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