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By Root 3512 0

didn’t appreciate the recitation of complaints he heard in meetings with U.S. officials. Uzbek government officials also asserted that the State Department ignored their requests to renegotiate the base lease for the U.S. air base at K2, the critically important lifeline into Afghanistan. On July 29, 2005, two months After the riots at Andijan, the Uzbek Ministry of Foreign Affairs delivered a letter to the U.S. embassy in Tashkent, indicating that we were no longer going to be able to use the air base.19 The Karimov government gave us six months to pack up, which left those of us in the Defense Department scrambling to try to come up with alternatives, all of which were considerably more expensive. Our eviction from Uzbekistan came at a critical time, just when it appeared that the Taliban was mounting a renewed offensive After three years of relative calm. American-Uzbek military-to-military relations were cut off abruptly, ending a relationship that, beginning in 2001, had exposed Uzbeks to democratic values and principles, such as freedom of speech and civilian control of the military.

Uzbek leaders then began to strengthen ties with nations that would not berate them regarding democracy and human rights—such as Russia and China. Karimov signed a formal treaty of friendship with Russia in November 2005, a marked reversal in attitude from when I had met with him four years earlier.

“Russia was and remains for us the most reliable bulwark and ally,” Karimov noted at the signing ceremony.20 The treaty, he added, “demonstrates with whose interests our interests converge and with whom we intend to build our future.”21

In July 2006, I wrote Hadley, “We are getting run out of Central Asia by the Russians. They are doing a considerably better job at bullying those countries [than] the U.S. is doing to counter their bullying.”22 We were effectively taking ourselves out of the region, and in the process reversing their progress toward freer systems as well as damaging our national security interests. “We need an Administration policy for Central Asia, and we need the NSC to see that our agreed policy—once we have one—remains in balance,” my memo to Hadley continued.23 I saw our administration’s knee-jerk response as shortsighted and misguided. Human rights had not trumped security. The truth was that human rights and our country’s security had both suffered.

Ironically, while we were lecturing and chastising our friends and partners in the name of democracy, administration officials were reaching out to some of the most brutal and undemocratic regimes in the world, lending them the legitimacy they sought. In the weeks After major combat operations had ended in Iraq, intelligence had indicated that the regimes in Syria, Iran, and North Korea were nervous, since Saddam’s regime had toppled in just three weeks. But by 2006, their worries had been eased. Bush’s first-term initiatives to isolate regimes that pursued weapons of mass destruction and sponsored terrorists were dropped to pursue negotiations with them in the second term. Unambiguous records of deception, provocative behavior, and broken promises stretching back decades were set aside in the hope of obtaining reversals from countries such as Iran, Syria, and North Korea through diplomatic engagement. A risk, of course, was that our apparent eagerness could send the wrong signal and make the situation worse.

One of the finest qualities of Americans is our optimism. We tend to believe that people of goodwill anywhere can find solutions to most problems. But there are limits to diplomacy, just as there are limits to goodwill. Some problems cannot be solved through negotiations. Some despotic governments take advantage of international negotiations to achieve prestige, which is political capital for them. Some regimes use terrorism and WMD programs as bargaining chips to extract concessions from other countries. These regimes, and sometimes members of the world’s diplomatic corps, see negotiations and engagement as useful ends in themselves.

I remembered from my time