When President Barack Obama received his Nobel Peace Prize less than 11 months after his inauguration in 2009, supposedly for, among other things, establishing “a new climate in international politics” in which “dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts,” the young, new president with close to zero foreign policy experience correctly made a point of defending the practice of dealing with thuggish regimes.
Human rights, Obama said in Oslo, “must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach—condemnation without discussion—can carry forward only a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.”
