What gets me about the idea of never talking to your enemy is that it runs completely against every diplomatic milestone we've achieved over the last hundred years. The Cold War was not won by fighting these skirmishes in Vietnam and Korea and Central America; we ended up losing most of those, or bringing them to a draw. We won the Cold War through Reagan's hard-assed negotations with Gorbechev. If Reagan had followed your advice, we'd still be grappling with Soviet communism.