Thursday, May 22, 2008
Why simply "talking" with enemies can be a problem
There are many reasons why Barack Obama's repeated insistence that he will "meet" with Iran without preconditions might be very dangerous. One of them is that all official contact between adversarial nations sends a signal, intentionally or otherwise, and not always one that is well-understood at the time. Even a president who understood Chamberlain's failure at Munich sent a nearly catastrophic signal to Nikita Kruschev:
Those who have grown up believing that John Kennedy's finest moment was the Cuban Missile crisis will be disappointed to learn that he may have contributed to the face off: widely considered the moment the world came closest to Central Nuclear War, by telegraphing weakness by his eagerness to "talk" to his adversaries....
JFK had repeated Chamberlain's key mistake at Munich. He sent a signal of abject weakness to an aggressor held back only by fear. He walked into shark-infested water bleeding and ringing the dinner bell. And although the US was overwhelmingly stronger than Khruschev's Soviet Union, the wily old Bolshevik judged it safe to hustle the "very inexperienced, even immature" Leader of the Free World. The Soviet strongman struck while the going seemed good.
This is not to say that we should not negotiate with Iran; clearly, that is what we have been doing for several years now. The only debate is over the preferred method of communication, and whether it should include the idiom of force. Iran clearly believes that it should and has acted accordingly. So -- probably -- does the Bush administration believe that coercion must be part of the negotiation, at least to the extent of responding to Iran's proxies with proxies of our own. Does Barack Obama?
MORE: In other words....
8 Comments:
By 
D.E. Cloutier, at
Fri May 23, 12:13:00 AM:
I think you can change the rules of the game. But it would take someone with far more marketing and negotiating skills than the typical politician has. Jack Welch of GE or Lee Iacocca of Chrysler or the late Walter Wriston of Citibank/Citicorp probably could have pulled it off in their younger days.
In addition, you would need a third party respected by both sides at any meeting. Those are hard to find, too.
And you would have to talk regularly to all of your enemies, not just one of them.
Don't give me crap about the best diplomatic minds need to work on the problems. The best scientific minds worked on flight for hundreds of years. Two bicycle makers who dropped out of high school solved the problem.
Is Obama God's gift to foreign policy? I don't think so.
By randian, at
Fri May 23, 01:43:00 AM:
Negotiation implies give and take, a mutual exchange. Why should we give them anything? One does not negotiate with people who use threats of nuclear terror in order to coerce others. Negotiation under threat of death cannot be mutual, even if you are stronger than country threatening you. Giving them anything displays weakness and shows that terror threats get you what you want, making future terror threats more, not less, likely. The only thing we should be telling Iran is "verifiably destroy your bomb facilities by X date or we destroy your oil fields".
What about the canary in the coal mine, the rest of the Middle East? Their whining about wanting atomic bombs to match Iran hardly means they don't already have Pakistani nukes. The Pakistanis are fellow Sunnis, after all, while Iran are heretics. The Syrians apparently had a bomb-making facility that was destroyed by Israel. Who designed it? The Saudis have lots of money to grease Pakistan's palms.
By Dawnfire82, at
Fri May 23, 01:50:00 AM:
"The Syrians apparently had a bomb-making facility that was destroyed by Israel. Who designed it?"
North Korea, by general consensus.
By Gary Rosen, at
Fri May 23, 03:28:00 AM:
There's a story out now that Israel is talking with Syria. No doubt the lefties will use this, "see even Israel is talking to Syria, why can't we talk to Iran?" Sure, Israel is talking to Syria - NOW THAT THEY'VE BOMBED SYRIA'S NUCLEAR FACILITIES!
If Obama takes out Iran's nukes, he can have sex with Ahmedinejad for all I care. That's a joke of course - according to Ahmedinejad, there are no homosexuals in Iran.
By Noumenon, at
Fri May 23, 09:31:00 AM:
So, per that editorial, the argument against negotiation is that world leaders make national policy according to their personal sizing up of their opposite number's poker face. Like hiring someone based on their can-do attitude instead of their resume.
So how about we just send President Obama to whoever trains the WWE wrestlers until he can flex and posture with the best of them, and then unleash him to cow the Iranians with testosterone alone?
By Gordon Smith, at
Fri May 23, 12:29:00 PM:
Ahmadinejad is not in charge of Iran's foreign policy. I wonder why folks keep using his name...
A return to Reagan style diplomacy sounds fantastic after these last many years of Bush's biggest-cock-on-the-block doctrine.
By Dawnfire82, at
Sun May 25, 04:45:00 PM:
Really? What other senior Iranian figure visits foreign powers to negotiate things? Or make major foreign policy speeches?
By Consul-At-Arms, at
Mon May 26, 11:25:00 PM:
I've quoted you and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2008/05/re-why-simply-talking-with-enemies-can.html
