Diplomacy Is Ill-Served by Name-Calling : Painting adversaries as buffoons trips up the U.S.

To judge from the language of American diplomacy in 1994, foreigners are a feckless lot. They are “irrational” (Kim Il Sung), “desperate” (Fidel Castro), “rogues” (Moammar Kadafi), enfeebled by old age (Deng Xiaoping) or garden variety “thugs” (Raoul Cedras, Slobodan Milosevic). In short, not worthy of statesmanlike treatment by the United States.

This allegedly ill-endowed crew has, however, enjoyed a pretty good year--much of it at U.S. expense. The Chinese humiliated the secretary of state in March. Their reward? Renewal of most-favored nation status and a visit in August by the secretary of commerce with a slew of top businessmen in tow.

Before his death, Kim’s shadow-boxing on the question of North Korea’s nuclear potential earned his (equally “irrational”) successor the prospect of diplomatic recognition and the promise of a new, fully paid-for nuclear reactor. And the little matter of accounting for past plutonium production is now on the back burner.

Castro has succeeded in reinstating the American trade embargo on the U.S. political agenda and in rewriting U.S. immigration laws, not to mention consuming huge amounts of taxpayer money.

In Libya, Kadafi has just celebrated the 25th anniversary of his regime, which, in comparison to his neighbors Egypt and Algeria, looks like an oasis of stability.

Milosevic has made himself indispensable as the main pressure point on the Bosnian Serbs.

Only Cedras’ prospects look cloudy, but even he can expect a comfortable retirement in the south of France.

Not bad going for a bunch of supposedly isolated, impoverished or flaky has-beens. Boris Yeltsin, who once held top position in U.S. foreign-policy priorities, would have been grateful for a tenth of the presidential time and attention devoted to Haiti.

The Administration has not been alone in falling into this trap. Senators, representatives, columnists and commentators have all delivered themselves of dismissive adjectives about foreign leaders.

The trouble is, diplomacy by personalized abuse just does not work. Calling people names may relieve tension or frustration, but will lead policy-makers into grave error if they start believing their own rhetoric. International diplomacy is conducted between sovereign states, complex entities that cannot be given simplistic labels.

A cardinal rule of athletics is never to underestimate your opponents; that puts a dangerous weapon into their hands. So it is with foreign relations. Opponents may be (and often are) highly unsavory. This does not mean, however, that the problems they create can be treated with less than top-class diplomatic finesse.

Demeaning characterization undermines this principle. It creates the impression that a problem is a one-dimensional battle between good and evil, with the good destined to win effortlessly. Surely, the experience of 1994 has demonstrated the error of this approach. The belief, for example, that Kim Il Sung was an irrational, isolated dictator led U.S. policy-makers to ignore his viewpoint, which was that he was acting highly rationally in trying to protect North Korea’s independence and squeeze out what benefit he could from the West. He noted that Ukraine exploited its nuclear status to gain economic assistance. He copied this example and succeeded in doing well for his country.

Similarly, when the first wave of Cuban refugees started to wash ashore in Florida, the U.S. reaction was to dismiss Castro as a desperate holdover from communism seeking to solve his domestic problems at American expense. Maybe so, but, more important, he caught the Administration with its pants down. While the world moved on, U.S. policy on Cuba had remained frozen in an incredibly untenable Cold War time warp. Now Castro may walk away with the big prize in the shape of the ending of the embargo. Senior Democrats, including the chairmen of both the Senate and House foreign affairs committees, have taken his side. Meanwhile, he has exposed the Clinton Administration as in thrall to the Republican-voting Cuban community in Miami. All in all, an astute political play.

These missteps should convey the message that U.S. diplomacy must discard ill-conceived abuse as a diplomatic weapon. It doesn’t get the job done. Many foreign leaders may be distasteful; their countries may be less well governed and less prosperous than the United States, but this does not mean that they are dopes. If foreigners can play their cards skillfully, Americans had better do so as well. In the critical tests confronting the United States, such as a possible invasion of Haiti and the lifting of the arms embargo against Bosnia, a clear head will provide a surer guide than a dictionary of insults.