A Giuliani-type fix for U.S. diplomacy

---

See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Rudolph W. Giuliani, former successful New York mayor was born to a working class Brooklyn family. You don’t have to come from that background to know something about the nature of reality. [Benjamn Disraeli, Britain’s great reforming prime minister, comes to mind, who for all his faults recognized the basic failings of English democracy.]

But it helps.

Giuliani broke the back of spiraling crime by insisting on “zero tolerance”. Pitching a rock through a school window was not a childish prank but a serious violation of peace and order necessary to a law-abiding society. It had to be acknowledged. Blocking construction of a pyramid of violations of the rights of others was not only essential to a functioning democracy but the basis of any effort to control human failings and crime.

Our State Department leadership, almost exclusively drawn from upper middle class [and promoting its members to honorary membership if they weren’t], has too often not seen the world with that kind of realism. [See the incisive Commentary essay by the late Patrick Moinyhan on the Washington media actors, and why their pseudo-revolutionary stance is a product of their largely suburban upbringings rather than ideology.] “Reform” at State over the years – wiping out the old consular corps, putting propaganda under its roof, making economic aid jobs the last promotion of Peace Corpsnicks – has only intensified the problem

But is a change coming brought on by the combination of crises for American foreign policy? Those problems are monumental. It would take more than a Solomon to know the long term implications of: a Western Europe besotted with prosperity and an unparalleled period of peace, unable to muster the resolve to defend itself against new and pernicious social and economic problems. No less for civilization generally facing a nihilistic and murderous terrorism from rebels in a failed Islamic society, virtually half the world. Or the dislocations of a worldwide technological revolution gaining momentum by the minute which puts into question all the economics assumptions.

Rather than flights of academic fancy, perhaps a return to fundamentals, the day to day prosecution of smaller diplomatic targets might be the way to go.

There are hints for whatever reason a new wave of scrutiny is now taking place in U.S. diplomacy. At the UN, John Bolton is with bulldog determination trying to do something about corruption and budgetary irresponsibility. [One hopes he will turn to recruitment equally a scandal.] In Canada, a U.S. ambassador has enraged Prime Minister Paul Martin by pointing out anti-Americanism is a cheap political ploy [however productive] with repercussions in the always complicated relationship between the world’s two largest trading partners.

But nowhere is there more a hint of a new breeze out of Foggy Bottom than in Korea. There a career diplomat with experience dealing with Communist totalitarianism debris has taken on the minutiae not only with a threatening North Korea but a spoiled-child syndrome in the South. One assumes as Beijing has increased its aid and support of Pyongyang, Washington has given up on a policy based exclusively on “persuading” Beijing to implement a consensus against the North’s developing weapons of mass destruction.

U.S. Ambassador to Seoul Alexander Vershbow, identifying North Korea as a major drug dealer and distributor of counterfeit U.S. currency, has talked up sanctions against Pyongyang. His emphasis also reflects, finally, a Japanese effort against Pyongyang’s notorious mafia among its Korean minority. Vershbow ignored protocol addressing a Seoul human rights conference on Pyongyang’s evil nature. How better to counteract misguided Korean youth, inspired by old Communist sleepers in President Roh Moo-hyun’s Administration, who preen as Korean nationalists but ignore the murder of two million of their brethren in a man-made famine.

When South Korean officials publicly rebuked Vershbow, he answered in Boltonese. Washington is pressing Seoul on its promises to see additional food and other aid to the North is not simply diverted to its huge military establishment. The new U.S. envoy on human rights on North Korea, Jay Lefkowitz, called on the South to link economic aid to human rights. Hopefully, this will be followed with a fullpress treatment of horrors of North Korean political prisons the likes of which the world has not seen since the Soviet Gulag and Nazi deathcamps. Washington apparently intends to continue to embarrass the South in its failure to support the UN resolution on North Korean human rights abuses

On the face of it, none of this would halt North Korea’s missile and WMD. But "Zero Tolerance" derived from the "Broken Windows" theory, put forward in 1982 by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, two academics, claimed when it came to maintaining public order in a community, leaving a broken window in a public building meant any public behavior was acceptable. So it is with international conduct.