The USA never negotiates with terrorists--except they always do

From hokey TV action shows to mainstream media quotes from "administration" spokespersons, the one hundred percent false claim is the official lie that "we never negotiate with terrorists." 

Yeah. We always do.

Negotiations come in many forms. Displaying your biggest weapons in a war games exercise with an ally for all to see is an opening note in a negotiation. 

Establishing a hot line between two enemies is a negotiation. 

Cutting funding to a weapons program that your enemy fears is a negotiation. 

Claiming that you never negotiate is a negotiation. 

Negotiation is a simple fact of life that is unavoidable and something that no one operating in any sort of strategic fashion would ever avoid. How it's done is infinitely varied. 

When Ronald Reagan said we never negotiate with terrorists and then negotiated the world's first nuclear weapons disarmament treaty, the Intermediate Forces treaty of December 1987, that showed a public, open example of negotiating with those previously deemed terrorists. 

They are always terrorists until they aren't. The evil empire can be reasoned with. 

Even refusing to negotiate is a form of negotiating, since that refusal can, at times, convince the enemy to seek negotiations. 

There is no hard and fast rule to convince your enemy to negotiate, but there is a convention that says to your enemy, "Pay no attention to my public refusal to negotiate. I'm interested." 

While most scholarship describes a sequence--resistance, dialog, negotiations--once we expand the realistic definition of negotiation to include all the words and actions meant to engage the enemy or opponent, we see that the process is often a fluttering of adaptive management from one component to another and back again (Dudouet, 2017).

Reference

Dudouet, Véronique (2017). Powering to Peace: Integrated Civil Resistance and Peacebuilding Strategies. International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ICNC-Special-Report-Civil-Resistance-and-Peacebuilding.pdf