Talking with Monsters

Nicholas Kristof had a great column in the New York Times this morning entitled "Talking With the Monsters." Here's an excerpt:

"If there’s one overriding lesson from North Korea’s apparent nuclear test, it’s this: We need to negotiate directly even with hostile and brutal regimes.

It’s probably too late to clean up the mess that President Bush has made on the Korean peninsula, but there is time to apply the lesson to Syria and especially Iran — where we may soon be facing a third military conflict in a Muslim country.

As former Secretary of State James Baker noted in an ABC News interview on Sunday: “I believe in talking to your enemies. ... It’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”...

“By not having any contact, we’ve lost any way of controlling or directing the outcome,” noted James Laney, a longtime Korea specialist and former ambassador to South Korea. “As this test indicates, we’re completely out of the picture.” ...

To show that talking with enemies doesn’t mean rolling over, we can also insist on raising human rights issues. American conservatives have led the way in protesting brutality in North Korea, but the protests simply aren’t effective. The U.S. government could add to the pressure by going public with satellite images of concentration camps and publicizing other intelligence about North Korean human rights abuses.

The challenge is larger than North Korea, though — it concerns how to stand up to all of the world’s rogue regimes. Notably, in the two where Mr. Bush has tried engagement he has enjoyed bits of success. Those are Sudan and Libya.

Even though Mr. Bush says that Sudan is engaging in genocide in Darfur, we continue (quite properly) to negotiate with Khartoum — and that helped end the war between north and south Sudan, after two million deaths. Likewise, negotiations with Libya led it to give up its W.M.D. programs.

In contrast, we eschewed most direct diplomacy with North Korea and Iraq, and the result has been disastrous. So as we lurch ahead toward a showdown with Iran, let’s remember the historical evidence: We sometimes do better talking to monsters than trying to slay them or wish them away."