Why Not Kill Dictators with Kindness?

A year ago in Tehran, I noticed a defiantly goofy graffito inscribed on the wall of the old U.S. embassy building, the compound where the American hostages were held in 1979: ON THE DAY THE U.S. WILL PRAISE US, WE WILL MOURN. This was an official slogan--in Iran, as in America, graffiti are the work of miscreants, but in Iran the miscreants run the country--and it was an unintentionally revealing one: the mullahs are terrified of better relations with the U.S. Without the Great Satan, they have no excuse for, and no way to divert attention from, the dreadful brutality of their rule. A wicked thought occurred to me at the time, and recurred last week, as the Bush Administration continued its foolish refusal to meet with the North Koreans: Why not do the one thing that would most discomfort, and perhaps even destabilize, the precarious regimes of the Ayatollah Khamenei, Kim Jong Il and--for that matter--Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi? Why not just say, "We hereby grant you diplomatic recognition, whether you like it or not. We're naming an ambassador. We're lifting the embargo. We're going to let our companies sell you all sorts of cool American things like Big Macs and Hummers. This doesn't mean we approve of the way you run your country, but it's silly for us to deny that you're in charge...for now"?

Diplomacy is rarely so rash. And yet, "It would certainly catch the mullahs by surprise," says Azar Nafisi, an Iranian dissident who is a fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "It would drive them crazy," she adds, laughing, "the thought of having an American embassy in Tehran again, with lines of people around the block, trying to get green cards. There is a theory that American cultural and economic power is so insidiously attractive that opening up to the U.S. would be the death of these regimes. I've heard it called the Fatal Hug."

The arguments against Fatal Huggery are obvious. Why encourage and legitimize evildoers? Why allow Kim Jong Il--the Michael Jackson of world leaders--to succeed with nuclear blackmail? Why reward the Iranians for their support of Hizballah? Fair points, all. But there is a problem: the current American policy of nonrecognition isn't working, and it may well be counterproductive. "What's the hardest job for a tin-pot dictator in the information age?" asks Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Keeping his people isolated from the world. Why should we be making life easier for Fidel Castro or Kim Jong Il?"