The allegation of realpolitik is still intolerable -- even baffling -- to these officials, who pledged themselves to Obama out of a deep faith in his redemptive promise. But if engagement rests upon the expectation that treating autocrats and theocrats with respect will significantly alter their behavior, then it suffers less from cynicism than from credulity -- which is the other article of baggage under which engagement now staggers. How can anyone believe that? Administration officials have been at pains to deny that they ever did, especially since Iran has trampled Obama's entreaties underfoot. The goal of engaging Iran, they now say, was not to change Iran's behavior but to change the behavior of more tractable states, like Russia and China, by showing that the United States was willing to go the last mile even with the Axis of Evil.

Of course, there is abundant evidence that Obama and some of his chief advisors really did hope that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would moderate nuclear policy if they showed due regard for his country's national interests, as Helene Cooper recently noted in the New York Times. But it's also true that from the outset, officials have made the secondary argument for the virtues of engagement. The SOs insisted to me, as other SOs have in the past, that Obama's Iran policy in fact constitutes a triumph of engagement because Russia has increasingly come around to the American view on the imperative for sanctions. They argue that the Russian change of heart owes not only to the country's growing alarm over Iranian ambitions, but also to the White House's persistent effort to put relations with Russia on a less adversarial footing than they were at the end of the Bush years. We have engaged with Russia and reaped the benefits. Of course, Russia hasn't yet signed on to a tough sanctions measure against Iran; and China, which so far has pocketed Obama's shows of deference without much display of gratitude, may scotch the whole affair.

Let us stipulate, then, that engagement is not quite so naive as it appears. But is it not, still, a realist bargain, trading away those universal values that the president so often evokes in the hopes of geostrategic wins, whether on Iran or climate change or the global economy?

"We're trying to say 'no,'" says SO #2. "We're not going to accept that tradeoff. We're going to do this in parallel."

Trying, of course, isn't doing. But in Russia, this official argues, Obama successfully lowered the temperature with President Dmitry Medvedev while still meeting with dissidents and civil society groups, and he criticized the country's undemocratic elections last fall. And it was "parallel," not a "tradeoff": Obama didn't offer to go easy on human rights, or for that matter missile defense, to get an arms deal, nor did he insist that progress on arms control would depend on democratization.

PREVIOUS 123NEXT