Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill (Library of Congress)

One can almost hear it. “Again? We picked the wrong guy again?”

Recent events involving Pakistan, Russia and Georgia suggest that Washington has again heaped its chips on a losing number. President George W. Bush, like so many before him, succumbed to the illusion that a little personal diplomacy — oiled with a few billion in trade and aid — would secure a dependable ally in a strategic area of the world.

Then it turns out that our little buddy has flaws that should have been discernible from space. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan was a dictator! Mikheil Saakashvili is a hothead! Vladimir Putin acts like a nuclear-armed bully who will press Russia’s interests no matter how many times Bush takes him fishing off Kennebunkport!

Can it be that personal diplomacy is a chimera – a wildly unrealistic plan for achieving basic goals? Is it possible that when we look an opponent or ally “in the eye” all we see is the reflection of our own foolish hopes?

Pundits sometimes suggest that we should just pick better. If we are going to cozy up to a Mujahadeen warlord to oust the Soviets or a Philippine senator to repress communists, we ought not to choose Osama bin Laden or Ferdinand Marcos. Bingo!

Sec. of State Condoleezza meets with former President Pervez Musharraf (state.gov)

Others suggest that Washington should quit trying to do anybody a favor because all you get is ingratitude. We should think in terms of interests, not good will. Leave it the Peace Corps to pass out Hallmark cards, and calculate geopolitical strategy as coldly as everybody else. In other words, accept the maxim that no nation has permanent friends, only permanent interests.

All good advice, but it ignores the historical precedents of at least four centuries.

It is the nature of diplomacy to cultivate personal relationships with foreign dignitaries no matter who they are. Ambassadors routinely serve cookies and lemonade — or caviar and vodka — to people whom they would shudder to meet under any other circumstance.

Why? Because when the proverbial excrement hits the fan, you need someone to whom you can say, “Now, Boris.”

Personal relationships are the lubricant in the machinations of government. The first job of any head of state is to protect national interests. Amicable conversation is an important venue for assessing an opponent or ally’s most cherished goals.

This is hard to do in the middle of a crisis. But on a fishing junket, or over cocktails on the veranda, national leaders hope to discover whether it is prestige, ideals, territory or money that is most likely to kindle a gleam in the eyes of an opposite number. In other words, the interlocutors cultivate insight, since this is more useful than friendship when interests collide.

And collide they will.

Perhaps the most important relationship in the history of U.S. foreign relations was that between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. One knowledgeable observer dubbed it “the friendship that saved the West.”

With all his legendary charm, Winnie initially wooed Franklin with pen and ink, sending letter after letter to the U.S. president, safe behind the Atlantic barrier. The prime minister sought the resources of the United States when Britain stood alone against Adolf Hitler. It was Churchill’s challenge to convince Roosevelt that placing his bet on the Britain would reap big rewards.

Roosevelt responded positively, even though, as he admitted to his closest aides, “I might be wrong.” One adviser, unconvinced by Churchill’s flattery, accused Roosevelt of “shooting craps with destiny.” Would this pug-faced pol prove any more resolute than Neville Chamberlain?

But even before the First Lord of the Admiralty became prime minister, FDR wrote Churchill, “I want you and the prime minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about.”

Churchill did exactly this, assiduously cultivating the bond. When, after Pearl Harbor, the United States was finally “up to the neck and in to the death” (his words), Churchill laid down his head and “slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

But even this relationship was no bed of roses. Churchill deeply resented Roosevelt’s attempts to dismantle the British Empire. And FDR was perfectly prepared to make end runs around the prime minister if it meant achieving this objective. As much as they may have liked one another, when their goals differed, the relationship was all business.

This is not to be regretted. Politics are a bit like a market economy. The system depends on each party looking out for its own best interests — which include avoiding war, palliating local complaints, fobbing off creditors, attracting investors and making sure that neighbors stay on their side of the fence. Protecting one’s interests generally keeps people cautious and focused. Developing personal ties with all the relevant actors is a sensible move.

So where do we go wrong?

First, it is a mistake—not usually make by politicians, but common amongst the public—to think that sentimental considerations will carry anything but the lightest load. When the president says he is disappointed in his pal Vladimir Putin, it doesn’t mean that he is surprised or disillusioned. It means he hopes to sway international opinion against Russian policy. In fact, diplomats understand that while good will is important, it will never, ever trump national interest.

Second, it is naïve to wring our hands and lament that yet another relationship has gone sour when someone like Musharraf is forced to resign. He got into power all on his own. When it comes to foreign counterparts, we mostly don’t pick ‘em and we don’t control ‘em, no matter how much money we wave under their noses. They may accept our planes and tanks, but they generally do with them what they will.

A senior Bush administration official intimated last week that Washington stuck with Musharraf too long and developed few other relationships in the country to fall back on. This is the kind of mea culpa we’ve heard on innumerable occasions. Yet it’s absurd.

What if Washington had openly backed Musharraf’s opponents, and tried to bring him down? What if Bush had invited Benazir Bhutto to the White House while she still lived, or former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif?

The reaction in Pakistan might have been akin to the American reaction when revolutionary France attempted to undermine George Washington, who was unreceptive to its demands, and then tried to sway the election of 1796 against John Adams in favor of Thomas Jefferson. All heck broke loose, and one consequence was the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. Few things backfire as quickly as stepping over national borders to cultivate members of the domestic opposition.

The point is: you are stuck with whoever is in power. Keep your fingers crossed, cultivate “friendship” and hang on for the duration. This is called respect for national sovereignty.

Lastly, perhaps our most common mistake is to give too much money to hoped-for allies, typically for the wrong things — like buying guns.

Now, some money is reasonable. Britain’s costliest mistake in the run-up to the American Revolutionary War was to neglect alliances for which it had to pay. In those days, an alliance meant cash on the barrel-head. When the Brits decided to pinch pennies and refuse subsidies to Sweden and Russia, they had two fewer “friends” to rely on. There is no shame in spreading the wealth, especially for projects that increase social capital, like education.

Diplomacy will always be personal, but the trick is not to let it get personal – as has happened between the Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Mikheil Saakashvili. Foreign leaders are, at best, placed in power by their own people and, at worst, tolerated by them. It’s our job to paste on a smile and make the most of it.

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman is the Dwight Stanford professor of American foreign relations at San Diego State University. She served for six years on the State Dept.’s Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation. She is the author of “The Rich Neighbor Policy” and “All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the 1960s.”

CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden headed the National Security Agency when the increased wiretappings began soon after 9/11. (WDCpix)

The House has passed a new version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. It is not surprising that the legislation makes many Americans queasy. After all, this is the country that created its first secret agency in 1947 and then announced it to the world.

The irony of America’s intelligence services is that they are so public. The United States routinely releases secret documents of historical importance, many over the Internet and sometimes only 25 years after the event. The Central Intelligence Agency is the cinematic archetype of skullduggery mainly because the government won’t shut up about it. Ours is the only nation out of 194 that requires itself, by law, not only to declassify but also to publish former state secrets.

This weirdness goes to the heart of a psychic dilemma that is particularly American. Cloak-and-dagger is the antithesis of democratic transparency. Americans pride themselves on openness, but can’t quite give up the power that comes from secret information.

This surveillance bill gives the National Security Agency greater leeway to eavesdrop on electronic communications between people in the United States and persons abroad. The new version would retroactively shield companies like ATT from lawsuits for cooperating in activities that otherwise invade clients’ privacy and contradict the Bill of Rights.

Critics say the bill would dramatically increase the executive branch’s authority to engage in electronic surveillance without court order. In 1978, Congress passed the original FISA to limit wiretapping of private citizens. The revised statute will allow for warrantless surveillance of messages between individuals within the country and foreign persons suspected of terrorism. Opponents say this is unnecessary, since warrants can be obtained within hours from the special court, or even retroactively.

On Thursday, June 19, the Swedish Parliament passed a similar law. The so-called “Big Brother” bill allows the national defense agency to monitor citizens’ phone calls, text messages, e-mails and Internet use without a court order. One blogger charged, “Democracy has died in Sweden.”

But the American reaction against loosening FISA goes beyond any particular bill. It is traditional and instinctive. Americans have long spoken out against spying, though all governments do it — including their own.

The country’s founders fled Europe to get away from the spies, double-dealing and royal treachery of the Old World. They aspired to a new diplomacy based on the notion that in public affairs, as President George Washington put it, “honesty is the best policy.” When pioneers went West, they sought not just land and gold, but freedom from constraint. They didn’t want strangers peering over their shoulders, so, like Huck Finn, they lit out for the territory.

Yet the pull of privileged information remains strong, especially now. Despite its relative openness, the U.S. government shares in the global propensity to spy. (For an eyeful, check out Intelligence Search.) What accounts for the universal allure of opening envelopes, intercepting cable traffic or hacking into phone lines?

Necessity, some would say.

In 1929, Henry L. Stimson, President Herbert Hoover’s high-minded secretary of state, closed the so-called Black Chamber. This State Department office was responsible for breaking the diplomatic codes of other countries. Though Stimson knew the Great Powers routinely intercepted one another’s secret correspondence, he thought Americans should be above this. “Gentlemen,” he insisted, “do not read other people’s mail.”

But in 1940, Stimson was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of war, and he had changed his mind. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Stimson clearly decided, the stakes were too high. When agents of the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, offered him “underground information” about the Japanese just prior to the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, for example, Stimson was all ears.

The World War II spy agency was disbanded when the hot war ended in 1945, only to be reborn as the CIA at the start of the Cold War. In the 1947 National Security Act, Congress made the CIA both public and permanent. The subsequent James Bond movies did much to rehabilitate the image of gentlemen who open other people’s mail. At least Bond met the first American requirement for impeccable deportment: a posh British accent.

Others may attribute the allure of spying to human arrogance, or the innate desire for a competitive edge. Think of the sordid behavior last fall of the general manager of the New England Patriots. The National Football League fined Bill Belichick $500,000 for videotaping the private signals of opposing coaches.

Most people would consider government spying far more legitimate than this. But even those who accept the need to spy on other governments, or on free-lance foreign terrorists, draw the line at prying into the affairs of private Americans. Outsiders may be a threat to national security, but can’t we trust our own citizens and residents? At the least, shouldn’t security agencies be required to obtain a warrant? Aren’t such invasive measures the first step towards a police state?

Last year’s marvelous German film, The Lives of Others, portrayed in compelling detail the profound moral rot that results from a nation’s surveillance of its own people. Spying corrupts the Peeping Tom as well as violates the suspect. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, even the East German Stasi was sick of it.

Historically, Americans have had a lower tolerance for spying than even their allies in what used to be called the “Free World.” Consider the contrast between the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and two of its kissing cousins, the British and Australian services. The CIA was created by public legislation. Its directors have always been named. Its location, in Langley, Va., is marked with a standard street sign off the George Washington Parkway.

The British Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6 to any James Bond devotee, did not officially exist until recently. Though the agency was founded in 1909, Parliament did not acknowledge MI6 until 1994. Its director was known simply as “C,” in honor of founder George Smith-Cumming. Its location remained top secret. Even today, SIS records are outside the scope of Britain’s Freedom of Information Act, unlike the records of the CIA.

The Aussies entered the spy business in 1952. Without the dashing Ian Fleming to publicize its exploits, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service remained undercover until reporters for the Sydney Daily Telegraph outed it in 1972. But the Australian government still resisted disclosing any basic information. Its existence was not given the legislative nod until 2001.

Americans expect more. Democratic government depends on mutual trust: the trust of citizens in their representatives, and the trust of representatives in the citizenry. Once shattered, that trust is harder than Humpty Dumpty to put back together again.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice observed in 2005 that the 9/11 Commission attributed the failure to anticipate events to a blind spot in our security systems. This blind spot is at the “seam” where intelligence operations overseas and domestic law enforcement agencies are sewn together.

Americans will never fully reconcile a repulsion against spying with its attractions. Congress now faces the challenge of keeping citizens’ good will and honoring the Bill of Rights, while grappling with the executive branch’s demand for additional discretionary powers.

Novelist Ian Fleming, whose fans are celebrating the centenary of his birth, would recognize the dilemma.

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman is the Dwight Stanford Professor of American Foreign Relations at San Diego State University. She served for six years on the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, overseeing declassification of “Foreign Relations of the US.” She is the author of “Major Problems in American History: 1865 to the Present” and “All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the 1960s.”

Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin meet at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. (Library of Congress)

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when “talking” got such a bad rep. But it clearly has one, and it is dogging the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, despite his clinching the Democratic nomination last night in a photo-finish against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. In his Minnesota victory speech, Obama called for “tough, direct diplomacy.” Not everyone will applaud.

Sen. John McCain raised the concern last night, as he has done almost daily. It started with Obama’s statement last summer that, if elected, he would talk directly with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea to bridge the impasse between these nations and the United States. Last week, McCain lectured Cuban-Americans that this would “send the worst possible signal to Cuba’s dictators.” Shortly before, President George W. Bush told the Israeli Parliament that such dialogue is tantamount to caving in to terrorists. Negotiation is appeasement, he said, “which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Bush is correct that appeasement has been widely discredited. But no observer of foreign relations could possibly equate negotiation with appeasement. Appeasement is what happens when one side accepts another’s outrageous demands. Winston Churchill did not object to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain meeting with Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938. Churchill objected to giving the Nazis Czechoslovakia.

Talking with an opponent is different from fraternizing with or capitulating to him. It is, in fact, the defining tool of diplomacy, humanity’s oldest substitute for fighting. Since war drains savings, interrupts commerce and kills the next generation, it’s best avoided. When talking fails to produce satisfaction, and one side starts swinging, most nations feel perfectly entitled to revert to caveman methods and do what must be done.

Negotiations may substitute for war or they may be held during a war under the white flag of truce. The critical question is whether one has savvy negotiators or stupid ones. Their job is to defang the enemy or at least pipe the cobra back into his basket. Diplomatic truce gives them the opening. As quick-witted Elizabeth Swann in Pirates of the Caribbean recently taught young moviegoers, “If an adversary demands parley you can do them no harm until the parley is complete.” If Walt Disney knows this, how did parley come to mean perfidy in American politics?

Some observers might reach back to World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. Woodrow Wilson has been criticized for conceding too much in negotiations to appease the other side. Even if that’s true, it needs to be remembered that he was negotiating with our allies, France and Britain. The losers in the war weren’t even invited.

One might also explain the aversion to talking with dubious characters by pointing to the Yalta Conference, after which some accused Franklin D. Roosevelt of treating Joseph Stalin too leniently. Here it’s worth noting that Stalin, a dictator if there ever was one, was also an ally and the Red Army was the only immovable object Hitler ever encountered. Not to meet with Stalin in 1945 at Yalta (or 1943 at Tehran) because the U.S. did not approve of either his domestic or foreign policy would have consigned Europe to Nazism. One might fault FDR for not getting enough in the Yalta negotiations, but certainly not for holding them.

Notably, one nation did indignantly refuse to negotiate with Stalin when the opportunity still existed. The Polish government-in-exile made Soviet acknowledgment of the Katyn Forest Massacre a precondition of face-to-face meetings. The Soviets refused; the two governments broke off relations, and whatever wiggle room existed in that perilous relationship disappeared. History tragically consigned the people of Poland to the wrong side of the Iron Curtain for the next 40 years.

Perhaps the best explanation for a stiff-necked posture toward negotiation is the legacy of the Cold War. In that struggle, the United States ruled out negotiations with Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Mao Tse Tung, to mention a few of the most important Communists whom Washington treated as persona non grata.

This was a break with diplomatic precedent going back hundreds of years. The first, and perhaps most important, European diplomatic conference was that which resulted in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. Protestant and Catholic kings hated one another so bitterly that they could not bring themselves even to walk the same streets, much less sit at the same table, so they convened in towns 30 miles apart. Through intermediaries they “talked” with their opposite numbers, though convinced that the other side would literally go to Hell. Yet they made a historic peace. Again, the point of diplomacy is parley: neutralizing enemies (if possible), or getting the best deal from allies.

Even during the Cold War, however, Washington ignored only those whom it thought it could afford to, like Cuba, North Vietnam and China. The United States never broke relations with the Soviet Union, supposedly the worst of them all and certainly the ringleader. Vice President Richard M. Nixon traveled to Moscow in 1959; the Soviet leader toured the U.S. the same year, and various Soviet premiers met with various presidents from Nixon onward, up until 1991. So the U.S. was not standing on any high moral principle if it was talking with one such leader while pretending the others didn’t exist.

In fact, the moments of real courage and wisdom in American history have typically come when U.S. statesmen risked censure to negotiate. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay ignored congressional warnings not to talk with the British without French approval, and negotiated directly with the nation’s enemy. They won independence and doubled our territory. Wilson was the first American president to confront European powers in their den, and engineered the first global organization for peace. Nixon risked his party’s coveted reputation for being “tough” on communism by opening talks with Mao and Leonid I. Brezhnev. Détente lifted the shadow of a Third World War that hung over two generations.

Of course, there are moments when delaying talks can have some benefit, but to postpone them for almost 50 years, as in the case of Cuba, merely delays resolution of a conflict. In this case, extending a white flag is sensible indeed. There is no conceivable reason, other than spite or pride, to clutch a policy that has produced so little. Why ostracize Cuban citizens or the Cuban government when we welcome interactions with China, a more formidable Communist country by far? Consistency in policy is the bedrock of order.

This brings us to perhaps the most important reason why talking has become an issue: the 2008 campaign. One suspects partisan posturing in the objections raised. Talking with enemies is not a betrayal of honor or decency, as implied. Conversation between the heads of two countries is not a papal audience, nor does it have anything to do with anointing one’s opposite number.

A cardinal rule of diplomacy is the principle of de facto recognition, to which President George Washington adhered when deciding he must shake the bloody hand of a representative of the French government that murdered Louis XVI. De facto recognition means that one nation does not judge how another nation rules itself internally. It recognizes whatever government wields power. There is no implication of moral approval or disapproval — regardless of how disgusted one might be by the other.

However, this underscores the principle of not meeting with terrorists, meaning non-state actors. Bush is right that the chief executive should not dignify the representatives of groups that hide in the shadows and throw bombs at passing school children. These are private individuals. They cannot be held to the Geneva Conventions or any other international accord. Accepted protocol is to leave them to Interpol or the intelligence agencies.

Osama bin Laden believes that he is God’s chosen tool, he holds all the cards and any opponent must concede to his every demand. Why ask for parley?

This is not behavior we should emulate. Though we have not always practiced what we preach, the United States has long been the preeminent champion of peaceful conflict resolution.

Talking and negotiation tend to be disparaged by people who aren’t very adept at either. This should not be a problem for the two candidates poised to win nomination, but the voters will have to decide who can speak best for our country. Deft diplomacy can win America’s most important battles and, historically, is always the first step toward peace.

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman is the Dwight Stanford Professor of American Foreign Relations at San Diego State University. She is the author of “Major Problems in American History: 1865 to the Present” and “All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the 1960s.”