Life and Leisure

Diplomacy key in turning foes around

By CHEN WEIHUA CHINA DAILY
Updated: 2010-04-30 00:00

NEW YORK — In a world rife with conflicts and wars the title alone of How Enemies Become Friends – the source of stable peace should be inspiring to those who aspire for peace.

Charles Kupchan, who served on the National Security Council in the Clinton administration and is now a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, gives his insights for building lasting peace by discussing 20 historic cases in which long-standing rivalry gave way to peace in this book from the Princeton Press.

Peace was achieved “not through defeat or war, but through diplomacy and a mutual stand-down,” Kupchan said at a recent gathering at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

The cases in the book cover a span of 700 years, from the Old Swiss Confederacy in 1291 to the onset of friendship between the United States and Britain, to the close partnership of China and the Soviet Union in the 1950s, which turned into open rivalry in the 1960s.

Kupchan argues that diplomatic engagement with rivals, far from being appeasement, is critical to rapprochement between adversaries. “Engagement of adversaries, under the right circumstances, is good diplomacy,” he said.

In all the cases he studied, Kupchan said peace resulted because both sides sat down and negotiated away their differences, not because one side coerced the other side into submission.

However, he does not believe it will apply to all cases, such as the conflict between the United States and al-Qaeda “whose ideology is to do you harm.”

“But over a wide range of bad guys we face in Afghanistan, only 2-3 percent fall into that category,” Kupchan explained to China Daily.

“That is why I think it’s important in terms of strategies to focus on the 95-96 percent that we can engage and may be willing to make compromise with us,” he added.

Kupchan contends that the nature of regimes matters much less than commonly thought. “Countries should deal with other states based on their foreign policy behavior rather than on whether they are democracies or the nature of their domestic institutions,” he said.

One of the findings that most surprised Kupchan is the belief that democracies will be good at making peace and non-democracies will not. “I did not find that,” he told the crowds of foreign relations experts.

“I found autocracies, in fact quite nasty regimes, can be reliable partners in peace,” said Kupchan, citing examples of Indonesian President Suharto who killed hundreds of thousands of Indonesian communists and ethnic Chinese, but became a peacemaker with Malaysia.

He also found that diplomacy, not economic interdependence, to be the currency of peace.

“Except for the German integration of the 19th century in which economic integration preceded peace, all the other cases I looked at, political integration and dispute settlement was a necessary condition for getting to peace,” he said.

Kupchan said he believes that concessions and strategic accommodation promote the mutual trust needed to build an international society.

“It is the practice of strategic restraint. It is the willingness of the power in question to tie one or both hands behind the back and to give the other space to back away from territory disputes, to do things that are unusual, to send a signal that (says): “I do not want to do you harm”. Then you wait for the other side to send the same signal. Together you back away from rivalry,” he said.

He supports US President Barack Obama’s politics of engagement with Iran, Cuba, Burma and Syria, and believes that at least one of them will succeed in getting diplomacy right.

While hailing the new START treaty signed by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Kupchan is worried that Obama may stumble when he tries to get the START treaty ratified by the Congress or when he tries to get the sanctions on Cuba or Iran reduced.