PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

In the year since the first edition of Dancing with the Devil appeared, threats have erupted around the globe: Russia has invaded Ukraine and now threatens the Baltic states; Syria has admitted that it did not actually destroy all its chemical weapons; war broke out between Israel and Hamas; the Taliban is resurgent; North Korea may have acquired the capability to put nuclear warheads on its missiles and Iran is likely not far behind. The irony is that diplomacy may have exacerbated all these problems.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine came after a concerted effort by President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to “reset” relations with Russia. To ensure that diplomacy continued and to prove its effectiveness to an American audience, the Obama administration turned a blind eye to evidence of Vladimir Putin’s insincerity, his hostility to the West, and his aggressive stance toward his neighbors. The administration, for example, hid evidence that Russia had violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty when, in 2010, it submitted the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) to the U.S. Senate.1 History repeats: just as the State Department and the intelligence community three decades earlier hid evidence of Soviet cheating on the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in order to keep arms-control talks going (see Chapter 11), the White House and the State Department in 2010 feared that acknowledging Russian malfeasance might undercut the Senate’s willingness to affirm any deal.

Whitewashing the behavior of rogues, however, never brings peace. When rogues become convinced that the United States will look the other way to keep diplomacy alive, the result is often more aggression. Leverage matters. While Putin’s invasion of Crimea had long been planned, not every plan is implemented. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s acknowledgment that the United States would reduce its military to pre–World War II levels probably signaled to Putin that he could act with impunity. Russian forces marched into Crimea four days later. Resetting relations with Russia requires not a new diplomatic push, but rather a new Russia.

In Syria, Bashar al-Assad continues to confound American diplomacy as well. Syria has been a reactionary state hostile to the United States and its allies for decades, but today President Assad has transformed his country into the poster child for rogue regimes. Having complete mastery of the skies, he uses his air force to drop barrel bombs on civilians. His militias have kidnapped and mutilated children in order to cow the populace into submission. Obama had long resisted involvement in Syria, and instead sought a diplomatic solution. He famously drew a red line, saying, “We have been very clear to the Assad regime . . . that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”² And yet, when Assad’s forces subsequently used chemical weapons against civilians in the opposition area in the eastern suburbs of Damascus, Obama stood down. He chose to endorse a deal in which Assad would simply declare his chemical weapons and allow the international community to neutralize them.

Even if Assad were to respect this deal, it came at the cost of precedent: Rogue leaders could use chemical weapons against civilians once and, in effect, get away with murder so long as they cooperated with the international community afterward. The problem was that Assad did not respect the deal and never intended to do so. He later acknowledged that he had not declared let alone destroyed his entire arsenal. By then, however, momentum against Assad had evaporated. With Obama demonstrating that the continuing talk trumped accountability and adherence to deals, the Syrian leader doubled down on violence. Nor was the failure to uphold the red line limited to Syria; indeed, it may have convinced Putin in the weeks before the invasion of Crimea that he had nothing to fear, no matter what Obama said.

Secretary of State John Kerry, like so many of his predecessors, entered office convinced that he could win Palestinian-Israeli peace where others had failed—never mind the complication caused by Hamas and its unabashed rejection of Israel’s right to exist and of the Oslo Accords’ demand that Palestinians reject terrorism. The basis for diplomacy, Kerry facilely believed, was to keep the two parties talking. When the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, decided to seek unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood in violation of the Oslo Accords’ commitment to a negotiated solution, Kerry looked the other way. And when Abbas approved a power-sharing deal with Hamas, the State Department argued that this was no cause for the United States to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority; rather, American assistance might simply go to those portions of the Palestinian Authority not tainted by Hamas.

Kerry may have thought himself clever, but what both Abbas and Hamas took home was the message that all American positions—and all diplomatic agreements—were flexible. If there was no consequence for violating one or two core commitments, then there should be no consequence for seeking to achieve other aims extralegally. Kerry might believe that talking has no cost, but it seems little coincidence that war between Israel and Hamas erupted just two months after he decided there would be no diplomatic consequence for Abbas welcoming Hamas despite its repudiation of the Oslo commitments upon which the Palestinian Authority’s very existence has been based. What Kerry saw as a cost-free process ended up costing the lives of more than a thousand men, women, and children. Of course, the war in Gaza may have been merely the prologue. The lasting legacy of Kerry’s push for peace might actually be a third intifada as Abbas concludes that, absent an American willingness to hold him accountable, violence pays.

The outlook is no better in Afghanistan. When President Obama ordered the release of five high-value al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for an American held captive by the Taliban, his top aides expressed hope that the exchange might jumpstart talks. But desperation diplomacy never achieves its aims. Rather than return to the table, the Taliban simply doubled down on their terrorist campaign, striking not only at military targets but also at diplomats, aid workers, and civil society. Secretary of State Clinton justified diplomacy with the argument that talks end all conflicts and so the sooner talks begin, the better; yet this has never been the case in Afghanistan, where groups seize power at the point of a gun and interpret an opponent’s offers of dialogue as little more than the waving of a white flag.

While the Obama administration has been relatively reticent about engaging North Korea, the Hermit Kingdom remains Exhibit A in the annals of diplomacy’s failure. It developed its nuclear weapons and received billions of dollars in Western subsidies against the backdrop of diplomacy. That Iranian officials look at North Korea’s interaction with the United States as a diplomatic model to emulate should not surprise. What should surprise is, first, the number of American veterans of previous talks with Pyongyang who continue to advocate for diplomacy and new incentives toward a regime proven so insincere, and, second, the refusal to consider the mistakes of North Korea diplomacy when applying very similar formulas to Iran. Just as with North Korea, it is very possible to reach a nuclear accord with Iran, especially if enough concessions are granted and demands abandoned, but a bad agreement may be more costly than no agreement.

Diplomacy can be an effective tool, but it is not an all-purpose one, nor is it often effective when isolated from a comprehensive strategy that emphasizes leverage and remains tied to strategic goals. Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results, and that definition also describes American diplomats’ approach to rogue regimes. So long as policymakers continue to consider diplomacy with rogues to be cost-free, its actual costs to the free world will mount. In statecraft, there are many enemies, but there are never any panaceas.

—Michael Rubin, November 2014