Breeze Perspectives: Uncle Sam’s ‘rules’ of engagement
With North Korea and Iran, the dilemma of direct negotiations with pariah states comes to light
By Jeff Genota, contributing writer
Posted on October 19, 2006

Engagement has been a widely-used term for direct negotiations or cooperation with pariah states like Iran and North Korea, an idea largely shunned by hawks in Washington — or rather the “chicken hawks” like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, because doing so “appeases” evil. The record shows that the United States does not negotiate with pariah nations that has historically humiliated and willingly irritated Uncle Sam. Only under circumstances when a vital strategic advantage or mutual breakthroughs are present, the opposing state has not directly harmed U.S. interests or when all other exhausted options leads to negotiating as the only option would the United States be more likely to pursue engagement.

But don’t expect serious consideration of direct talks from the Bush administration very soon. Its no-direct-talk policy stems from a deep distrust and despising of rogue nations, and is rooted in the aggressiveness of post-Sept. 11 foreign policy despite Iraq’s blunders.

Washington generally considers exploiting a real strategic advantage of an opponent or a mutual breakthrough as the first ‘rule’ of engagement. In this case, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger engaged directly with Mao Zedong’s government to take advantage of a freeze in Chinese-Soviet relations and to wean the Chinese off involvement in Vietnam. Ronald Reagan ended his presidency by negotiating with Mikhail Gorbachev and the “evil empire” to drastically reduce the likelihood of nuclear war by the mutual reduction of nuclear stockpiles and deployments in Europe.

The second “rule” of engagement is that a state should engage only with a regime that has not threatened or harmed it directly. Lately, the United States has been chided for not adopting the aforementioned approaches to Iran and North Korea. America refused and still refuses to negotiate with states it views with the most scorn and disdain because of bad history with these countries. In 1979, Iranian revolutionaries held the U.S. Embassy hostage for 444 days after Jimmy Carter allowed the Shah into the United States for medical treatment. North Koreans are brainwashed with brutal hatred for American “imperialists,” and demonstrated their zeal in 1968, when the North Koreans captured a U.S. Navy reconnaissance ship in international waters; in 1975, they bludgeoned an American soldier to death on the southern side of the DMZ attempting to cut a tree obscuring the view of the border. This history remains alive, but both North Korea and Iran understand an egregious miscalculation ultimately means their own demise.

Today, it is easy to think that because of the implausibility of military intervention and the doubt surrounding the effectiveness of sanctions, we should adopt engagement as the solution toward North Korea and Iran. As tricky and complicated the process of diplomacy and international relations are, we must bear one thing in mind: when a state’s fear of insecurity is removed, it is better inclined to cooperate with others. However irrational we may perceive these regimes, we can eradicate security headaches by changing the environment in which they operate. For now, we have to suspend these “rules” and think realistically.

If we let the new status quo continue, we risk exacerbating more problems because harsher actions thwarting Iranian and North Korean ambitions through sanctions and coercion causes greater insecurity and nervousness for everyone else in the neighborhood. Therefore, the only way to restrain the pariah states is to avoid provoking them with the perception of endangered security. Doing so through a gradual process of engagement is not a failure of American policy, but rather an opportunity to reclaim the moral high ground and exercise responsibility and duties that comes with being the world’s foremost superpower and the manager of the international system.

Jeff Genota is a sophomore political science major.