Talking to Our Enemies
Surprisingly, one of the biggest foreign policy issues to arise during this presidential primary season has been the question of whether we ought to talk to our enemies. Proponents of this course argue that we have little to lose by doing so. Opponents, bolstered by the current conventional wisdom, argue that talking to our enemies legitimizes them. The three key test cases are Iran, Cuba, and Hamas.
We have had no diplomatic contact with Iran for 29 years since its revolution in 1979 and the subsequent seizure of the American embassy in Teheran. Cuba has been cut off since 1960 (48 years), though we did explore the possibility of normalizing relations with Havana in the mid-1970s. Hamas is a terrorist organization with whom we have no formal contact.
What does history say about about speaking to our enemies?
We broke diplomatic relations with Russia following the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. Lenin’s regime rejected traditional diplomacy, executed the Czar and his ministers, and confiscated property without compensation. And yet, by 1933 — a mere 16 years after the revolution — we had re-established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. We maintained those relations through Stalin’s massacres of the 1930s and the Nazi-Soviet pact. And we allied with the Soviets during World War II on the theory that the enemy of our enemy is our friend (Hint: al Qaeda hates the Shiites and would love to overthrow the Iranian regime). We kept dealing with the Soviets after the war, even as they were stealing our nuclear secrets. We met with them as they were killing 20,000 Hungarians in crushing the 1956 reform movement there. We met with them even after they tried to place nuclear missiles into Cuba and while they were actively supplying our enemies in Vietnam. When Ronald Reagan rightly called the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world” he was still willing to meet with them.
The Chinese communists took power in 1949. We fought a war against them in Korea. They actively aided our enemies in Vietnam as well. Yet by 1972, Richard Nixon was willing to visit China — 23 years after the establishment of the communist regime.
We negotiated with the Japan government in the 1930s even after they brutally invaded China and after the militarists destroyed democracy there. We were still speaking to them as their planes dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor.
Either we believe that Cuba and Iran are worse than the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and fascist Japan, or we have to accept that our current policy has no historical foundation. Ronald Reagan was willing to speak to the Soviets, not because he was weak and not because he thought they were misunderstood, but because he realized that toughminded diplomacy sometimes requires you to speak to your enemies.
Hamas is a special case, of course. But we encouraged the Palestinian elections, and in life if you make your bed you have to lie in it. Either we support democracy or we don’t. Hamas is a terrorist organization, but unfortunately it is also the preferred choice of the Palestinian people. Any pursuit of Middle East peace that seeks to exclude Hamas is doomed to fail.
[...] Crossposted here. [...]