Cutting Raw Deals With Devils--Domestic Politics and the U.S. Engagement of Autocratic Outlaw States.

In this paper I confront a burgeoning conventional wisdom among foreign policy scholars which holds that the US should tend to succeed in efforts to engage autocratic rogue states, such as North Korea, Iran, and Syria. Rather, I argue that domestic political pressures in the US and domestic political opportunities in the autocratic taget state will impel US administrations to oversell and overcommit to engagement, and impel the target state to reciprocate US engagement with merely cosmeticor tactical behavioral concessions. I proceed to test this theory in the "hard case" of the US engagement of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. Owing to the highly asymmetric bilateral balances of power and interests that grossly favored the US during this engagement attempt, domestic political pressures mitigated the Reagan Administration's inclination to conditionally engage the embattled Baathist regime in Baghdad so as to reform troublesome Iraqi behavior in such issue-areas as Iraq's continued support for terrorism. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]