“With our allies and partners, we’re engaged in negotiations to see if we can peacefully achieve a goal we all share: preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Obama´s goal is noble...

The high price of negotiating with bad guys

Michael Rubin

Obama´s goal is noble, but if history is any guide,

 talking 

may not suffice, and agreements may come at a dear price

It was during a 2007 Democratic primary debate that Sen. Barack Obama first declared “ridiculous” the idea that “not talking to countries is punishment to them.” Eighteen months later, with the world watching his historic inauguration, he reiterated his openness to dialogue with America’s enemies: “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Since then, his administration has talked with North Korea and the Taliban, defied cynicism at home and abroad with efforts to jump-start ­Israeli-Palestinian talks , sought to bring Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in from the cold, and, after 35 years, brought the United States and Iran to the verge of a nuclear deal. And retired American diplomats Thomas Pickering and Rob Malley — as well as Rachel Schneller, a State Department official who was on leave at the time — have met with Hamas, a terrorist group implicated in scores of bombings and suicide attacks in Israel.

Obama’s embrace of negotiations — what might be called the Obama Dialogues — has support across the foreign policy spectrum. “We ought to have enough confidence in our ability as diplomats to go eye to eye with people — even though we disagree in the strongest possible way — and come away without losing anything,” Bush-era Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said in 2006.

Ryan Crocker, the diplomatic hero of Iraq and Afghanistan, took the idea even further, saying the United States should engage the terrorist group responsible for the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and dozens of hijackings, bombings and kidnappings since. “We should talk to Hezbollah,” Crocker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 2010. “One thing I learned in Iraq is that engagement can be extremely valuable in ending an insurgency.”

Nicholas Burns, an accomplished diplomat who has served both Democratic and Republican administrations, summed up the attitude when he told a 2009 Senate hearing exploring Obama’s initiatives that “we will be no worse off if we try diplomacy and fail.”

While Obama’s embrace of negotiation with America’s enemies seems to have become the norm in U.S. foreign policy circles, it represents a sharp departure from past administrations and from generally accepted statecraft. History shows that this approach offers very high, if unintended, costs.

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