"Never Negotiate Out of Fear – Never Fear to Negotiate"

When it comes to the question of whether the United States should negotiate with other countries, especially unfriendly ones, there are lots of trite little phrases, like the one in the title of this post, that can take the place of real thought. This question has been an issue a couple of times already in this campaign, and it probably will be again.

I think the first time the question came up was at one of the Democratic debates last year (at this point it is hard to distinguish among them). In response to a question to the candidates whether they would, in their first year in office, meet without preconditions with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, Barack Obama said he would. Senator Obama later clarified his answer by saying that there would have to be an agenda, but he still said there would be no "preconditions". More recently, Senator Obama has amplified his clarification, saying that there would be preparations and preliminary diplomatic contacts to lay a groundwork for meetings, but still no preconditions.

There have been lots of articles and comments on the question of when leaders of countries should meet. In support of his position Senator Obama has mentioned President Reagan’s meetings with Miguel Gorbachev. Others mention President Nixon going to China. Supporters of Senator Obama have scoffed at the idea that meetings should be held out as some kind of a reward to other countries. John Kerry said the "[d]irect negotiations may be the only means short of war that can persuade Iran to forgo its nuclear capability."* He also said "[d]ialogue helps us isolate [Iranian President] Ahmadinejad rather than empowering him to isolate us."

Those on the other side note failed meetings in the past. One meeting they frequently mention is the summit between President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June of 1961. Kennedy apparently sought the meeting to get to know the Soviet leader, but for two days Khrushchev bullied and lectured Kennedy. When it was over, Kennedy himself told one of the reporters covering the meeting that it was "the roughest thing in my life." "He just beat the hell out of me. I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts." Some argue that the impression Khrushchev got of Kennedy in that meeting encouraged Khrushchev to approve the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 – and maybe even to send nuclear missiles to Cuba the next year.

The purpose of this post, however, is not to go over all of the arguments about when and whether leaders of countries should meet. What I want to do is to mention a risk of such meetings that I have not really seen mentioned, but which can be a real danger in summit-level meetings that are not properly prepared for or which are held even though there is no realistic chance of an agreement being reached.**

The danger of such meetings is this: If a meeting is held, people expect results, either an agreement or at least some kind of statement about how the two leaders will work together in the future. If there isn’t an agreement, the meeting is seen as a failure. And our politicians don’t like to look like failures. After all, you won’t get nice articles in the media and a bump up in the opinion polls if your summit meeting is a failure.

The problem is that the other side knows this, and they use it against us. It takes a strong politician to be willing to come back from a summit without an agreement. President Reagan was willing to do that at Reykjavik, but President Reagan was unusual.

John Kerry claims that "[b]y engaging Iran, we reclaim the moral high ground …. If Iran refuses to budge, we have new leverage to expose it as a threat whose bad intentions cannot be explained away." But it doesn’t work that way.

Democracies and open societies are at a disadvantage in negotiations with dictatorships. If is hard for our politicians to say one thing in public while doing another in private. We have an opposition that will call them on it and a news media that will report it. Dictatorships don’t have that problem. According to Michael Rubin in The Washington Post:

"At a June 14 panel with Iranian journalists and political advisers, former [Iranian President] Khatami spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh explained, ‘We had one overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence building, and a covert policy, which was continuation of activities.’ He advised President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to soften his defiance, noting that: ‘During our negotiations and so long as we were not subjected to sanctions, we could import technology. We should have negotiated for so long, and benefited from the atmosphere of negotiations to the extent we could import all the technology needed.’"

So while our President is driven by public opinion and the media to reach an agreement, it is entirely possible the other side will be "agreeing" to things they know they will never do just to string us along.

A good example of how this works can be seen in how Saddam Hussein played world leaders and the media in the run-up to the Gulf War in late 1990 and early 1991. (See A World Transformed by George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, especially chapters 16-18.)

The result is that we can find ourselves negotiating against not only the other side but also the demands and expectations of public opinion.

What this means is that we shouldn’t have meetings just "to get to know each other" with countries such as Iran and Syria, etc. A president willing to meet such countries without preconditions, without some pre-meeting understanding about what the meeting will accomplish and what the other side will agree to, is setting up himself, and the United States, for either being seen as a failure or accepting a bad agreement – or both.

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* The John Kerry quotes are from an op-ed by Senator Kerry: "The Wisdom In Talking," The Washington Post, May 24, 2008.

** As I indicated above, I am not talking about meetings between friends. Meetings between friendly countries can be held just to talk. What I am talking about here are meetings with countries like those mentioned in the question to Senator Obama.

Update (9/19/08 1:00 a.m): Corrected a typogrpahical error in the quotation from Michael Rubin.: