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Introduction

PARIAHS TO PARTNERS: BRINGING ROGUES TO THE TABLE

The United States has had no shortage of enemies in its history. From Great Britain to Japan to the Soviet Union, it has fought, contained, or deterred a variety of hostile powers. Whenever possible, however, American governments prefer diplomacy to war. Historically, engagement has involved diplomats, other officials, or even presidents talking to their counterparts. During the Cold War, citizen diplomacy also became an important part of engagement. American scientists visited the Soviet Union, ping pong players traveled to China, and delegations of American Jewish activists met with Palestinian leaders. Today, diplomats view engagement as enveloping adversaries in process. Whether the adversary is the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, American diplomats talk in order to set agendas, establish roadmaps, and enable more talks.

Beginning with the Clinton administration, officials have identified a category of states and nonstate actors that pose a special challenge, requiring a new concept of diplomacy. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recognized that “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.” She lamented that “our friends and allies don’t get it.”¹ Two Clinton-era defense secretaries, William Perry and William Cohen, suggested that rogue regimes might be immune to the traditional form of deterrence that was effective during the Cold War.² This book examines the ways that U.S. administrations have attempted to deal with rogues; it weighs the promise and the perils of engaging rogue regimes and terrorist groups, and reflects on the policy lessons that emerge from those efforts.

What Is a Rogue?

For all the attention that presidents and the Pentagon have given to the problem of rogue regimes, there is no universal or legal definition of such a regime. The idea of “rogue regimes” has become the diplomatic equivalent of Justice Potter Stewart’s quip about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Generally, we recognize a rogue when we see it. Just as few would dismiss the threat posed by terrorism to the United States simply because there is no single definition of terrorism, so the absence of an international consensus on a definition of rogue regimes does not mitigate their threat.

The concept of rogue regimes has roots in the 1970s, when political scientists used the term “pariah states” to describe isolated countries that aimed to acquire nuclear arms. Applying no value judgment to the governing ideology of such states, they singled out Taiwan and Israel as pariahs. Those countries might be pro-Western and, in Israel’s case, democratic, but both sought nuclear capability because they faced hostile neighbors and were susceptible to arms embargoes.³ In 1979, the New York Times, quoting intelligence officials, spoke of a “nuclear club of outcasts” comprising South Africa, Israel, and Taiwan.⁴

At the same time, a new definition of rogues was emerging, one which focused more on regime behavior than on diplomatic isolation. Television beamed stories of slaughter in Cambodia and Uganda into living rooms, transforming atrocities that policymakers might once have ignored into public obsessions. This led the Washington Post editorial board to articulate the difference between rogue regimes and mere dictatorships. “How does the international community deal with rogue regimes, those that under the color of national sovereignty commit unspeakable crimes against their own citizens?” the Post asked in 1979, naming Pol Pot and Idi Amin. As Tanzanian troops invaded Uganda, the Post editors applauded, saying, “It seems hypocritical to say border-crossing is never justifiable.”⁵ It is an enduring political irony that so many American politicians and academics today are willing to approve of force when it comes to rogues that commit atrocities against their own people, while calling for engagement with regimes that threaten U.S. national security.

In the late 1970s, terrorism also started to shape public discussion of rogue behavior. The State Department began labeling some regimes as state sponsors of terrorism in 1979. Iraq, Libya, South Yemen, and Syria were inaugural members of the club, soon joined by Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Sudan. Nearly seventeen years before President George W. Bush would identify an “axis of evil,” President Ronald Reagan spoke of “a confederation of terrorist states.”⁶ Parallel definitions of rogues as proliferators, human rights abusers, and terror sponsors quickly converged. U.S. officials began to describe proliferators who were also terror sponsors as rogues, outlaws, or renegades.⁷ Against the backdrop of optimism about dawning freedom in the former communist bloc, lofty hope for a peace dividend, and a “new world order,” the contrast between responsible states and rogues grew starker.

It was during the Clinton administration that the term “rogue” came into vogue. When Defense Secretary Les Aspin unveiled the Defense Counterproliferation Initiative in 1993, he warned that “the new nuclear danger we face is perhaps a handful of nuclear devices in the hands of rogue states or even terrorist groups.”⁸ Speaking the next month in Brussels, Clinton himself described Iran and Libya as “rogue states.”⁹ And, giving an address at Georgetown University in October 1994, Secretary of State Warren Christopher repeatedly referred to Iran and Iraq as rogue regimes.¹⁰ In each case, the Clinton administration focused more on threats to the United States than on dangers that rogue leaders posed to their own people. Saddam was a rogue leader because he pursued nuclear weaponry and invaded Kuwait, not because he gassed Kurds and massacred Shi’ites.

It fell to Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security advisor, to define the concept precisely, although he used the slightly more diplomatic term “backlash states” as a label for Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya. “Their behavior is often aggressive and defiant,” he explained. “The ties between them are growing as they seek to thwart or quarantine themselves from a global trend to which they seem incapable of adapting.” They are “ruled by cliques that control power through coercion, they suppress basic human rights and promote radical ideologies.” And, most important for the purposes of U.S. diplomats, Lake noted, “These nations exhibit a chronic inability to engage constructively with the outside world, and they do not function effectively in alliances—even with those like-minded.”¹¹

William Cohen, as defense secretary, tweaked the definition slightly to emphasize regimes that were immune to traditional deterrence. Iran’s Islamic Revolution and suicide terrorism had propelled apocalyptic ideologies to the fore. The “mutual assured destruction” of the Cold War was predicated on the fact that no matter how antagonistic the Soviet Union was toward the United States, it was not going to risk annihilation in pursuit of its ideological goals. But if post–Cold War rogues aimed to cause destruction even if it put their own existence at risk, then traditional U.S. strategies could no longer apply.

Hence, although the fight against rogue regimes would be attached in the public mind to the George W. Bush administration with the “axis of evil” speech and the “global war on terror,” it was actually Clinton’s team that first explained the necessity of breaking with traditional diplomacy, even at the cost of antagonizing friends and rivals. European allies criticized Clinton for skirting international law in his approach to rogues, while Russia criticized U.S. moves to develop a missile defense system against the backdrop of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.¹²

Critics of American policy toward rogue regimes are correct in saying that the United States has been inconsistent. The radical thinker Noam Chomsky even argued that the United States was the true rogue, and the economist Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr. has suggested that American disdain for international organizations and many treaties make it a “rogue nation.”¹³ Robert Litwak, a Clinton national security aide, noted the inconsistency of demonizing Cuba while treating (pre–civil war) Syria like a normal state despite its place on the State Department’s terrorism list and its weapons of mass destruction programs.¹⁴ The roots of such inconsistency lie in the desire for diplomacy. First the Clinton administration and later the first-term Obama team treated Syria benignly because the White House sought to reel it into the Middle East peace process. The effort failed spectacularly and became an illustration of the price that engagement with rogues can exact.

If there is debate over which countries are rogue, there is consensus with regard to certain regimes. The Islamic Republic of Iran broke with diplomatic norms when it took American diplomats hostage, and North Korea’s reclusive communist regime has thumbed its nose at traditional diplomacy for decades. The brutality and terror sponsorship of the Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi and the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein led both to become subject to sweeping international sanctions. Pakistan may appear to be a normal state, but the inordinate power and rogue behavior of its intelligence service places it within the definition of rogue regime. American diplomats have faced down Afghanistan’s Taliban first as a government and, after 9/11, as an insurgent group. The Palestine Liberation Organization took the opposite trajectory: When American diplomats first began their dialogue, the PLO was an unrepentant terrorist group. Diplomacy led it to become a government. Other terrorist groups remain pariahs, but this has not prevented some officials from counseling engagement with them.

Why Engage?

How the United States can best handle rogue regimes is a problem that continues to confront presidents, secretaries of state, senators, and generals. Presidents have a broad menu of options ranging from diplomatic to economic to military. They have invaded and occupied, sanctioned and talked, bombed and bribed.

Each strategy has costs and benefits. The key for policymakers is to determine how to achieve goals at minimum cost. In the face of intractable foes, hard power can be tempting: Reagan bombed Libya; George H. W. Bush attacked Iraq and Panama; Clinton bombed Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Serbia, and came very close to launching airstrikes against North Korea. George W. Bush invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq. Bombing and military strikes may be effective, but the costs are high: military action is expensive, it antagonizes the international community, and it risks blowback. Every administration, for good reason, adopts the mantra that a military option against international rogues should remain on the table but as the strategy of last resort.

More often, when the White House and Congress seek to look tough, they turn to sanctions. Jimmy Carter sanctioned the Soviet Union after the invasion of Afghanistan, Reagan sanctioned Poland after the imposition of martial law, George H. W. Bush sanctioned China after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, Clinton slapped sanctions on Iran because of the Islamic Republic’s support for terrorism, George W. Bush sanctioned Sudan because of Khartoum’s complicity in the Darfur genocide, and Obama sanctioned Syria and Zimbabwe on account of human rights violations.

Sanctions may be symbolically satisfying and wear down rogue regimes over time, but their effectiveness—in the near term, anyway—is questionable, and they are costly to ordinary people living under the targeted regime. Reagan opposed sanctions on South Africa at least in part because black South Africans would suffer more than whites. On the other hand, when Secretary Albright was confronted with reports of Iraqi suffering under sanctions, her response was, “We think the price is worth it.”¹⁵ While tales of starving Iraqi children had been greatly exaggerated, the statement was damaging nonetheless. Perception means more than reality on the international stage, and Albright’s words came to symbolize U.S. callousness. Public opinion turned against sanctions. Saddam Hussein may have been the true villain in Iraq, but it was the United States that the public condemned on the streets of London, Paris, and Berlin, as well as in the Arab Middle East. Policymakers then made narrow, targeted sanctions the economic tool of choice. But targeted sanctions elevate symbolism over effectiveness, and by avoiding discomfort they remove the potential for grassroots movements to change regime behavior. In any event, the business community often opposes sanctions, since less scrupulous Chinese, Russian, or French competitors do not hesitate to fill the gap when American companies step back.

Because of the problems inherent in other strategies, policymakers often conclude that their best option is to talk. That engagement must be a better strategy is a logical fallacy, however. Just because more coercive strategies have costs does not mean that less coercive strategies have fewer costs.

Diplomats make many arguments to advocate engaging rogues. The most basic argument is that it never hurts to talk. Within the State Department, there is a culture that treats engagement as cost-free. “We will be no worse off if we try diplomacy and fail,” said Nicholas Burns, formerly the under secretary for political affairs, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, throwing his support behind Obama’s outreach to Iran.¹⁶ Richard Armitage, who was his boss during George W. Bush’s first term, made a similar argument: “We ought to have enough confidence in our ability as diplomats to go eye to eye with people—even though we disagree in the strongest possible way—and come away without losing anything.”¹⁷

Officials often interpret a rogue’s willingness to talk as a sign that progress is possible. In 1999, for example, the State Department spokesman James B. Foley defended engagement with North Korea. “We don’t meet for the sake of meeting,” he said. “We believe that it is a positive sign that we and North Korea decide[d] to meet bilaterally, and we have such meetings because we believe progress can be achieved.”¹⁸ Joel S. Wit, a former State Department official and North Korea specialist, counseled the same approach early in the Obama administration. “Since Mr. Kim has said publicly that he is open to talks, the United States should do nothing to shut what may be a window of opportunity.”¹⁹ James Kelly, who led talks with North Korea for the Bush administration, argued that engagement provided the best hope. “Persistence, quiet resolve, and calmly working with allies and partners will serve U.S. interests better than loud speeches, threats or ineffective sanctions attempts,” he reasoned.²⁰ Diplomats have likewise counseled unrestricted engagement toward Iran. “Diplomats should talk, even with our foes,” explained L. Bruce Laingen, the senior diplomat held hostage in Tehran after the Khomeini revolution. “That’s what we do. It doesn’t make sense for us not to talk.”²¹

Politicians also get involved in the game. Senator Arlen Specter was a vocal proponent of engaging rogue regimes, and he made flipping Syria his special goal. He never succeeded. After meeting one Syrian delegation in 2003, he admitted, “The only real agreement came on the utility of dialogue even in the absence of any agreement on any proposed solution.”²² But no matter: Specter saw the fact that the Syrians were talking at all as an achievement. The senator from Pennsylvania was no outlier in this regard; the belief that talk is useful as the alternative to isolation permeates American diplomacy. According to Charles Hunter, the top diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Damascus for much of 2010, “It is better to engage, discuss differences and try to overcome them, than to ignore or isolate.”²³

Keeping the door open is not the only justification for engaging rogues. Prominent politicians saw engagement as an important component of national defense in the post–Cold War world order. “Diplomacy has become more important than ever as a vital front-line defense of American interests,” said Joe Biden, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in 1997.²⁴ Engagement was seen as a way to avoid misunderstanding and prevent rogues from stumbling into conflict. In 2003, as evidence mounted that North Korea was cheating on its international commitments to curtail its nuclear weapons program, Biden declared, “Talking is not appeasement. It is the most effective way to tell North Korea what it must do if it wants normal relations with us. In fact, in dealing with an isolated regime and a closed-off leader, talking clearly and directly is critical if we want to avoid miscommunication and miscalculation.”²⁵ Madeleine Albright echoed Biden’s view. “Talking is the way you deliver the message that you need to have received by the other side,” she told a Senate Democratic leadership news conference.²⁶ Direct diplomacy can certainly facilitate communication, but the question for policymakers is whether it is possible to communicate positions toward rogue regimes without formally engaging them—for example, by means of a presidential speech.

Proponents of engagement also cite amelioration of rogue behavior as a benefit of engagement, even if talks ultimately lead nowhere. Negotiations can embroil adversaries in process. In the Middle East, much of the strategic logic of engagement with Palestinians in the 1990s was to entangle the PLO so tightly in a peace process that they would be unable to extricate themselves. Nicholas Burns adopted similar logic when he suggested that “negotiation may now be the most effective way to slow down Iran’s nuclear progress.”²⁷ Leon Sigal, a former editorialist for the New York Times, suggested that dialogue with rogues was the best mechanism to manage their psychology. Reasoning that those states were “insecure,” he said that coercion and threats of force “may give them more of a reason” to seek nuclear arms.²⁸

Henry Kissinger disagreed. Recalling Cold War talks with the Soviet Union, he observed, “When talks become their own objective, they are at the mercy of the party most prepared to break them off, or at least the party that is able to give that impression.”²⁹ Still, Kissinger favored engagement with rogues under certain circumstances. He argued that continuing the nuclear stalemate with Iran, for example, “would amount to a de facto acquiescence by the international community in letting new entrants into the nuclear club.”³⁰

If some diplomats use engagement as just a way to manage crisis, others believe that it offers real opportunity. In their study of the Arab-Israeli peace process, Daniel Kurtzer, a former ambassador to both Egypt and Israel, together with Scott Lasensky, a Middle East specialist recruited into the State Department during the Obama administration, argued that diplomats can take two general approaches to reconciling with enemies: They can wait for opportunities in which to seek peace, or they can use engagement to create opportunities.³¹ This was also Senator Chuck Hagel’s logic when he advocated more dialogue with Iran. “Engagement creates dialogue and opportunities to identify common interests,” he said.³² The State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley described the Obama administration’s Middle East peace strategy in similar terms:

We want to get this process started. Once we get into the process, we think that it has the potential to create a dynamic that will create some momentum. . . . We recognize that until you get into a process, it is almost impossible to make progress on these issues. So getting them started, beginning to address the specific issues at the heart of this effort, then we think that that dynamic—it will take care of itself.³³

Seasoned diplomats also identify more precise benefits. Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, trumpeted the intelligence value of engagement. He advocated engaging Hezbollah in order to learn more about the organization, its personnel, and its internal divisions.³⁴ Likewise, Nicholas Burns argued that three decades without diplomatic relations with Iran had left Washington operating in the dark. “In the absence of diplomatic relations and the lack of a substantial American business or journalistic presence in Iran, we have no real basis to understand its government, society and people,” Burns told a Senate committee.³⁵ Whether the intelligence gained in such diplomatic initiatives provides a net gain over sophisticated satellite pictures, phone intercepts, multibillion-dollar espionage services and broadcast media remains an open question.

The Uncertainty of Engagement

Diplomacy may provide opportunities, but it also imposes costs. Some are quite literal: diplomats often couple engagement with financial and material inducements, sometimes to the tune of billions of dollars. The results may or may not be worth the price. Had American officials not sat down to talk with North Korea’s leadership in the mid-1990s, American security would be no worse; indeed, the U.S. Treasury would be wealthier, and the American strategic position would be no worse.

Aid and inducements may actually create reverse incentives and effectively reward rogues for their defiance. The United States helped bankroll a nuclear reactor for North Korea and has offered technological assistance to Iran. Bribing adversaries with incentives can contribute to a squeaky-wheel syndrome. In 2001, for example, the United States provided Mali, one of the poorest countries on earth but at the time the freest and most democratic Muslim state in the world, just $33 million in development assistance, while Lebanon, a country with one-third the population and host to numerous terrorist groups, received 50 percent more. It was not until a coup ended Mali’s democracy and al-Qaeda took root in its territory that the State Department again focused on the West African country.

Successful engagement requires assessment of an adversary’s sincerity, weakness, and desire. Does the rogue leader truly seek a resolution or does he merely want to delay, to give diplomats reason for hope and hold off sanctions while he pursues other aims? Arguably, Muammar Qadhafi chose to engage sincerely only in 2003, several years into his dialogue with American and British officials. Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was not sincere in his dialogue leading up to the second Camp David summit, even if some of his subordinates were. Saddam Hussein seldom approached the negotiating table with sincerity. Whenever rogues engage insincerely, they can avoid accountability, consolidate their position, rearm, and make resolutions more difficult.

Engagement does not happen in a vacuum; circumstances matter. Neither the success of Nixon’s outreach to China nor Reagan’s détente with the Soviet Union was inevitable. Both were the result of a confluence of events that affected the thinking of policymakers in Beijing and Moscow. Diplomatic breakthroughs occurred on the Korean Peninsula and in the Middle East after the United States’ lightning victory against Saddam Hussein in 1991. The Soviet Union was gone, and rogues had few patrons. But when Iran backs Hezbollah and Pakistan supports the Taliban, engagement with either group often goes nowhere.

Calculations of strength and weakness play into the question of whether to engage. When Washington reaches an impasse with a rogue, does the threat of military force improve the chance for engagement to work, or does it set the United States down a slippery slope to war? If policymakers bluster but then back down, as Obama did after Bashar al-Assad’s regime used chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, is it possible to continue engagement with credibility, or will rogue regimes conclude that America is, in the words of Osama bin Laden, merely a “paper tiger”? When rogue actors do not take American threats seriously, how might the United States restore its credibility?

Perhaps the most difficult question with regard to engagement is also the most basic: When presidents or diplomats engage, how do they measure success? It is far easier to gauge military success, and the cost of military action is also easy to calculate in terms of blood and treasure. The success of sanctions is also quantifiable: If sanctions are imposed to change behavior, compel withdrawal from territory, or force the abandonment of terrorism, it is easy to judge both success and cost in lost business. With engagement, it’s trickier. Seldom does engagement lead outright to a rogue regime dismantling weapons programs or ceasing terror sponsorship. Diplomats often shy away from announcing metrics of interim success out of fear that politicians will lose patience for diplomacy if those are unmet. As important, diplomats seldom acknowledge that diplomacy can exact a cost in terms of lost momentum, lost credibility, or time that adversaries can use to develop weapons or plan terrorist attacks.

The Perils of Engagement

Talking to rogue regimes and terrorist groups makes headlines. Newspapers are far more likely to track the latest talks between American and North Korean diplomats than they are to report on the latest tête-à-tête between the United States and Sweden. Rogue engagement makes or breaks legacies. Had President Jimmy Carter left office after brokering peace between Egypt and Israel, he might be remembered as a brilliant foreign policy tactician. But the Iran hostage crisis sank his presidency and tarred his legacy. Clinton likewise gambled heavily on peace between Israelis and Palestinians in part to shape his legacy. Not only did his peace deal collapse, but it led to decades of further strife in the region.

Moral clarity is often the first casualty of diplomacy with rogues. Two years after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, Biden condemned George H. W. Bush’s attempt to engage China. “What President Bush and Secretary Baker have been seeking to engage is the world’s last major Communist regime,” he said; “it is a regime marked by brutality at home and irresponsibility abroad; and it is a regime the United States should now cease to court and must no longer appease.”³⁶

If rogues are intractable, engagement may simply appease them. It was for this reason, at least rhetorically, that George W. Bush refused to engage rogue regimes. Speaking before Israel’s Knesset on May 15, 2008, the president said:

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.³⁷

Because diplomacy with rogue regimes has such high stakes, the decision to engage rogues often affects the way politics and policymaking work. Political appointees in the State Department serve at the pleasure of the president and their careers depend on political loyalty, so they have a stake in diplomacy’s success. Career diplomats may have policy agendas just as strong as those of their political counterparts, if not stronger—though they might react with indignation to anyone who questioned their integrity. Diplomats immerse themselves in raw intelligence to decide what their superiors see or do not see. If they bury evidence of an adversary’s insincerity, other officials may develop a false belief that diplomacy is succeeding. Often there is a reckoning when intelligence and reality diverge. In foreign policy, the price is paid in blood and treasure.

The State Department is especially susceptible to political manipulation. Many diplomats see engagement as their raison d’être and amplify any glimmer of hope, however contrived, into justification for new engagement. When Congress involves itself in foreign policy—making engagement conditional on a rogue’s cessation of terrorism, for example—diplomats avoid findings that might be the death knell for an initiative they believe in. It is not only a problem within the State Department. As administrations become invested in high-profile diplomatic engagement, many officials face the temptation of shaping intelligence to support the initiative and manipulating the metrics by which to judge the effectiveness of their efforts.

Diplomacy can also constrain other options. As the White House pursues rapprochement, it often pressures agencies to suspend parallel policy initiatives—covert operations, military preparation, and even human rights reporting—that might upset adversaries or cause the international community to doubt the American commitment to dialogue. Clinton, for example, ordered that an FBI report fingering Iran in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia be recalled in order to protect the “dialogue of civilizations” that the Iranian president Mohammad Khatami was promoting. In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, suspended postwar planning because she worried that preparing for conflict would mar the optics of diplomacy.

Engagement with terrorist groups brings its own unique costs. When diplomats talk to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, they legitimize the path to the negotiating tables that these groups have walked. The symbolism of such engagement might alter the political climate.

Even when engagement does not fail, success can be costly. As Serbs massacred Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia, Joe Biden criticized how “diplomatic intervention . . . compromised principle at every turn.”³⁸ When Milosevic finally consented to cut a diplomatic deal, Biden was dismayed, saying he had “mixed emotions” about Milosevic’s agreement to a truce. “I believe he only understands force,” Biden explained. “I believe that he is the problem. I believe that, ultimately, force will have to be used. And, quite frankly, I wish we had just used this force.”³⁹

The struggle over when and how to engage rogue regimes is not new. Fundamentally, it is interests that determine when to engage. As Kissinger noted, “If ideology necessarily determined foreign policy, Hitler and Stalin would never have joined hands any more than Richelieu and the Sultan of Turkey would have three centuries earlier. But common geopolitical interest is a powerful bond.”⁴⁰ At the same time, a cost-benefit analysis colors the assessment of interests. If one lesson can be learned from the history of engaging rogue regimes, it is that diplomacy is never a cost-free strategy. Indeed, it can often be deceptively costly to American national security.

In any case, the United States no longer has the luxury of isolation. Rogue regimes, international pariahs, and terrorists who once focused their activities thousands of miles away are developing the means to strike anywhere in the world. Talking alone will not solve the problem.