The document critiques the Bush administration's strategic approach to disarmament, particularly towards rogue states such as Iran and North Korea, arguing that the emphasis on a 'strategic decision' to eliminate weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is ineffective. It suggests that successful disarmament requires a more nuanced approach, involving sustained diplomatic engagement and compromises rather than an all-or-nothing policy. The examples of Libya and South Africa illustrate the complexities of disarmament and the pitfalls of relying solely on the strategic decision framework.

1. jofi joseph
Strategic Mistake
Why Bush can’t disarm Iran.
Over the past six years, the United
States has confronted a range of crises surrounding the proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction (WMD), from North Korea’s fall 2006 nuclear weapons test
to Iran’s willful defiance of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The
Bush Administration’s inclination toward the use of force and regime change as
tools to counter the proliferation of WMDs is well known, as is its distaste for
negotiations with states featuring tyrannical regimes that abuse human rights.
But minimal attention has been paid to an important framing concept used by
senior American government officials in recent years when seeking to persuade
states like North Korea and Iran to stand down their WMD programs. As stated
policy, the United States encourages WMD proliferators to make a “strategic
decision,” sometimes referred to as a “strategic choice.” Accordingly, the United
jofi joseph is foreign relations adviser for Senator Bob Casey, Jr. (D-Penn.).
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect
those of the Senator.
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2. jofi joseph
States demands that rogue regimes assess the costs and benefits of maintaining
illicit weapons programs and then make a voluntary, national-level decision to
eliminate them in a comprehensive and transparent fashion. As senior Admin-istration
officials like to point out, this is what happened with Libya, which in
2003 made just such a decision to end its nuclear weapons program and sur-render
its chemical weapons stocks in favor of closer diplomatic and economic
relations with the West. Indeed, the agreement reached last month between
the United States, North Korea, and four other nations to freeze and eventually
dismantle Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for a series of
economic, energy, and diplomatic benefits is noteworthy precisely because it
strays so far from the Administration’s stated policy.
With the Administration insisting, in the wake of the North Korea deal, that the
strategic-decision approach remains official policy and will guide its handling of
Iran, it is vital to ask whether it actually works. The answer is definitively no. It is
unrealistic to expect a state to reach an overnight realization that nuclear weapons
are not in its national interest. Instead, any such decision can only emerge in the
aftermath of sustained engagement demonstrating the tradeoffs inherent in defy-ing
the will of the international community, a point demonstrated by the years of
negotiation preceding Libya’s decision and, more recently, the agreement forged
in the Six Party Talks on North Korea. In fact, demanding a permanent strategic
decision may inadvertently discourage rogue regimes from taking intermediate
steps that make the world more secure, including “half-loaf” compromises that
fail to resolve a state’s underlying proliferation desires but effectively constrain its
arsenal for a period of time. Although messy, these steps can buy the necessary time
to allow a permanent solution to emerge while securing our national interests in
the interim. Conversely, the strategic-decision approach allows the United States
to sit back while countries move down the road of weapons development. After all,
if a nation refuses to change, the United States won’t talk with them, and absent a
credible threat of force, there is not much else the United States can do.
There is an alternative course, one that worked well in the 1990s, and that is the
lost art of coercive diplomacy: combining incentives and punishments to coerce
recalcitrant regimes into making the right decisions. Such coercive diplomacy—as
we might be seeing on the Korean Peninsula, but will not likely see repeated with
Iran—blends carrots and sticks to ensure that hostile regimes have a clear choice
between economic integration and broad diplomatic acceptance versus isolation
and the prospective use of military force. It sees negotiation as a diplomatic tool,
not a diplomatic reward. And it recognizes something that President Bush has
ignored during his first six years in office: that successful nonproliferation poli-cies
are more often marked by shades of gray than black and white.
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3. strategic mistake
What Does Disarmament Look Like?
In January 2003, the White House faced a thorny dilemma. Under pressure from
the United States and the United Kingdom, the UN Security Council had passed
Resolution 1441, which presented Iraq with a final chance to come clean on its
WMD programs after a decade of stonewalling on its commitments under the
1991 Gulf war cease-fire. Iraq allowed UN and IAEA inspectors to return and
filed a lengthy declaration laying out the current status of its nuclear, biologi-cal,
and chemical weapons programs. Nonetheless, the Hussein regime placed
numerous obstacles before the international inspectors, including refusal to
allow weapons scientists to be interviewed privately and concealment of sensi-tive
documents, actions that led many in the international community to assume
that Iraq was still hiding critical information.
On January 23 the White House
issued a white paper titled “What Does
Disarmament Look Like?” The paper
sought to contrast Iraq’s behavior with
that of other nations that had voluntarily
and transparently surrendered their
WMD programs to the satisfaction of the
international community. In the process,
the White House created a document
that serves as a guide to the Bush Administration’s thinking on disarmament.
It is unrealistic to expect
future proliferators to come
to an overnight realization
that nuclear weapons are not
in their national interest.
According to this document, the first prerequisite for a strategic decision to
disarm calls for any such decision to be taken at the highest political level. The
supreme political authority in a state must sign off on any such decision and
invest personal credibility in ensuring the implementation of resulting commit-ments.
At the same time, a genuine strategic decision must receive the approval
of all key national stakeholders. An agreement drafted and endorsed by a nation’s
foreign ministry to eliminate a WMD program, for instance, means nothing if
the national military has not reached the same conclusion.
Second, the national government must implement bureaucratic initiatives
to dismantle WMD and related infrastructure. A designated entity within the
chain of command must be given a clear mandate and sufficient authority to
organize dismantlement, with carte blanche to overrule any special interests
within a regime that may have reason to hinder or frustrate the process. Desig-nation
of a central actor also allows for smoother communications with outside
countries and international organizations.
Third, and most importantly, there must be full cooperation with interna-tional
authorities and transparent behavior through every step of the process.
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4. jofi joseph
A nation that has made a strategic decision on WMD dismantlement will lead
international inspectors to previously concealed facilities, stockpiles, and per-sonnel.
It will not engage in needless games or coy attempts at concealment;
behavior to that effect is perceived as a smoking gun that a strategic decision has
not been made. Nor will it allow international inspectors into the nation only
to hide information from and engage in subterfuge against them to undermine
their mission.
Running through these criteria is one important tenet—any strategic deci-sion
to disarm must be voluntary and uncoerced; commitments undertaken by
states to dismantle WMD programs made under great duress, the thinking goes,
will have less staying power. Regimes must come to a rational judgment that
they are better off without WMD programs, not simply make a hasty decision
because they are under the gun.
The South African Example
To support their belief that such a transformation is possible, Administration
officials often point to South Africa and Libya as successful models. In both cases,
each government supposedly recognized that its WMD program was artificially
isolating their nation from the global economy and was not providing tangible
security benefits. For South Africa, this argument holds merit. As its notorious
apartheid regime crumbled and the Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980s,
South Africa made a strategic decision to end its long-standing, albeit secret,
nuclear weapons program. Under the leadership of President F. W. de Klerk,
the South African government initiated dismantlement in 1990, acceded to the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) the following year, and in 1993 publicly
disclosed the existence of its program.
By and large, South Africa’s nuclear disarmament met the criteria of a stra-tegic
decision. The decision was made at the most senior political levels: When
the decision was made in 1990 to terminate the nuclear program, President de
Klerk appointed a senior-level steering committee with a mandate to oversee
the dismantlement of the six nuclear devices produced under the program and
the melting and recasting of all highly enriched uranium (HEU) material. The
steering committee fulfilled these orders in the span of slightly more than a year,
completing the dismantlement process by the time the South African government
acceded to the NPT. Moreover, the South African authorities fully cooperated
with the IAEA in verifying the dismantlement of its nuclear weapons program
and accounting for all nuclear materials, stockpiles, and facilities.
The South African experience is a model case for the strategic decision frame-work.
And yet the specifics of the country’s position make it difficult to see it as
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5. strategic mistake
a model for future disarmament scenarios. The decision came amid a peaceful
transition from a uniquely racist regime to a democratic one, and South Africa
decided that it simply no longer needed a nuclear weapon with the demise of
international communism (and with it the threat from communist rebels to its
north). It is unlikely that North Korea or Iran—or any other future proliferator—
will undergo such an alteration in regime and security environment profound
enough that will enable a 180-degree reversal on their WMD programs.
The Libyan Example
Libya’s December 2003 decision to end its nuclear and chemical weapons pro-grams
and fully cooperate with American, British, and international inspectors
is perhaps a more relevant example—and one embraced by the Bush Administra-tion.
As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “Just as 2003 marked a turn-ing
point for the Libyan people, so too could 2006 mark turning points for the
peoples of Iran and North Korea. . . . We urge the leadership of Iran and North
Korea to make similar strategic decisions that would benefit their citizens.”
No question exists that Libya has acted in an exemplary manner. Tripoli
granted the United States permission to airlift out of Libya, to Tennessee’s Oak
Ridge National Laboratory, a voluminous set of documents and components
from its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, including uranium hexafluo-ride
supplies and centrifuge parts. It invited IAEA officials, as well as Amerian
and British experts, into the country to conduct follow-on inspections, with
the Libyans eagerly opening up their previously illicit programs to the light of
full transparency.
However, a closer examination of Libyan behavior reveals that the Muammar
Quaddafi regime’s decision came only after lengthy negotiations over tradeoffs
and concessions that involved significant deception on the part of the Liby-ans
before the United States and Britain called their bluff. In fact, the Libyan
disarmament process more closely resembled traditional negotiations with a
proliferator state seeking to extract maximum gain before surrendering a valu-able
bargaining chip, rather than a textbook strategic decision. First, the Libyan
decision to end WMD activities was carefully predicated upon the expected
response of the United States and Great Britain, who served as proxies for the
broader international community. Reports indicate that Libya conducted back-channel
talks with representatives of the U.S. government as early as 1992, when
the prospect of opening Libya’s WMD programs to full disclosure and interna-tional
inspection was first put on the table. The behind-the-scenes diplomatic
process continued into the Bush Administration in 2001, with all sides able to
settle on a final agreement only in December 2003.
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6. jofi joseph
Even then, the Libyans were unable to fully commit, instead seeking concrete
assurances on the type of economic, trade, and diplomatic benefits they could
expect upon making this decision, a desire reciprocated by their American and
British interlocutors. The Financial Times reported that Prime Minister Tony
Blair sent a letter to Quaddafi in 2002, with Bush’s concurrence, spelling out
how a final deal on WMD would lead to normalization of relations. And a former
Bush Administration official, Flynt Leverett, disclosed that in 2003 the United
States offered Libya an “explicit quid pro quo” involving the lifting of U.S. sanc-tions
in return for a verifiable termination of Libya’s WMD program.
In other words, Libya, the United States, and the United Kingdom were
engaged in lengthy negotiations, with the discussions focused on the gains Libya
could expect by doing the right thing on WMD disarmament. Advocates of the
strategic decision approach often min-imize
the value of negotiations with
rogue regimes. Yet rather than proving
their point, the Libya example presents
stubborn proof that such negotiations
can be essential for securing prolifera-tion
successes.
Furthermore, the strategic decision
The Administration’s thinking
on counterproliferation is
akin to equating grand larceny
with jaywalking.
school of thought posits that those nations that have made a genuine commit-ment
to disarmament will have no reason to dissemble or conceal evidence from
international authorities and inspectors. Yet, in the case of Libya, months of
desultory talks in 2003 produced results only following just such an incident.
In October 2003, the United States, acting on sensitive intelligence and working
in concert with Germany and Italy, intercepted a freighter headed toward Libya
found to be carrying essential components for uranium-enrichment centrifuges.
The contents of the BBC China cargo allowed American officials to confront
the Libyans with concrete evidence that Tripoli’s nuclear program was on a
much larger scale than they had previously revealed. It was only at this point
that the Libyan regime fully confessed, inviting American and British weapons
experts and intelligence officials into their country, opening up their weapons
facilities and stockpiles, and making available scientists for interviews.
Libya’s deceitful behavior raises questions about why that country is cel-ebrated
by the Bush Administration as a model for strategic-decision making.
Had Iran or North Korea engaged in similar talks with the United States, only
to be discovered at the eleventh hour engaging in illicit procurement activities,
those discussions likely would have quickly collapsed. After all, such behavior
would run counter to the whole strategic decision approach.
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7. strategic mistake
Why the Strategic Decision Paradigm Fails
To the Administration’s credit, there are advantages to the strategic-decision
template. It allows the United States to communicate clearly that WMD prolif-eration
is the wrong choice for nations that aspire to a prosperous future, full
membership in the international community, and a rewarding relationship with
the United States. It also provides valuable clarity in assessing whether nations
are truly committed to dismantling WMD programs. A state that continually
hedges its bets, frustrates international inspectors, conceals WMD-related
information, and limits transparency is a state that has not yet made a genuine
decision to give up its illicit programs. Recognition of such behavior is invalu-able
in shaping follow-on national and international responses.
Nevertheless, a rigid and unyielding emphasis on the necessity of a strategic
decision can actually encourage recalcitrant states to maintain, if not expand,
their illicit programs. That’s because in adopting an all-or-nothing approach, the
United States risks missing out on partial “half-a-loaf” compromises that may
further nonproliferation interests. Nowhere is this dynamic better seen than in
the case of North Korea. From 1994 to 2002, the Agreed Framework effectively
froze the most dangerous component of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program,
its plutonium reprocessing capability located at Yongbyon, while permitting it
to retain its existing nuclear facilities and avoiding a timetable for dismantle-ment
of its nuclear program. That agreement collapsed in the fall of 2002, when
American representatives confronted North Korean officials with evidence of
a secret uranium-enrichment program. The North Korean officials confessed
to the violation, triggering a chain of events that culminated in North Korea’s
ejection of IAEA inspectors, its withdrawal from the NPT, and the restart of its
plutonium-based weapons program—ultimately leading to its test of a nuclear
weapon in October 2006.
Despite its very real success, Republican pundits and lawmakers have
mocked the Agreed Framework as the most egregious case of appeasement
since Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich muttering “peace in our
time.” Nothing could be further from the truth, as the last four years have
effectively demonstrated. Under President Bill Clinton’s watch, the United
States averted the prospect of a bloody war on the Korean peninsula with a
negotiated agreement that, while admittedly imperfect, served to keep in check
North Korea’s nuclear program for almost a decade. The Agreed Framework,
although never advertised as anything more than a temporary and incomplete
solution, succeeded in imposing a cap on North Korea’s plutonium-reprocess-ing
capacity for eight years and hence prevented a nuclear “breakout” on the
Korean peninsula.
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8. jofi joseph
And, whereas the Clinton Administration threatened a military strike in
1994 if the North Koreans so much as touched spent fuel rods that could be
reprocessed for weapons-grade plutonium, the Bush Administration, facing a
nearly identical scenario in the winter of 2002, stood idly by and watched the
North Koreans cart away the spent fuel rods and restart the Yongbyon nuclear
reactor. Administration policymakers defended their laissez-faire approach by
pointing to North Korea’s secret uranium-enrichment program and declaring
that Pyongyang had already violated the Agreed Framework; that North Korea
was now explicitly violating the Agreed Framework was irrelevant because it
had already revealed its true stripes.
In effect, Bush Administration policymakers were viewing the North Korean
crisis through the perspective of the strategic-decision model. The uranium-enrichment
effort, they felt, offered clear evidence that North Korea had not
truly committed to disarmament when it signed the Agreed Framework in 1994.
Until North Korea arrived at a genuine strategic decision that nuclear weapons
did not serve its national interests, they maintained, it made little sense for the
United States and the international community to pretend otherwise through
compromise deals or agreements honored in the breach.
But the Administration’s thinking is akin to equating grand larceny with jay-walking:
Both North Korean violations qualify as contempt for commitments
previously made, yet their degrees of magnitude are not comparable. The ura-nium-
enrichment program, if it existed in the first place (North Korea has sub-sequently
denied any confession and the underlying intelligence remains shaky),
was still in its nascent stages in 2002 and was years from posing any critical
danger to the United States. By contrast, for eight years, the Agreed Framework
mothballed North Korea’s plutonium-based nuclear weapons program under
the watchful eyes of IAEA inspectors. The spent fuel rods that were effectively
frozen under the Agreed Framework represented a direct danger to the United
States; their reprocessing could yield in a matter of months sufficient fissile
material for four to five nuclear weapons.
Of course, the North Korea case demonstrates that the strategic-decision
paradigm can only go so far, even with its strongest proponents. In late 2006,
Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill was granted unprecedented flex-ibility
by the White House and Rice to reach an agreement with Pyongyang and
halt, if not dismantle, its growing nuclear program. After a subsequent series
of intense negotiations, including bilateral talks between the United States and
North Korea, the Six Party Talks reached consensus in February on an agreement
to freeze the Yongbyon reactor and lay the foundation for further nuclear dis-mantlement
steps in exchange for a series of concessions, including immediate
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9. strategic mistake
energy assistance and the softening of U.S. financial sanctions. In effect, despite
all its words of castigation and condemnation of its predecessor’s efforts, the
Bush Administration has signed on to a sequel to the Agreed Framework.
Nonetheless, the strategic decision paradigm imposed severe costs in the
interim period. Between 2002 and 2007, the North Koreans reportedly has
quadrupled the size of its plutonium-based stockpile, making the October 2006
nuclear test a fait accompli (with more fissile material on hand, North Korea could
afford to expend some of it in a nuclear test). By any measure, the North Korean
nuclear problem today is significantly worse than it was in 2002. History rarely
gives us the opportunity to assess how two different leaders would respond to a
similar situation, yet the two nuclear crises on the Korean Peninsula in 1994-1995
and 2002-2006 have done just that. And the verdict is not kind to President Bush
and the strategic-decision approach
he followed on the Korean Peninsula
for the majority of his presidency—and,
more ominously, continues to follow
with Iran.
Indeed, the relative success of the
By dint of its national interests
and global leadership duties,
the United States cannot
afford the luxury of refusing to
engage dangerous regimes.
Agreed Framework demonstrates that
partial compromises sometimes have a
place in nonproliferation policy, even
if they are unsatisfying and do not provide full closure. Diplomacy does not
always insist upon immediately solving a thorny problem, but rather managing
and containing a problem for a period of months or years until more propitious
circumstances arrive. With their firm delineation of right versus wrong choices
by national governments, strategic-decision advocates do not allow for this form
of nuance. Their emphasis on a permanent solution can allow potential inter-mediate
opportunities for constraining further proliferation to slip away.
The strategic-decision model also inadvertently absolves the United States
of any obligation for leadership. Strategic-decision advocates focus their atten-tion
on the proliferating state; it is the bad actor that is expected to recognize
the error of its ways, make amends to the international community, and disarm
in a thorough and transparent manner. Because a nation that has made a real
strategic decision should not expect explicit incentives and concessions, minimal
attention is paid to the “carrots” offered by leading powers and the international
community. Under the strategic-decision approach, the inducements offered by
the United States and other leading powers ultimately do not matter.
Taken to its extreme, as it often is by the Bush Administration, the strategic-decision
school of thought can absolve the United State of even the need to talk
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10. jofi joseph
with WMD proliferators. If the burden of proof for a state that is dismantling
its illicit programs is total and complete cooperation, with no caveats, modifiers,
or exceptions, then negotiations to establish such modalities are not required.
As former Undersecretary of State and UN Ambassador John Bolton asserted
in a speech drawing out the lessons for Iran and North Korea from the Libya
case, “The principle, though, of not rewarding outlaw regimes merely for com-ing
back into compliance with their past obligations is an important one for the
United States to uphold. It is not only anathema to our values—it is bad policy. It
will encourage further violations not only with the state in question, but other
rogue states as well.”
It makes sense that an administration that has demonstrated extreme reluc-tance
to engage those regimes it finds odious for reasons of tyranny, human
rights abuses, or general anti-Americanism will be drawn to a paradigm for
WMD proliferation that minimizes the importance of negotiations and mutual
compromises. Yet, ultimately, such an approach represents an abdication of
responsibility. By dint of its national interests and global leadership duties, the
United States cannot afford the luxury of refusing to engage dangerous regimes
on ideological or moral grounds. Already, we see the end results of such a course:
WMD proliferation has accelerated and other nations, most notably China, have
stepped into the void created by the absence of U.S. leadership
Resuscitating the Art of Coercive Diplomacy
As evidenced by the recent North Korean agreement, the Bush Administration
is not necessarily beholden to the strategic-decision paradigm when it comes
to navigating nonproliferation challenges. After six years of policy paralysis
that permitted North Korea to become a declared nuclear power with ample
fissile material, the Administration finally reversed course and struck a deal
with Pyongyang. Yet it is important to remember that the North Korean deal
likely represents more of an aberration than a fundamental change in policy.
More than anything else, it appears to have been driven by the White House’s
need for a foreign policy success in an otherwise bleak environment. And the
strategic decision model continues to undergird the U.S. approach to Iran: The
White House continues to rule out a diplomatic outreach to Tehran, demand-ing
that Iran first verifiably suspend its uranium enrichment program before
talks can begin.
U.S. officials have not been shy about concealing an implicit threat of mili-tary
action when it comes to Iran. Yet any objective observer can realize that
the U.S. military is in no position to engage in a third front in Southwest Asia,
much less absorb the threat of Iranian retaliation within Iraq. Which means
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11. strategic mistake
that if the United States cannot rely on the power of military force, the threat
of regime change, or the aura of moral condemnation to convince proliferators
to promptly disarm, it must develop an alternative framework to effectively
constrain and roll back proliferation. It is time for the Bush Administration to
re-acquaint themselves with the concept of coercive diplomacy, a time-honored
approach that has been largely abandoned for the past six years.
Coercive diplomacy successfully incorporates openness to dialogue and
negotiations, backed by the threat or use of limited force, to facilitate a success-ful
outcome. A nation practicing coercive diplomacy is not afraid to reveal, and
even brandish, the stick of force, so long as it publicly demonstrates that it is
willing to settle for a peaceful solution that achieves its objectives. A successful
application of coercive diplomacy ultimately avoids the use of force, because
the threat of force is so credible that the adversary recognizes further defiance
is unwise in the face of a peaceful, negotiated alternative.
Three key principles underlie a successful use of coercive diplomacy as it
applies to the challenge posed by proliferation outlaws. The first principle is
that regime disarmament trumps regime change. It is impossible to engage in
coercive diplomacy with another regime if you are simultaneously seeking the
forcible removal of that regime. No matter how heinous a regime, if the prin-cipal
aim of U.S. foreign policy is to prevent that regime from acquiring WMD,
then Washington must be willing to accept a verifiable disarmament package
even as the regime continues to solidify its internal power. The United States
must be willing to credibly assure proliferating nations that, if they faithfully
implement disarmament obligations, they will enjoy a minimum level of access
to U.S. diplomatic, economic, and security benefits and will not need a nuclear
weapon to deter U.S.-fostered regime change. Both Iran and North Korea, not
unreasonably, have hesitated to engage with Washington ever since Bush made
his infamous “axis of evil” statement in the 2002 State of the Union address.
Instead, hard-liners in both regimes have been empowered to block any con-ciliatory
stances toward Washington by citing the barely hidden desires in the
Bush Administration for their removal. Regime change may be an appropriate
alternative in those cases where it stands a chance of success. Unfortunately,
in both Iran and North Korea, both regimes have strengthened their grip over
the past four years. Calls to depose the rulers in Tehran and Pyongyang are
ultimately counterproductive.
This approach need not surrender all of the goodies Washington has to offer
in exchange for WMD disarmament alone. The United States can structure
additional concessions, such as economic assistance, down the road in exchange
for greater democratization and human rights practices. But the proliferation of
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12. jofi joseph
WMDs is the most urgent national security threat facing the United States. No
matter how realpolitik or calculating it may appear, halting the spread of these
weapons must take precedence above all other priorities, including the spread
of democracy and the desired universality of human rights standards. Otherwise,
the U.S. government is placing the interests of foreign citizens above the safety
and security of the American people.
Second, an effective strategy of coercive diplomacy requires the ability to
deliver on both carrots and sticks and deploys both in a balance. Although the
United States has professed openness to a negotiated solution to resolve the
Iranian crisis, it has failed to offer either credible carrots or genuine sticks. On
the carrots side, the United States has refused to make a clear offer of a secu-rity
guarantee to Iran in exchange for its complete and verifiable disarmament,
instead asserting that other issues
must be resolved first or that a security
assurance from the world’s sole super-power
is unnecessary. European and
Asian partners are more than capable of
stepping up and providing various eco-nomic
inducements; what the United
States can uniquely offer is the binding
promise that it will not attack either
It is time for the Administration
to reacquaint itself with the
concept of coercive diplomacy,
a time-honored approach that
has largely been abandoned.
regime. A carrot is not worthwhile unless a nation is willing to extend it.
The Bush Administration has been even more cavalier on the stick side of the
equation. After warning Iran that its rejection of an international call for suspen-sion
of uranium enrichment would be met by strong sanctions, the United States
engaged in months of feckless negotiations with its fellow UN Security Council
members, only to produce a set of weak and limited sanctions that underscored
the lack of international unity on Iran’s nuclear program. In short, we have
substituted bluster for real threats, removing any genuine element of coercion
from our diplomatic approach. A new approach would minimize the hyperbole,
instead working with our partners and allies on a genuine set of sticks that can
be backed by a credible willingness to actually use them. One positive recent
sign is the Administration’s willingness to use financial and economic pressure
as a means to squeeze North Korea and Iran’s access to world capital markets;
the key question is whether the United States is willing to turn off this pressure
in return for specific WMD concessions from Tehran.
Finally, it is important to return to a nuanced understanding of diplomacy and
negotiations as a mechanism for securing broader national interests, not as an end
in and of itself. Many Europeans and other committed “multilateralists” often
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13. strategic mistake
view negotiations as a panacea for international security challenges: So long as all
parties are meeting with one another and dialogue is taking place, they feel, a lid
is kept on potential crises. This perspective ignores the reality that negotiations
can provide the necessary time and cover to allow a proliferator to simultane-ously
engage in discussions while proceeding apace with its WMD programs. At
the other extreme, the Bush Administration has adopted the curious view that
negotiation itself represents a concession, one that should only be parceled out
after the suspected proliferator makes a strategic decision. The Administration
is essentially stating that the price of talking with the United States is unilateral
resolution of the very issue at hand in the first place—a demand that seems to
strike everyone but the White House as fundamentally perverse.
Both of these perspectives are flawed, because they offer excessive import
to the very act of negotiations and diplomacy. Instead, America should once
again recognize that diplomacy is a useful tool of our nation’s foreign policy and,
when used in the right circumstances, can help us secure our national interests.
Diplomacy offers the added benefits of forcing our adversaries to come to the
table with their own credible packages and permitting a glimpse of the inter-nal
divisions and rivalries that may shape decision-making in otherwise closed
regimes. Talking to our enemies does not legitimate their actions or form of
government; instead, it offers a means to lay out clearly what can happen if a
regime chooses to give up its WMD programs and rejoins the international com-munity.
A stubborn refusal to come to the table only forces the spotlight on the
United States and makes it out to be the bad guy, jeopardizing valuable support
from allies and partners. Talking never hurts; as the world’s sole superpower,
the United States should know that better than anyone.
Measuring Success
History’s verdict on the Bush Administration’s nonproliferation record will not
be kind. On its watch, the United States carried out a preventive war against a
regime it accused of amassing WMDs, only to find that Iraq’s efforts had been
stillborn for almost a decade. It stood by as North Korea greatly expanded its
nuclear arsenal, tested a nuclear weapon, and threatened to sell its weapons and
fissile material to the highest bidder, all without any discernible consequences.
Finally, it rejected opportunities in 2002 and 2003 for dialogue on Iran’s emerg-ing
nuclear program when Tehran was more likely to make significant conces-sions;
today, Iran is proceeding apace with its nuclear program and is in little
mood to compromise.
Underlining this disastrous approach to nonproliferation policy is the mis-taken
view that only a strategic decision for comprehensive and irreversible
democracyjournal.org 33

14. jofi joseph
disarmament can qualify as a success. This approach has informed the Admin-istration’s
refusal to talk to unsavory regimes and has rationalized its dispar-agement
of previous U.S. nonproliferation victories, most notably the Agreed
Framework. The strategic-decision model is a ready-made excuse for the U.S.
government to step away from the duties of leadership in the struggle to contain
the spread of WMDs.
Coercive diplomacy offers a more sturdy and reliable foundation for Amer-ica’s
foreign policy in coming years. By successfully integrating all of the avail-able
options in our nation’s toolkit, we can maximize the full spectrum of our
nation’s power, ranging from the strength of our economy to the dominance of
our military. Coercive diplomacy offers an unmistakable choice to nations pur-suing
illicit weapons programs: Join with the United States in a prosperous and
secure future or face the prospect of economic isolation backed by the threat
of force. President Bush has shown encouraging signs that he may be moving
away from the strategic-decision model when it comes to North Korea, but his
unyielding stance remains firm with Iran. If he is to avoid saddling his succes-sor
with an emerging nuclear state at the heart of the Middle East, it is time for
him to switch course. d
34 spring 2007