RNC: Obama Needs A Quick Refresher Course in Cold War History

WASHINGTON, May. 21 /PRNewswire/ --

WASHINGTON, May 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following is an Op-Ed by K.T. McFarland of the New York Daily News that is being distributed by the Republican National Committee:

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080519/RNCLOGO )

Recently, Sen. Barack Obama reiterated his pledge to meet with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, among other rogue leaders, without preconditions, suggesting his approach would be consistent with the best, and strongest, American foreign policy of the past century.

"Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries," said Obama. "That's what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That's what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That's what Nixon did with Mao."

Not so fast. I was in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and I can attest that those Presidents understood the danger of prematurely forcing top-level meetings without sufficient preconditions. Neither Richard Nixon nor Ronald Reagan would sit down for face-to-face meetings with their counterparts in enemy nations until America had some realistic -- and playable -- bargaining chips. They recognized that negotiating without leverage isn't negotiating, it's begging. ...

The threat of a loose Sino-American alliance gave us the leverage we needed to get the Soviets to the negotiating table on arms control. Nixon met with Mao Zedong only after he had the leverage needed to negotiate.

Similarly, Reagan waited until his second term to deal with the Soviets. He used the first term to line up the leverage necessary to negotiate from a position of strength. ...

Obama said recently that Reagan's negotiations with Gorbachev "led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war, and over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall."

He's got it turned around. Reagan built up the leverage first, and then negotiated. He didn't believe we could talk the Soviets into anything they didn't want to do, nor trust them without verification. ...

We all have the right -- indeed, the obligation -- to ask exactly what leverage a President Obama would carry with him to the negotiating table, and how he plans to get it.

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