President Donald Trump recently said that, if re-elected, he would quickly strike deals with Iran and North Korea. At the same time, Joe Biden has indicated that he would rescind Trump’s tariffs on China and reverse his decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Common to both leaders—and to their audiences—was the belief that, rather than confronting adversaries, it is better to engage them. 

Over the past hundred years, and inexorably since the anti-war movements of the 1960s, engagement has achieved near-sacred status. Institutionalized in dozens of international agencies, taught as writ in Western classrooms, the view of engagement as the ultimate diplomatic tool is no longer challenged. The very word is ameliorative, especially when combined with “mutual respect,” “frank and honest,” and “understanding.” The irony is that, historically, engagement rarely works. On the contrary, it almost always backfires.

That lesson is taught, in cringing detail, by the Bible. When Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, is raped by Shechem, his father engages the Israelites. “You shall dwell with us; and the land shall be open to you,” Hamor placates them, and even agrees to circumcise all his male subjects. The sons of Jacob accept the offer, but two of them—Simon and Levi—massacred the incapacitated Canaanites and pillage their city, “all their wealth, all their little ones and their wives, all that was in the houses.” The fact that Simon and Levi later pay a price for their perfidy does not diminish the lesson’s power. Engagement does not pay. 

The same conclusion is reached roughly contemporaneously in the Odyssey. Feigning the need to conciliate the goddess Athena and announce the end of their war with Troy, Greek warriors construct a large wooden horse. When this “thing of guile,” as Homer calls it, is hauled into the city, the swordsmen spring out and rampage. The warnings of one Trojan priest, quoted by Virgil nearly a thousand years later—“beware of Greeks bearing gifts”—goes unheeded.  

The Romans, in turn, ignored Virgil’s admonition in later appeasing the barbarians. Alaric, King of the Visigoths, ransacked Greece in 396 C.E. and set his sights on Rome. Hoping to appease him, Roman leaders made him a general and enriched him with gold and grain. In 402, though, he invaded Italy and plundered its capital. The Romans “who had respected the faith of treaties, were justly indignant,” wrote Edward Gibbon in the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while “the success of the rebellion encouraged the ambition of every leader of the foreign mercenaries.”

These ancient accounts point out the principle danger of engagement, namely, that it can easily devolve into appeasement. That observation was certainly borne out in the twentieth century, beginning in Munich. The city whose very name is synonymous with appeasement was the scene of a disastrous summit between Adolf Hitler and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in November 1938. In return for promises of “peace in our time” and disarmament, Chamberlain acceded to Hitler’s demand to dismember Czechoslovakia. “The path to appeasement is long and bristles with obstacles,” the British leader wrote, “I feel [now] that it may be possible to make further progress along the road to sanity.” Bitterly rejecting this approach, Winston Churchill replied with words which should be memorized by every modern statesman. “The idea of reasoning with terrorists without force or with appeasement is naive, and I think it’s dangerous,” he stated. “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.” 

Churchill’s quotes on appeasement were documented by the CIA in a memo prepared for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. By that time, the United States should have drawn unequivocal conclusions on the subject. During the 1956 Suez Crisis, President Dwight D. Eisenhower rescued Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser from defeat at the hands of Israel, Great Britain, and France. Nasser rewarded Eisenhower by fomenting anti-American revolutions throughout the Middle East. Later, in 1959, the Eisenhower administration hosted Cuban rebel Fidel Castro in Washington. He ate hotdogs, kissed babies, and even placed a wreath on George Washington’s grave. Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s Vice President, found him to be naïve about Communism but otherwise “a leader of men [who] seems to be sincere.” Nixon was unaware that Castro’s agents were at that same moment meeting with Soviet officials in Moscow.  

Thirteen years later, in February 1972, President Richard Nixon and Secretary Kissinger flew to China. In the “week that changed the world,” they met with Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai and toured three cities. After a hiatus of two decades, diplomatic relations were restored. The Americans made several strategic gestures toward the Chinese, including the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Taiwan, but did not demand the cessation of Beijing’s military support to North Vietnam and North Korea. The goal, rather, was to reach a modus vivendi with China based on mutual antagonism to the Soviets and its peaceful transformation into a capitalist and more open society. “Neither China nor the United States, both great nations, want to dominate the world,” Nixon told Mao. “We can find common ground, despite our differences, to build a world structure in which both can be safe to develop in our own way on our own roads.” 

Though Nixon’s initiative proved successful in the short-run, breaking up the Chinese-Soviet alliance, five decades later, it must be judged a failure. Neither Nixon nor Kissinger foresaw Belt and Road, China’s fifty-two-country, $1.3 trillion initiative to dominate the world economy and edge out the United States. He did not envisage the expansion of Chinese naval power from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the Mediterranean. Unforeseen was China’s emergence as a financial giant that refuses to play by Western rules while subverting them, and a society that is both capitalist and ruthlessly closed. “We must cultivate China during the next few decades while it is still learning to develop its national strength and potential, otherwise we will one day be confronted with the most formidable enemy that has ever existed in the history of the world,” Nixon wrote. America engaged China earnestly and may already be facing that foe.

The belief in engagement, as we have seen, is not limited to Americans, to right- or left-wingers. For a decade, from 1993 to 2003, Israel engaged Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat. Under his leadership, the PLO had launched numerous terrorist attacks against Israel and bombarded it from bases in Jordan and Lebanon. The goal, whether staged or immediate, was Israel’s destruction. Yet Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres believed that Arafat could be assuaged and changed. “The Palestinians are our closest neighbors,” Peres said. “I believe they may become our closest friends.” Israeli-Palestinian peace, Peres believed, would usher in a New Middle East, a region without borders or competing nationalisms. He convinced both Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and President Bill Clinton of the sincerity of Arafat’s transformation from terrorist to peacemaker, and to join him in signing the Oslo Accords. 

Those agreements fell victim to many factors including Rabin’s assassination by an anti-Oslo gunman in 1995, but above all to continuing Palestinian terror. A last-ditch effort by Clinton at Camp David in 2000 led to an offer of Palestinian statehood in Gaza, almost the entire West Bank, and half of Jerusalem, but Arafat walked away. “I am a failure,” Clinton told the chairman, “and you have made me one.” Weeks later, Arafat presided over a wave of terrorist attacks—the Second Intifada—that claimed one thousand Israeli lives and forced the Israeli military to re-occupy Palestinian cities. Oslo was dead. The New Middle East envisaged by Peres, borderless and denationalized, would later emerge in the form of the Islamic State’s caliphate.  

Peres later tried to broker a U.S.-Iranian reconciliation by funneling American weapons to Tehran in 1985. Simultaneously, Washington was selling dual-use military technology, even materials used in creating weapons of mass destruction, to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. These initiatives not only collapsed, they boomeranged. The arms transferred to Iran and Iraq would eventually be used against both the United States and Israel.

Still, rather than realists, critics of engagement risk being labeled war-mongers. Advocates of the practice can point to many examples where it has succeeded. Theodore Roosevelt mediated an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and Jimmy Carter brokered the 1979 peace accords between Egypt and Israel; both men earned Nobel prizes. But a closer examination of the record reveals that engagement proves most effective when the stakes are low and the engager faces no immediate threat. Engagement works best when it is perceived as coming from a position of strength rather than a place of weakness. 

Weakness, unfortunately, was key in the most celebrated engagement of this century so far, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. While imposing international sanctions on Iran, the Obama administration reached out to the regime with “mutual respect” and the hope that it would become “a responsible regional power.” To this end, the White House overlooked Iranian aggression against Americans and their allies as well as its support for terror and recognized its right to enrich uranium. President Barack Obama later admitted that military action against Iran was never seriously contemplated. The result, signed on July 14, 2015, was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). “This deal demonstrates that American diplomacy can bring about real and meaningful change,” the president declared. “[It] makes our country, and the world, safer and more secure.” 

Except that it didn’t. Rather than acting responsibly, Iran used the many billions of dollars in sanctions relief to finance its takeovers of Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, to further bankroll terror, and to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads far as the United States. Iran never came clean, as the JCPOA stipulates, on its previous nuclear weapons work, and denied international inspectors access to suspicious nuclear sites. After the United States withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, the speed with which Iran returned to higher-grade enrichment only exposed the flimsiness of the deal’s restrictions. These, in any case, will start expiring in five years. 

The Iran deal may stand as the best contemporary example of engagement’s delusions, but it is not the most persistent. That distinction belongs to the three successive U.S. presidents, beginning with George Bush, who tried to engage Vladimir Putin.  

Meeting with the Russian leader in November 2001, the forty-third president announced that the two had “embarked on a new relationship for the 21st century, founded on a commitment to the values of democracy, the free market, and the rule of law.” In his first meeting with Putin, in July 2009, Obama declared a “reset” in U.S.-Russia relations, an “excellent opportunity to put [them] on a much stronger footing.” Cooperation would begin on arms control, trade, and what the White House called the “Dual Track Engagement in Support of Universal Values.” While excoriating Obama’s failure to conciliate Putin, the newly elected Donald Trump praised him for “doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia period,” and defended him against charges of interfering in U.S. elections. Trump, too, proclaimed a reset. 

But instead of rapprochement, America received Russian invasions of the Crimea and Ukraine, massive arms build-ups, and a savage intervention in Syria. Rather than progressing toward democracy and the rule of law, Russia descended into a brutal dictatorship. Of course, America is not blameless in this tragedy, expanding NATO to Russia’s borders and disrespecting its status as a global power, yet there can be no gainsaying the abject failure of consecutive American efforts to conciliate the Kremlin. U.S.-Russian relations have indeed been reset, but back to the Cold War.  

Yet, far more than a priority for the last three presidents, engagement has been an exalted policy option for three millennia. Why? One answer lies not in diplomacy but possibly in psychology. Appeasement, according to Florida-based psychotherapist Revital Goodman, is often a reaction to trauma. “If a country can experience trauma the way a person can, identification with the aggressor is the psychological condition that could explain why leaders continue to appease enemy nations,” she explained. It’s easy to see how Britain, traumatized by World War I, would want to avoid further conflict by appeasing Germany’s Adolf Hitler, America, post-Korea or Vietnam, might embrace Beijing. Americans demoralized by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were understandably risk-averse to a third one with Iran. Other experts, such as psychoanalysts Sándor Ferenczi and Anna Freud, viewed engagement as an involuntary reaction to abuse, a “situation of tenderness” not unlike the Stockholm Syndrome. 

Perhaps engagement is not only the product of fears and trauma but also of self-love? Implicit in so many of these cases was the belief that the engagers were morally, if not militarily, superior, and that by magnanimously reaching out, they could make their adversaries more like them. “I found him very straightforward and trustworthy,” Bush famously said of Putin. “I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Reenforcing that solipsism is the belief that all human beings are essentially alike and, if treated respectfully, will respond in a rational manner. “Iran is a complicated country just like we’re a complicated country,” Obama told columnist Thomas Friedman. “We learned a lot about each other and our countries,” Trump said after his June 2018 summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. “We have developed a very special bond.” 

Offsetting the grim history of engagement is the inspiring example of leaders who determined to stand strong, from Churchill’s “we shall surrender” and Roosevelt’s “the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory,” and Ronald Reagan’s “stay the course.” It’s Washington crossing the Delaware and Lincoln after the firing on Fort Sumter. As President John F. Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis showed, the more credible the military threat the smaller the chance of having to act on it. 

Yet even this does not mean that armed conflict is the only means of resolving disputes and that nations must rush to use it. That is precisely what happened in Europe in August 1914 igniting in one of history’s bloodiest cataclysms. Diplomacy is always preferred, at least initially and if only to prove that force was, in the end, unavoidable. Prior to launching the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel secured vital American support by first exhausting all nonviolent alternatives. Six months of feverishly seeking to end Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait enabled President George H. W. Bush to field a million-soldier coalition against Saddam Hussein in 1991.

Force should always be the last resort, but neither should engagement be the only resort, a sacrosanct value upheld irrespective of its consequences. Its practitioners must always be wary of those who would view any offer of peace as a sign of impending surrender. Much like war, engagement is a tool that must be used wisely and sparingly, especially when it can only cause harm. 

Michael Oren, formerly Israel’s ambassador to the United States, a Member of Knesset and Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, is the author, most recently, of The Night Archer and Other Stories.

Image: Reuters