A2 Diplomatic Engagement

Cards
 Engagement Fails
Diplomatic Engagement fails to cause change Obama Proves
Adam Segal 09 , 10-7-2009, "The Essence of Diplomatic Engagement," Council on Foreign
Relations, http://www.cfr.org/diplomacy-and-statecraft/essence-diplomatic-
engagement/p20362

As the Obama administration charts its foreign policy, there is increasing unease about its lack of
achievements. The Iraq war lingers, Afghanistan continues to be mired in its endless cycle of
tribal disarray and Islamist resurgence, Guantanamo remains open. Still, Obama has introduced
important changes in both the style and substance of US diplomacy. An honest dialogue with
the international community has at times led the president to acknowledge our own
culpabilities and shortcomings. Even more dramatic has been Obama's willingness to reach out
to America's adversaries and seek negotiated solutions to some of the world's thorniest
problems. It is Obama's declared engagement policy that has raised the ire of critics and led
them to once more take refuge in the spurious yet incendiary charge of appeasement.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer recently exclaimed, "When France chides you for
appeasement, you know you're scraping bottom." Acknowledgement of America's
misjudgments is derided as an unseemly apologia while diplomacy is denigrated as a misguided
exercise in self-delusion. After all, North Korea continues to test its nuclear weapons and
missiles, Cuba spurns America's offers of a greater opening, and the Iranian mullahs contrive
conspiracy theories about how George Soros and the CIA are instigating a velvet revolution in
their country. Tough-minded conservatives are urging a course correction and a resolute
approach to the gallery of rogues that the president pledges to embrace.
 Engagement = Hollow Rhetoric
The CP is hollow rhetoric it sends mixed signals and co-opts the affs own
internal link [Re Highlight]
Kriner 10 associate professor of political science and the Director of Undergraduate Studies
at Boston University (Douglas, After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Conduct of
Waging War, p. 155-156)

The models also investigate the effect of legislative actions to curtail presidential discretion in the conduct of military affairs on a ventures expected duration. However, not
all legislative actions to curtail an ongoing operation have equal legal or political weight. To capture
some of this variance in the types of actions members introduce, the analysis divides all congressional challenges into two

categories based on whether or not the demands they place on the president are legally binding. Concurrent resolutions or
provisions expressing the sense of Congress are primarily vehicles for position taking and public posturing, not substantive assertions of congressional influence over the conduct

Through these nonbinding actions, the presidents opponents in Congress can criticize
of military affairs.

the executives deployment of troops, call for their return home, or saddle the president with reporting and other requirements while avoiding
the costs associated with legally binding actions, such as exposing members to countercharges of failing to support the troops in
the field or triggering the interbranch constitutional struggle inevitably touched off by an effort to

invoke the War Powers Resolution. These open expressions of congressional criticism may have
some effect on raising the political costs to the president. However, because such actions fail to carry
any concrete consequences for the president and hence are often seen as hollow rhetoric, their
impact should be limited. Nonbinding resolutions do not put new alternatives to the
administrations policy onto the national agenda, and therefore they do not represent serious institutional
challenges to the presidents preeminence in military affairs. Similarly, the signals nonbinding actions send
to foreign actors are also ambiguous. On the one hand, such actions are publicly visible signs of
congressional unease over the administrations conduct of a use of force; on the other, they demonstrate Congresss
unwillingness to use the formal legislative means at its disposal to rein in presidential conduct
of which it does not approve. Consequently, the effects of nonbinding actions to curtail a conflict should be limited,

if they have any influence at all.