Last week I had the pleasure of attending a fine conference hosted by The Stanley Foundation. I wish I could call attention to several of the presentations there, but I was particularly taken by Bruce Jentleson’s paper and discussion of the lessons that we should take away from Libya’s decision to dismantle its nascent nuclear weapons program.

Jentleson’s paper for Stanley (.pdf here) is derived from a longer article, written in conjunction with Christopher Whytock, that was published early this year in the prestigious journal International Security. His findings have direct relevance to some of the most pressing foreign policy challenges of the day. ”The key to the Libya success,” Jentleson explains:

was a strategy, started in the Clinton administration and continued in the Bush administration and pursued jointly with Britain and support from others, balancing carrots and sticks consistent with three criteria — proportionality, reciprocity, and coercive credibility.

These findings fall into the category of inconvenient facts for those individuals determined to make the case that preventive war is a suitable — perhaps even preferable — form of U.S. engagement with the rest of the world. Better to be feared than loved, the logic goes. In this vein, the toppling of tinpot dictators such as Saddam Hussein was supposed to have a salutary impact, a demonstration effect, on the behavior of other tinpot dictators such as Muammar Qaddafi. If one believes, as the editors of The Weekly Standard apparently do, that violence and the threat of violence is all that matters in diplomacy (i.e. “coercive credibility”) then Qaddafi’s behavior is easily explained.

It has been a bit harder for the leading advocates of the Iraq war to explain the behavior of Kim Jong-Il, or, for that matter, the leaders in Iran. And with good reason. The response of the other two states of the “axis of evil” has been essentially 180 degrees from what U.S. policy sought to achieve: we wanted them to halt their weapons programs, instead they have accelerated them.

Why have these two regimes not responded as the logic of coercion suggests that they would, by renouncing their weapons programs and cowering in fear? Chiefly because neither regime has any assurances that they will long survive if they do what Qaddafi did. And, to be fair, many of the leading advocates of war with Iraq have no wish to reassure Pyongyang or Tehran. Much the opposite. In 2003 Richard Perle said that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sent a simple message to other state sponsors of terrorism: “You’re next, and if you don’t shut down the terrorist networks on your territory, we’ll take you down, too. Is it worth it?” Perle concludes, “Of course it isn’t worth it. It isn’t worth it for any of them.”

Alas, the world has not behaved as Perle and his fellows at AEI and elsewhere have predicted. Iran’s support for Hezbollah has increased in the wake of the Iraq war, they have similarly boosted support for a rejectionist Hamas-led government in the Palestinian Authority, and they have found new opportunities for mischief within Iraq’s incipient civil war.

The Iraq Study Group advocates engagement with all of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran and Syria, but essentially concedes that such an effort might not bear fruit. We might contemplate, as my colleague Ted Carpenter and others have suggested, one last attempt to break the impasse in U.S.-Iranian relations by offering Tehran a “grand bargain.” If we do not drop our longstanding posture of regime change, then our attempts at coercive diplomacy are likely to fail.

As Jentleson concludes:

In announcing the restoration of US-Libyan diplomatic relations, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Libya “an important model.” In effect, Secretary Rice asked why won’t you, Iran and North Korea, do like Libya did? The answer lies in part within their own leaderships. But US policies have failed to offer Iran and North Korea the combination of carrots and sticks, especially the security reassurances of policy change not regime change, that made a deal palatable to Libya. (emphasis mine)

As I said, these are inconvenient facts for those who favored preventive war with Iraq, and who wish to see similar wars in Iran and North Korea. All the more reason why the opponents of such wars should raise these facts over and over again.