliance with Israel, and suspicious of Chinese intentions.
Carter may have embraced diplomacy with rogues, yet he understood that the Soviet Union had “little intrinsic interest in restraint.” Western Europeans were not so certain, however. “Most European governments have the far more modest expectation that a shrewd, businesslike political and economic relationship will bolster the position of those in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who stress the need for economic modernization over military expansion,” explained Peter Langer, a research associate at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. “By treating the Kremlin as a negotiating partner, this approach will give Soviet leaders a stake in long-term détente.”37
The Cold War revealed stark differences between the American and the European approach to diplomacy with rogue regimes and terrorists. As the Economist noted in 1982, “When Americans are nervous, they tend to get pugnacious. . . . They prefer strength to subtlety. When Europeans are nervous, they slide toward caution and call for patience and compromise.”38 A poll the following year found that 70 percent of the British public lacked any confidence in Reagan’s judgment on diplomatic issues.39 Vice President George H. W. Bush brushed off such skepticism when he visited Europe in February 1983. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The United States is the leader of the free world and under this Administration, we are beginning once again to act like it.”40
Likewise, European and American attitudes often differ with regard to engaging terrorist groups. American administrations of both parties tend to espouse American exceptionalism and embrace moral clarity. In Years of Upheaval, Kissinger ridiculed the notion of talking with terrorists. “We did not have a high incentive to advance the ‘dialogue’ with the PLO, as the fashionable phrase ran later,” he wrote, “not because of Israeli pressures but because of our perception of the American national interest.”41 Europeans take a more pragmatic approach. While American governments refuse to negotiate with terrorists to release hostages, for example, European governments often do it with a wink and a nod.
Why should the United States and Europe approach diplomacy with terrorists and rogue regimes so differently? History is one reason. The United States may have been party to the twentieth century’s great conflicts, but Europe was the battlefield. Americans in the United States sacrificed material comfort, but Europeans sacrificed their cities, farms, and homes. Another historical factor is Europe’s imperial ventures, which left a moral equivalence in their wake. In 1975, the British journalist Gerald Seymour coined the phrase “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” in his novel Harry’s Game, set during the height of the British conflict with the Irish Republican Army.
Geography is also a key. During the Cold War, while the threat of Soviet missiles hung over every American and European city, only the European populace faced the threat of Soviet tanks, artillery, and short-range missiles. It was Europe that was America’s strategic depth; the relationship was not reciprocal. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet threat may have evaporated, but Europe’s geographic challenge did not. Even in a globalized age, the Atlantic Ocean insulates the United States from chaos in the Middle East and Africa. Any instability let alone war in Libya could send tens of thousands of migrants across the Mediterranean into Europe.
Geography heightens the security threat to Europe. During the Cold War, it was far easier for Soviet-sponsored terrorist groups to operate in Europe than in the United States. Indeed, while Americans faced sporadic attacks by Puerto Rican nationalists, the Baader-Meinhof Gang terrorized Germany and the Red Brigades agitated Italy. At the height of the Palestinian terrorist campaign, the PLO and associated groups targeted airports in Italy and Austria; they hijacked or blew up planes from Great Britain, Switzerland, and France. In the first decade after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, revolutionary assassins killed eleven dissidents on French soil, sometimes hitting French citizens in the crossfire. Muammar Qadhafi retaliated against the 1986 U.S. attack on Libya by firing missiles at the Italian island of Lampedusa. Simply put, when the White House chooses violence, it is often Europe that must pick up the pieces.
Even so, the sharpest differences between European and American attitudes often boil down to trade. Many rogue regimes lie close to the European continent. Whether because of energy or exports or the fear of instability unleashing waves of refugees, European statesmen are loath to pursue any policy that could negatively affect their treasury, regardless of security costs down the road. The reason for this priority is that the U.S. taxpayer and U.S. military subsidized European defense throughout the twentieth century. Except for the British and the French, European taxpayers contributed little to the nuclear missiles, aircraft carrier battle groups, and submarines that preserved European freedom in the face of Soviet ambitions. The European public and diplomats are unaccustomed to the true cost of defense and do not understand that security’s price must sometimes be paid proactively. Hence, European governments often resist imposing economic sanctions, whereas American policymakers—whether Democrat or Republican—see them as a valuable and nonviolent way to coerce rogue regimes. As of 1999, the United States had sanctioned thirty-three countries unilaterally.42 European countries are much less likely to apply sanctions without UN direction, either on moral grounds or to penalize rogue behavior.43
The passage of the Helms-Burton Act in 1996 highlighted the clash between Washington and European capitals. The law extended U.S. sanctions on Cuba to foreign companies—including, of course, European companies—that traded with the communist state, and also sharpened penalties when those firms trafficked in property confiscated by Cuban authorities from U.S. citizens.
European and American public attitudes reflect the different approaches of their governments with regard to multilateralism and the application of sanctions on rogue regimes. A 1998 German Marshall Fund poll found that only 21 percent of Americans surveyed would make sanctions on Libya or Iran conditional on European participation, while 75 percent supported unilateral sanctions.44 Sixty-one percent of Americans polled also agreed that talk with autocratic leaders should be coupled with more punitive measures.45 Less than half of the British and French surveyed agreed with the concept of sanctions on principle, although slightly more than 56 percent of Germans supported sanctions. When the target of sanctions was Iran, support for sanctions among citizens of the three European powerhouses was even lower.46
It was largely in reaction to the more punitive U.S. approach to rogue regimes that Europeans promoted the concept of “critical dialogue” and “critical engagement.” Previously, European governments would informally say they were involved in diplomatic engagement if they had more than one meeting with an adversary, even if there were no regular, institutionalized contacts. In the 1990s, however, the European Union began to consider itself engaged in a dialogue only with the fulfillment of three conditions: First, EU ministers or political committees had to decide formally to engage. Second, so did the other side. Third, the dialogue had to be conducted regularly.47
The European Union had multiple motives to engage in dialogue with rogues. Dialogues became a convenient mechanism by which outside countries could attain more structured relations with the EU.48 Dialogues are easy to start; by 1997, the European Union was engaged in over a hundred regular dialogues.49 This proliferation arguably diluted their importance. Once started, engagements became self-perpetuating, with careers and whole bureaucracies growing around dialogue. Amidst the moral outrage of Beijing’s crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, European officials froze their dialogue with China, but it was not long before they resumed it.
Because of the European enthusiasm to engage, European officials have reached out to those whom their U.S. counterparts have considered beyond rapprochement. In the early 1990s, Europeans facilitated back-channel exchanges between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah, and also reached out to the Colombian president Ernesto Samper, whom the Clinton administration avoided because of his relationship with drug lords.
Europe’s largest critical engagement project revolved around Iran.50 Many European officials may have been sincere in their hope that they could encourage reform in Iran through dialogue and provide Tehran with economic incentives to bring its policies into conformity with the international community. Trade was a prominent concern, however. German officials especially hoped to protect an extensive trade relationship with Iran. From a strictly fiscal standpoint, sanctions can be self-defeating. When the European Union briefly worked to isolate Tehran after a German court concluded that senior Iranian officials were complicit in an assassination in Berlin, the Kremlin sought to profit. “We have good, positive cooperation with Iran, which shows a tendency to grow,” said President Boris Yeltsin. The Speaker of the Russian parliament, Gennadi Seleznyov, declared, “There is no court in the world which has the authority to pass sentence on a whole nation.”51
Many European leaders put a premium on the act of talking and refuse to acknowledge the symbolism of dialogue. On June 1, 2010, a year after the fraudulent election in Iran, accompanied by the worst unrest in thirty years, the Islamic Republic’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, visited the European Parliament in Brussels. Several European parliamentarians protested the visit. Struan Stevenson, a British conservative, called Mottaki’s visit the equivalent of hosting Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, in the European Parliament. The president of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Gabriele Albertini, dismissed the criticism, saying, “The choice is either to confront opinions that may be different from our own or to ignore them.”52 That dichotomy, however, ignores the costs and the complexities of engagement with rogue actors.