Engage, don’t isolate

Los Angeles Times: President Obama’s Sudan strategy, announced this week, is consistent with his approach to foreign policy elsewhere: Engage, don’t isolate. Hold out carrots, but hang on to the sticks. And, quite often, seek the middle ground.

Obama offered direct talks on nuclear weapons to the notorious leaders of North Korea and Iran, and he made it clear he wanted to meet with the Communist bosses in Beijing before receiving their Tibetan human rights nemesis, the Dalai Lama, in the White House. Now the administration has raised the possibility of peace dividends for Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes in the country’s western Darfur region. The Times supports the broad policy of engagement in the belief that it is more effective than isolation and confrontation for achieving U.S. goals.

‘Incentives and pressure’

The administration says it will use a mix of “incentives and pressure” to ensure that the Khartoum government denies a haven to terrorists, implements a 2005 deal to end a decades-old civil war in the south and seeks peace in the conflict in Darfur, where more than 300,000 people have died since 2003 and another 2.7 million have been driven from their homes.