Keep your enemies closer

Barack Obama stresses that he would. Hillary Rodham Clinton equivocates but basically would be averse to premature talks with our adversaries.

John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, did not address the issue in his recent speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. But the Bush administration has been clear about its approach: Rather than engage our enemies, it has preferred to revile and isolate them. That's what it did to Iraq before invading it and to North Korea before joining six-party talks to rid it of nuclear warheads,and what it still does to Iran. And there has been no effort to engage Raul Castro, Cuba's new leader.

One former president, whose name has frequently come up in the presidential campaign as an object of near-veneration, talked to the country's enemies. He was Ronald Reagan, and we can learn much from his approach.

Reagan enjoyed publicly denouncing the Soviet Union. At his first news conference as president, he railed against that country's communist leaders, who reserved "the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat" and believed in "treachery, deceit, destruction and bloodshed." On another occasion -- in one of his most famous speeches -- he said they were "the focus of evil in the modern world."

During his eight years in the White House, Reagan dramatically raised U.S. military spending, invaded Grenada, deployed a new generation of missiles to our allies in Europe and aided the mujahedin in Afghanistan and the Contras in Nicaragua. In March 1983, he announced a new strategic defense initiative -- Star Wars.

All this is well known. What is not as well known is the other Ronald Reagan, the one who persistently sought to negotiate with the men who ran the evil empire. Housed in the Reagan Presidential Library and Museum is a trove of evidence concerning his efforts to talk to the nation's enemies, including a series of letters that he wrote to Soviet leaders, often in his own hand to underscore their authenticity.

What did Reagan say to Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko? He told each of them that, notwithstanding the differences between the United States and the U.S.S.R., there was much to talk about. Common problems could be discussed across the ideological chasm. The "fact that neither of us likes the other," he said in a January 1984 speech,"is no reason to refuse to talk. Living in this nuclear age makes it imperative that we do talk."