Defining diplomacy

Should we avoid spying on other countries so as to improve our prospects for diplomatic negotiations with them? That is the question FP colleague and friend Steve Walt raises in his comment on the news that an Iranian nuclear scientist defected to the West. In Walt’s words:

Third, I wonder what Americans would think if other intelligence services engaged in energetic efforts to get leading scientists in our nuclear weapons labs to defect? Based on our reaction to prior cases of nuclear espionage (going back to the Rosenbergs), my guess is that we’d regard it as an act of considerable hostility. I’m not saying we were wrong to recruit this guy, but doesn’t it undercut that "open hand" that we’ve supposedly been extending to Iran? I’ll bet that’s how Tehran sees it."

Walt does include a half-hearted disclaimer "I’m not saying we were wrong to recruit this guy" right before he disclaims that very sentiment by asking that very question. Perhaps he was just channeling the Secretary of State (later Secretary of War) Henry Stimson who is alleged to have opposed efforts at signals intelligence in the decades between World Wars I and II because "Gentlemen do not read other gentleman’s mail."

To my eyes, the answer is obvious: Diplomacy works better the more informed we are about the other side’s intentions and capabilities. The absence of good HUMINT from inside Iraq contributed to the failure of diplomacy there. The relative dearth of good HUMINT from inside Iran is likewise hampering diplomacy now. Thus, I celebrate the CIA’s intelligence coup and my only regret is that it somehow became public.

Yes, the Iranian regime will not like the fact that we are spying on them and will like even less that we have a rare intelligence success. But the Iranian regime would never believe that we were not spying on them. Can Walt seriously think that the Iranian regime would trust and credit us with a Stimson-esque refusal to spy? If Walt wants to fret about something, he should join me in fretting about the leak, but not the intelligence operation that was leaked. (I am open to the admonishment that fretting about leaks is as fruitless as fretting about the weather, but at least it is not as fruity as fretting that there is weather.)

Perhaps this points to a deeper confusion about diplomacy, a notion that diplomacy is only talking nice-nice. This view is captured in the quote attributed to Robert Frost: "A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age." In this view, diplomacy is artful speech and the alternative to diplomacy is anything else: spying, sanctioning, and threatening.

In the world of policy realism, however, effective diplomacy usually involves all four aspects: artful and encouraging language; the use of economic and non-economic sanctions as leverage to shift the opponent’s cost-benefit calculation; the delicate deployment of "or else" threats that credibly back up the diplomat’s commitment to resolve the matter, one way or the other; all backed up and informed by careful, all-source intelligence. In other words, I think the definition attributed to Chou En-Lai is closer to the mark: "All diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means."

Ironically, it is the Chinese today who are (willfully, I think) mischaracterizing diplomacy with Iran, blocking the tough sanctions which are our only hope of cajoling Iran into accepting a satisfactory diplomatic solution to the nuclear problem on the grounds that we should avoid sanctions so as to give diplomacy a chance.

We are not going to improve our odds at peacefully resolving the Iranian nuclear problem by eschewing leverage over the Iranian regime. Nor are we going to improve our odds by refusing to spy on them.