Unlike Bush, however, Adams did not want war, and neither, it turned out, did France. Once Charles M. de Talleyrand, France's foreign minister, saw that the United States was preparing for war, he began authorizing intermediaries to tell influential Americans that France had no wish for hostilities and would accept a new envoy with none of the onerous conditions (including the payment of a douceur, or bribe, to himself) imposed on the previous mission. Adams began hearing from private citizens and diplomats, including his son John Quincy, then minister in Berlin, that France wanted peace. None of this was publicly known, and opinion remained no less inflamed. But Adams concluded he had to take a risk on Talleyrand's bona fides. In February 1799, he appointed his minister to the Netherlands as envoy to France. And in October 1800, the two sides signed a peace treaty known as the Convention of 1800.
Standing up to the war hawks was the most noble and selfless act of Adams's tenure. As historian William Stinchcombe concludes in The XYZ Affair, "in this respect alone his record as president must be judged as superior to that of many others." Adams believed he had signed his own political death warrant, and he may have been right: He lost considerable Federalist support and was defeated by Thomas Jefferson in the 1800 election. McKinley, by contrast, not only apparently slept like a baby but cruised to reelection. One moral of the story is thus that choosing diplomacy over a needless war may gain a president credit with posterity, but not with voters. If the temperature rises, Obama, too, may have to risk his political future in order to resist the call to arms.
There are other lessons of the so-called quasi-war with France more directly applicable to the current standoff with Iran. Despite its revolutionary domestic policy, France pursued its foreign interests as a rational state actor. Talleyrand was a wily schemer who laughed at ideological purity. One could not say the same, of course, for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- though the English-speaking foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, may be the closest thing to a moderate in the upper ranks of the Iranian leadership. Both, in any case, appear to be trying to maneuver Iran back from the brink. Salehi has recently said that Iran is prepared to rejoin talks with the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) and has proposed doing so in Turkey. Salehi's bona fides are at least as suspect as Talleyrand's, but it behooves the United States and its allies to test them.
What is also clear is that it was not Obama's initial policy of engagement that has induced the change in Iranian behavior, but the vise of economic sanctions he and others have tightened on Iran -- and perhaps also the threat of war from Israel. Iran has been pursuing the logic of an expansionist foreign policy, just as France did; in both cases, revolutionary ideology essentially served to sanction classic self-aggrandizement. Iran would not be waylaid by deference and respect. Obama needed to make good his threats, as Adams needed to build his "wooden walls."
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