Why 'Reset' Failed

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Why 'Reset' Failed why ‘reset’ fAILED Diplomacy with Rogues Rarely Works Michael Rubin Meeting her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov for the first time as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton famously presented him with a red, plastic “reset” button. “We want to reset our relationship and so we will do it together,” she explained, adding, “We worked hard to get the right Rus- sian word. Do you think we got it?” “You got it wrong,” Lavrov responded. The problem, in hindsight, was less a botched translation than it was a misunderstanding of the Russian mind. Like too many presidents and secretaries of state before them, President Obama and Secretary Clinton assumed that the problems hampering relations lay more with their prede- cessors than with America’s adversaries. Obama and Clinton were more will- ing to blame President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for what Obama caricatured as knee-jerk hostility to diplomacy with Russia than President Vladimir Putin himself. Putin took full advantage of this mistake. Obama has made diplomacy with adversaries a cornerstone of his foreign policy. “The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them . is ridiculous,” he declared in July 2007, soon after launching his presidential campaign, promising that, if elected, he would sit down with any adversary that was willing. As secretary of state, Clinton Michael Rubin is the author of the new book Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes. JULY/AUGUST 2014 79 why ‘reset’ fAILED embraced the same philosophy. “You don’t make peace with your friends. You have to be willing to engage with your enemies,” she explained. Many Republicans agreed. Former Secretary of State James Baker dismissed criticism from some Republican circles that Amer- ica sacrificed its principles when it engaged enemies. Citing President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s World War II cooperation with Soviet dicta- tor Joseph Stalin, he declared, “Talking to hostile states . is “ TK ” not appeasement. It is good foreign policy.” Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration, agreed. “We ought to have enough con- fidence in our ability as dip- lomats to go eye to eye with people—even though we dis- agree in the strongest possible way—and come away without losing anything.” Nicholas Burns, a top diplomat during both the Clinton and Bush administrations, agreed too. “We will be no worse off if we try diplomacy and fail,” he told a 2009 Senate hearing examining Obama’s diplomatic outreach. The idea that diplomacy with rogue regimes is cost-free is a relatively new idea, one that may sound good in the abstract but is less durable in reality. Policymakers often advocate diplomacy with rogue rulers and even terrorist groups because other options seem unattractive. As our recent experience in Afghanistan and Iraq shows, war extracts a tremendous price not only in terms of blood and treasure but in terms of national morale as well. The American public is exhausted by these conflicts and wondering if their price was worth paying. In such a situation, grasping at sanctions is perhaps understandable as well, particularly when more war seems to be the only alternative, but they are hardly a sure thing. Few dictators care about the discomfort of their 80 WORLD AFFAIRS Michael Rubin citizenry. Saddam Hussein may have charged that half a million children were dead because of sanctions—revealed as a vulgar propaganda claim by the liberation of Iraq—but in fact he cared little about the deprivations sanctions caused the Iraqi people. Even when effective—against apart- heid-era South Africa, for instance—sanctions are at best slow. When they are too narrow, targeting only a handful of individuals involved in Iran’s nuclear program, for instance, or Russian businessmen benefiting from Putin’s kleptocracy, they are ineffective. To sanction two dozen individuals in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the diplomatic equivalent of double-secret probation in Animal House—a response that mostly just makes those imposing it feel good. Just because military and economic coercion come at a high price does not mean diplomacy is a panacea. While diplomacy with Brussels or Burundi or Brunei (i.e., the kind of part- ners who uphold the norms of diplomacy) might be the bread-and-butter of statecraft, talking to rogues is different. Barack Obama might have been a relative foreign policy novice when he entered the Oval Office, but not so Hillary Clinton when she became his secretary of state. It was during the administration of Clinton’s hus- band, in which she was an active participant, that top strategists popular- ized the concept of “rogue regime.” With war fears on the Korean Penin- sula, nuclear proliferation in the Persian Gulf, and terrorism beginning to stir across the globe, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin raised the specter, in 1993, of “a handful of nuclear devices in the hands of rogue states or even terrorist groups.” Secretary of State Warren Christopher repeatedly referred to Iran and Iraq as rogue regimes in a Georgetown University address later that year. Clinton himself described Iran and Libya as “rogue states” during a 1994 Brussels sojourn. Both William Perry, who succeed- ed Aspin, and William Cohen, who succeeded Perry, spoke about rogues’ imperviousness to traditional deterrence. Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security adviser, sought to tie all these themes together in “Confronting Backlash States,” an article in the March/April 1994 issue of Foreign Affairs. Examining five rogue regimes— Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya—he found what they had in common was “aggressive and defiant” behavior, a resistance to globaliza- tion, domination “by cliques that control power through coercion” and JULY/AUGUST 2014 81 why ‘reset’ fAILED “suppress basic human rights and promote radical ideologies,” and, most importantly, “a chronic inability to engage constructively with the outside world.” Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s second-term secretary of state, elaborated: “Dealing with the rogue states is one of the great challenges of our time . because they are there with the sole purpose of destroying the system.” Russia may have been too weakened to go rogue in the 1990s, but with the economy rescued by a quintupling of oil prices and a leader in the Kremlin steeped in Soviet statecraft (which was itself quite obstinate), Russia today arguably fits this bill. Whether in Moscow, Tehran, Damascus, or Pyongyang, rogues view the outstretched hand of American presidents with disdain. That is not to say they are unwilling to talk, but American administrations, especially Obama’s, consistently confuse dialogue with sincerity. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani bragged in 2005 that the key to Iranian success against the United States was to lull Americans into complacency and then do the unexpected. Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, an aide to former President Mohammad Khatami, also bragged about such deception. “We had an overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence building,” he explained, “and a covert policy, which was continuation of the [nuclear] activities.” Nor are the Iranians the only ones who practice this strategy. The Taliban, likewise, were willing to sit down with American officials on more than thirty occasions between 1995 and 2000, promising repeatedly both to close terror training camps and detain Osama bin Laden. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union was also perfectly willing to engage. It understood and sought to take advantage of the fact that American policymakers saw agreements as sacrosanct. While Western dip- lomats might understand agreements as symbols of conflict resolution, rogues just as easily see deals as a tactic of asymmetric warfare, tying oppo- nents’ hands or encouraging them to let down their guard while maximiz- ing the strength of their own position. Indeed, that was exactly the finding of the CIA’s Team B analysts examining Soviet negotiating behavior in a report released in the last days of the Ford administration. While revisionists have since questioned Team B’s findings, the broad- er Soviet track record exemplified consistent deceit. (It was in this culture 82 WORLD AFFAIRS Michael Rubin of strategic Soviet deception and zero-sum struggles for dominance that Putin, then a young KGB recruit, learned statecraft.) The greater the enthusiasm for dialogue with Moscow, the greater the Russian tempta- tion to cheat. Donald Rumsfeld recalls how, after Ford lost his bid for reelection, he was briefing Jimmy Carter and his national security team. Carter excitedly said that he had an “unprecedented” communication from the Soviet Union expressing interest in new arms-control talks. The subsequent Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT-II) were so one-sided in Moscow’s favor that even the Democrat-controlled Senate refused to ratify the deal. Concerns expressed on the Senate floor at that time, however, went beyond Carter’s bizarre refusal to address European concerns by includ- ing Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles in the deal. Rather, for many senators, the problem was growing evidence of Soviet cheating on its diplomatic commitments. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, reports persisted that the Soviet Union was using chemical and biological weaponry in Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan, in violation of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Tribesmen in Laos described colored gas emerging from bombs or rockets that exploded at treetop level. Dutch journalists filmed a Soviet helicopter dropping canisters emitting a yellow cloud on a village outside of Jalalabad, in Afghanistan. The American intelligence community was able to collect tissue samples, blood, and urine from refugees exposed to the “Yellow Rain,” and in Feb- ruary 1982, a special national intelligence estimate concluded that the Soviets were mass-producing and weaponizing a toxin. Many academics and diplomats pushed back on publicity about the new information for fear that President Reagan would abandon talks on new treaties in the face of incontrovertible proof of Soviet deception.
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