From an article by Noah Feldman in the 10/1/06 New York Times Magazine:
"...even intractable interlocutors may be worth engaging. Perhaps the conversation serves as a strategy of subterfuge and delay, maintaining a holding pattern or cease-fire until the time is ripe to restart hostilities. Talking can also reveal information about an adversary’s leaders — their preconceptions, their blind spots, their fixed beliefs.
Ultimately, however, the most fruitful negotiations are based on a different premise: under certain conditions, the motives that drive people and regimes can be changed. Properly carried out, diplomacy creates new incentives that alter countries’ underlying interests — and thus their behavior. Over 50 years, a slow and painstakingly negotiated process of economic integration has taught Western Europe’s traditional enemies to look upon one another as allies, then friends and now almost as parts of one big country. If there is ever to be a meaningful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it will involve something similar: putting both peoples in a position to gain more the closer they come together.
When we put our trust in diplomacy, it is not because it is an inspiring or uplifting discourse or because it helps us see the common humanity in others. The stylized circumlocutions of diplomats can make them seem ridiculous or irrelevant: they never seem to be talking about what is really going on. Moreover, talk between enemies may remind both parties of the depth of their mutual enmities and of all the reasons why they were tempted to use force against one another in the first place.
Nevertheless, diplomacy is essential as long as the use of direct force has limits. After 9/11, most Americans were in no mood to talk with our enemies in the Middle East, whatever those enemies’ ideology, and the Bush administration’s policies of invasion and pre-emption reflected that sentiment. Now, having relearned the lesson of our limitations, we find ourselves edging back to the table."
He concludes:
"In an ideological age, diplomacy may seem weak and prosaic. But sometimes it is all we have."