From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Tue Dec 22 2009 - 20:50:08 EST
December 19, 2009
By JAMES TRAUB
If there is a one-word handle that fits the conduct of foreign relations in
Barack Obama’s first year as president, it is “engagement.” The Obama
administration has engaged with Iran, Russia, Burma, Sudan, North Korea.
“Engagement” sounds harmless — something any sensible administration
would do (though the Bush administration apparently did far less of it).
But what, in fact, does President Obama have to show for “engagement”
itself? And how do you keep score? He has just emerged from Copenhagen
having brokered an agreement, however modest, on climate change. Does that
count?
Engagement is shorthand for “talking to your enemies,” or at least to
countries with which you have profound differences. The Bush administration
did not literally ignore countries like Iran, but when you describe a
country as evil while obliquely threatening regime change, most diplomats
would say you are talking in name only.
That was why, in the CNN/YouTube debate of July 2007, the Democratic
candidates were asked if they would, “without preconditions,” talk to
leaders of states with which America has hostile relations. Mr. Obama said,
“I would,” adding that it was a “disgrace” that President Bush
hadn’t done so. Hillary Rodham Clinton called that answer
“irresponsible and frankly naïve.” That remains the view of many
conservatives as the policy unfolds, but centrist and liberal foreign
policy experts have widely applauded the engagement policy. In the current
issue of The American Interest, for example, Jessica T. Mathews, head of
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, gives the president “an
unequivocal ‘A’ ” on this score.
But the math required to hand out such grades is complicated. Engagement
can fail with its immediate object, but still reshape the climate of
opinion; it can succeed in warming deep-frozen relations, but at a cost not
worth paying.
If, in fact, President Obama has dispatched senior officials to talk to
their counterparts in the most authoritarian states in the hope that
treating them with respect will change their behavior, then events have so
far proven him naïve. Persistent attempts to draw the poison from our
relations with Iran have had absolutely no effect on Iran’s nuclear
program, or its sponsorship of terrorism. The North Koreans remain
similarly intransigent. Ditto Myanmar and Sudan.
To some conservatives, engagement thus sounds like a euphemism for
“appeasement.” Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, argues, “There is a perception around the world that Obama is
proceeding on bended knee to our enemies, and they’re rebuffing us
contemptuously.”
Where, then, over the last year, has engagement actually advanced
America’s national interest?
Iran is both the most important, and the most passionately disputed, case.
Engagement here would seem to have been a failure — but only if you take
the policy wholly at face value. One senior administration official who was
not authorized to speak on the record says that while the offer of
engagement was “never just an instrument or a ploy,” and remains on the
table, the very public effort to exhaust all available means of persuasion
has helped move Europe, Russia and China toward a tougher stance.
“Iran had an alliance with Russia and China,” he said, “and they were
in a confrontation with the West. That’s not the dynamic anymore.”
Should Iran remain recalcitrant, he said, “I remain convinced that we
will get a resolution that Russia supports.”
Indeed, the Russians do not talk about Iran today the way they did a year
ago.
But is the change great enough to overcome Russia’s historic resistance
to sanctions, and to jeopardize its commercial relations with Iran? “Put
me down as skeptical,” says the neoconservative writer Robert Kagan. He
agrees that Mr. Obama’s persistent diplomacy has increased the likelihood
of tough action but observes that engagement itself cannot change basic
calculations of national interest. “The Russians know the Iranians are
trying to build a nuclear weapon, and they don’t care,” Mr. Kagan says.
The question of sanctions figures in two distinct campaigns of engagement
— toward Iran, and toward Russia. The first has arguably succeeded by
failing; the second appears to have actually succeeded. Russia, it’s
true, is scarcely an adversary like Iran or North Korea, and it’s not
fair to say that President Bush refused to engage with it. Nevertheless,
the change in tone of Russian-American relations has made possible
achievements like the relatively noncontentious talks over nuclear arms
reduction that now seem close to conclusion.
Russia/Iran belongs at the top of the engagement scorecard. So, too, do
American relations with the United Nations Security Council. Susan E. Rice,
the ambassador to the United Nations, says the engagement policy “has
created a complete sea change in terms of countries’ willingness and
openness to cooperate with us.” She cites tough sanctions imposed on
North Korea, the nonproliferation resolution adopted at the Security
Council session chaired by Mr. Obama in September, and a fine-tuning last
week of measures against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Perhaps Sudan belongs near the bottom. Patient diplomacy rarely works with
states that ignore international opinion, and virtually nothing has come of
six months of conciliatory diplomacy toward the murderous regime of
President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan. Human rights advocates say the
administration has been too willing to make concessions and offer dialogue,
with little in return.
Still, even staunch advocates say outside actors have no choice but to seek
a political solution that the regime can live with, rather than content
themselves with what Mr. Obama dismissed in his Nobel Prize speech as
“the satisfying purity of indignation.”
Engagement, then, has two faces: It seeks to offer even the most ruthless
regime “the choice of an open door,” as the president put it in Oslo.
It also furnishes a kind of diplomatic currency. At the time of the YouTube
debate, one of Mr. Obama’s chief foreign policy advisers told me that
“the cost-benefit analysis” of engagement had as much to do with
changing America’s global image as with changing the behavior of the
state in question. If the United States changes its language and diplomacy,
“then you’re a different America” — one in a far better position to
marshal world opinion in order to advance its goals.
Perhaps, then, the ultimate measure of the success of the engagement policy
will be the extent to which the good will President Obama has generated
will tip the balance in the hard bargaining before his administration —
over assistance from allies in Afghanistan, over new approaches to the
Middle East and the international economic structure, and, most
immediately, in the struggle to reach a meaningful agreement on how to slow
global warming — an issue where the global good collides with the most
basic questions of national interest. The credit Mr. Obama has earned will
have to stretch a very long way.