海角大神

In a United States presidential election year, peace talks can take on a life and a direction of their own.

As President Barack Obama pushes for peace talks with the Taliban, ahead of an expected withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in 2014, he may keep in mind these two past scenarios, when election-year peace talks went astray:

• In May 1968, President Lyndon Johnson's administration began three-way peace talks with North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the US. As the election campaign progressed, South Vietnam began to balk at signing a deal, and by Dec. 9 the talks stopped entirely. Pointing to reported secret meetings between South Vietnamese negotiators and a deputy of Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon,聽President Johnson privately fumed over Nixon鈥檚 鈥渢reason.鈥� Johnson鈥檚 vice president, Hubert Humphrey, lost the election to Nixon.
• In 1980, during President Jimmy Carter鈥檚 reelection campaign, negotiations with Iranian student hostage takers broke down, shortly after a reported meeting between a well-connected Iranian cleric and William Casey, a campaign functionary for Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. Negotiations restarted after Mr. Reagan won the election and were concluded by Mr. Carter鈥檚 team at 8:04 a.m. on Reagan鈥檚 inauguration day. In his 1991 book, 鈥淥ctober Surprise,鈥� Carter official Gary Sick, now a professor at Columbia University, charged that Casey encouraged the Iranians to stall the release of the hostages to deny Carter the symbolic victory of a negotiated hostage release. 聽

In 2012, there are no obvious signs that candidates in the current election are meeting with the Taliban, with whom the Obama administration has opened its doors to peaceful negotiations, or with Tehran, against whom many American conservatives are urging military action over its suspected nuclear weapons program.

But even without a conspiracy, there are lessons worth learning. The Taliban and the Iranians don鈥檛 need agents within the US political establishment to further their own interests. America鈥檚 system of lengthy and public presidential politics gives adversaries such as the Taliban and Iran all the leverage they need. Speeding up talks or stalling them rewards certain US politicians and punishes others. Progress, or the mere hint of progress, can be sugar or arsenic, depending on one鈥檚 political interests. So while America鈥檚 adversaries may not be able to actually pull key strings to choose America鈥檚 next president, the penchant of American politicians for politicizing American foreign policy ends up giving enemies 鈥� and friends 鈥� the tools they need to manipulate the US.

Merely criticizing a sitting president on his foreign policy achievements and blunders, of course, is not treasonous. Given the importance of foreign policy these days, post-Sept. 11, debating differences in foreign policy is an important measure of how different candidates distinguish themselves from the competition.聽

On the campaign trail, Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney penned a March 5 opinion piece in the Washington Post promising a much more militant stand with Tehran聽if elected.

The very next day, on March 6, President Obama extended a tentative olive branch (or perhaps a twig) to Tehran, urging Republicans to avoid 鈥渓oose talk of war,鈥� and hinting that there was a聽鈥渨indow of opportunity鈥� for a peaceful resolution with Tehran over its controversial nuclear program. "It is deeply in everybody's interest 鈥� the US, Israel, and the world 鈥� to see if [the Iranian nuclear situation] can be resolved in a peaceful fashion," Obama said in his first formal press conference of the year.

It was a definite pullback from the Obama administration鈥檚 stern warnings over the past month or two, and a signal that the US might be willing to ease up some of the war pressure and the punishing sanctions imposed by the US and Europe against Iran.

In Tehran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei welcomed Obama鈥檚 calmer words. And Efraim Halevy, the onetime director of Israel鈥檚 security agency, Mossad, in the early 2000s, told the Huffington Post that the Romney's criticism of Obama聽may actually backfire.

Similarly, Taliban leaders 鈥� who have launched exploratory negotiations to open a political office in Doha, Qatar 鈥� have an opportunity to embrace talks with the Obama administration, or to ignore them. Talking with Obama would inevitably give the current US president a foreign policy boost. But since the US has already signaled its intention to withdraw troops by 2014, perhaps the Taliban will be content to stall the start of negotiations, and to wait until after the November elections to figure out which administration it will have to deal with.