Speaking to the enemy

May 22nd 2008
From The Economist print edition

Sometimes it makes sense; sometimes it doesn't; sometimes not talking can be appeasement

EVERY noun enjoys its 15 minutes of fame. Some get more fame than they deserve. In America's foreign-policy debate one that has been bandied about too much lately is “appeasement”. When he spoke to Israel's parliament on May 15th, George Bush blasted those who sought “the false comfort of appeasement” by negotiating with terrorists and radicals in the Middle East. Barack Obama assumed the barb was aimed at him. He in turn accused Mr Bush and John McCain, the Republican candidate, of “hypocrisy and fear mongering”.

Mr Obama had it right. Speaking to the enemy is an ordinary part of diplomacy and does not on its own amount to appeasement. In Munich in 1938, Neville Chamberlain's sin was not that he talked to Adolf Hitler, but that instead of standing up to him he sold Czechoslovakia down the river. Had the British prime minister then been Winston Churchill, the outcome of the meeting, and the history of the world, might have been different. In January 1991 in Geneva, for example, America's secretary of state talked face-to-face to Tariq Aziz, a nasty piece of work who was Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and is currently on trial for murder. But nobody has ever been silly enough to accuse James Baker or the president who sent him (one George H. W. Bush) of appeasement. And that is because instead of letting Iraq keep Kuwait, which it had just invaded and annexed, Mr Baker told Mr Aziz that America would throw Iraq out by force if it did not leave. Hardly appeasement.

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