Anti-Climacus

WELL: Eric Moberg, in the comments:

"There are certainly many aspects of international law (the Vienna Conventions on diplomatic rights are a classic example) where despotic and democratic countries share common interests."

but, as the counterargument to my counterargument would have it, this is exactly the sort of issue that makes attempts at international law horribly morally compromised, even from a utilitarian perspective. The issue is this: you can (maybe) accomplish good things even though solutions can only be incomplete, and even when dealing with despotic and democratic regimes. But what you lose in doing so is your effective position against despotic regimes (e.g., you can use Stalin's help to fight WWII, but the energy that you expend making friends and normalizing relations both legitimates all of the regime's activities and require you to ignore the more unpleasant aspects of the regime in question--the rise of diplomatic relations with China is perhaps a very fine example of this trade-off*), and you possibly extend the shelf-life of a corrupt regime (which should be normatively undesirable for obvious reasons).

So if you're a utilitarian, your case would run something like this: it makes a lot of sense to engage despotic nations to get as many good things accomplished as possible (but only if those good things end up happening), and it would make more sense to avoid building relations with them if doing that would shorten the length of time until a governmental change. In other words, you can't, on utilitarian calculations, know what the right thing to do is unless you know whether what you do would be successful. One more reason to be a deontologist.

*One of my favorite Jim Morrow stories is when we were discussing the Taiwan Straits Crisis, and he asked the class who the United States' main strategic partner in the Pacific was. Everyone said, of course, "Japan." Morrow then replied with something like: "yes, though you'd have had a hard time telling that during the Clinton Administration."