Appeasement

Much has been made on the left of President Bush's recent remarks before the Israeli Knesset in which the President attempted to explain his views on the futility of negotiating with the Iranians, which he compared to "appeasing the terrorists". The President was blamed for aiming his comments squarely at all-but-certain Democratic nominee Barack Obama. Some claimed such overseas politicking broke an unwritten rule of foreign policy, despite their silence over Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Syria in 2007 solely for the purpose of political grandstanding Others attacked the substance of Mr. Bush's remarks, citing the Reagan-Gorbachev talks, along with this Administration's own negotiations with Libya and North Korea, as evidence of the President's supposed unwillingness to see the potential fruits of diplomacy. Yet, contrary to what Barack Obama and his campaign surrogates on the editorial boards across the country want to believe, there is indeed merit to what the President said.

Negotiation (or diplomacy) is a “technique”, not a policy. That is the central distinction that many critics of the remarks fail to see. The President was not saying that any negotiating with adversaries is akin to appeasement, he was saying that Obama’s expressed willingness to hold direct executive negotiations with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without precondition is a futile technique when dealing with the Iranians at the current time.

The three adversaries that the Obama camp has trumpeted as evidence of the successful track record of negotiations -- North Korea, Libya, and the Soviet Union -- were politically weak at the time that talks commenced, looked to be on the verge of reform, and showed a willingness to make concessions. The desperate state that these three nations were in at the time led to an opening in which the U.S. could negotiate from a favorable position of strength. That is, the technique of negotiation was likely to be the best option capable of achieving a certain end. Iran, by contrast is currently at a position of growing strength, extremity, and influence on the world seen. U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are being killed daily by advanced explosive devices manufactured in Iran and supplied by the Iranian government to fuel the insurgency in those nations. Iran is also training and funding Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which are gaining (or have already gained) control in those areas. Furthermore, Iran has tighetning economic bonds with two veto-wielding permanent UN Security Council members -- China and Russia -- making international action impotent. This strength is evidenced by Iran’s failure to show any willingness to negotiate. When Ahmadinejad’s stated foreign policy toward Israel is that it should be "wiped off of the map", that hardly seems to be a negotiable position.

In other words, the Iranians are unlike the three nations touted by Sen. Obama in that they, not the United States, are the ones in a position of strength. Therefore, any negotiations that are conducted between the two in such a climate are likely to be fruitless, in that the U.S. could hardly be expected to achieve much without giving up much more. Just look at the troubles that the United States has faced in the six-party talks with North Korea, which was much weaker than Iran is today when talks began under President Clinton. These “negotiations” have dragged on for years without any major concessions by Kim Jong Il. During this time the North Koreans were able to build and test a nuclear weapon and spread their materials and know-how to Syria and God knows who else. Good job, diplomacy.

Does Barack Obama really think that similar negotiations would achieve anything more with Iran today -- a nation in a much stronger position to negotiate than North Korea ever was? At this height of Iranian influence, when the rhetoric of Ahmadinejad is increasingly extreme and U.S. troops are being killed by weapons manufactured and supplied by Iran, is that really the context in which direct presidential negotiations without preconditions would be an effective policy technique? I believe those are the questions that were at the core of what the President was trying to get to in his remarks before the Knesset, and I believe that they were spot-on. When a candidate -- even an infallible one like Barack Obama -- advocates a policy on the very real threat of Iranian nuclear weaponry that contains no technique other than weak diplomacy, one is definitely justified in questioning the naïveté of such a position. For someone who is supposed to have great judgment in the arena of foreign affairs, Sen. Obama's views on dealing with Iran certainly don't seem to show it.