The record on face-to-face diplomacy by top U.S. leaders? Damnably disastrous
Wednesday, February 27, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
About every four or eight years about this time, we hear from one American politician or another that same old refrain: I am not afraid, I will talk not only to our friends, I will talk to our enemies; we need more personal diplomacy, I will go to [Germany, Korea, Iraq, Pakistan, China, Timbuktu, wherever] to guarantee peace…ad infinitum.
The truth is that personal diplomacy, whether practiced by Franklin D. Roosevelt with the cool disdain of a Hudson River patroon or Henry Kissinger with his accent “mit schlag”, has largely led to disaster. Roosevelt at Yalta did not have the measure of Good Old Uncle Joe as he imagined, but, perhaps, luckily for him, did not live long enough to learn it. Kissinger thought he had found a Meternichian realpolitische colleague in Le Duc Tho, only to reap millions of Vietnamese and Cambodian deaths and refugees and a decade of disgrace for America.
At a moment when we are hearing a good deal of talk another John F. Kennedy, it is well to remember:
“There is reason to believe that Khrushchev took Kennedy's measure at their Vienna meeting in June 1961, and decided this was a young man who would shrink from hard decisions... There is no evidence to support the belief that Khrushchev ever questioned America's power. He questioned only the President's readiness to use it. As he once told Robert Frost, he came to believe that Americans are ‘too liberal to fight’.”[1]
By that fall, the world was on the edge of a nuclear war when Khrushchev underestimated his opponent. But as an outcome, the naďve JFK [perhaps unavoidably] accepted a compromise that has deprived the Cuban people of life and limb for a half century, and nurtured wave after wave of disorder and economic backsliding in all of Latin America. As a result of the Vienna talks, Khrushchev did not follow through on his threat to throw the U.S. out of Berlin, but he did order The Wall constructed and “consolidated” the Communist Empire for another 30 years. Even a recently deceased ikon of the liberal OPC establishment in the U.S. has written: “"For all the style and excitement of the new team, and all the great promise, 1961 was a terrible year for the Kennedy Administration." [2] So much for a second coming of JFK in foreign policy.
Ironically, Hillary Clinton, despite her defense of her husband’s eight sorry years of foreign policy disasters – from Somalia [Black Hawk Down] to Sudan to [Osama Bin Laden’s escape] to the Oslo Accords [the annointing of terrorist and corrupter Yasser Arafat] – is on the side of the angels. She maintains, although she hasn’t a great deal to offer in its stead, that it takes more than rhetoric and cheering university audiences to guide the U.S. through some of its most troubling times since World War II. Amen!
In fact, we have already been there and done that.
Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000 spent six hours talking face to face with the brutal dictator of North Korea, Kim Il Jong, danced with a group of young Koreans, and, reportedly, even took a turn on the dance floor with Kim himself. The net result was an agreement based on trust which could not be Reaganized [verified]. Pyongyang got an extra decade to proceed with its nuclear arms buildup, and, at the moment, after a redux by State Department negotiators, we are back to zero with a disentegrating enemy who has no other blackmail material but his weapons of mass destruction program.
Then there was that remarkable Bush Administration encounter reported at the time by America's chief executive:
“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue.
"I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
President [soon to be prime minister, whatever, but anyway vorzhd’ naroda, the people’s leader] Vladimir Putin was alas! not “…the beginning of a very constructive relationship…" as the well meaning American president had hoped would come of a friendly, frank encounter between old enemies.
Common sense, of course, dictates that Americans conduct their business with other countries in a way that would establish confidence, trust, amicable relations where possible, in order to get the business of the day accomplished. But intimacy among national leaders is probably not possible, nor is it beneficial.
Naďve newcomers to the dreary cocktails of the anointed in the diplomatic and spying and media world are often unaware that the catscradle of international connections is one that leads to communication virtually all the time, through the formal channels of our 180-odd foreign missions. Then there are the spies, above and below ground, outside the formal missions. And there are the American military scattered across the globe in deployments from the Antarctica to Greeland to Central Asia; many of these installations have been in place since World War II and have constant communication, formal and informal, with their non-American neighbors. And then there are the media riffraff carrying tales back and forth.
Longer ago than I care to remember, I ran interference as a young local newsman in Bangkok to rescue two American merchant seamen who had jumped ship in Dakar, joined the French Foreign Legion, and then got themselves captured by the Vietminh [the Communist-nationalist alliance fighting the French before 1954]. As far as I know, no one but the American Ambassador to Thailand and myself knew of the communication line – which was, successful.
All these people are “talking”, exploring the ramifications of American strategy, policy, and tactics.
It is a little shocking, for example, to have presidential aspirant Barrack Obama talking about opening up communications with Tehran. He seems to forget, for example, that within the past few weeks we had face-to-face meetings of our diplomats and military in Baghdad, specifically over the issue of Iranian intervention in Iraq. [It doesn’t seem to have come to much.] Does anyone over the age of 12 believe we do not get reporting from the constant flow of Iraqis and Persians back and forth to the holy places of the Shia in southern Iraq, or that there are not a hundred ways Tehran and Washington are exchanging opinions and information about each other’s policies.
Granted, that often there is a surfeit of information, that it is a problem of separating the wheat from the chaff, or that it does not get into the proper channels. The failures which produce 9/11 have been investigated and regurgitated over and over. But, again, common sense would tell one that such mistakes are inevitable, that life is full of mistakes, and that every accident looks idiotic with hindsight.
If President Bush, President Hillary Clinton, or President McCain were to manage to get Iranian President Momould Ahmendinajad to sit down for a face-to-face discussion on the issues that confront U.S. policy toward Iran, would it be possible then and there to find a solution? Or would such an encounter further the U.S. effort for peace and stability in the Persian Gulf and the middle East? What would be the ramifications for our allies, in terms of psychological impact, whether the Israelis or the Arab states along the Persian Gulf — or Egypt for that matter? Under what conditions does such a meeting take place assuming Ahmendinajad would consent to it? Who is this Ahmendinajad – is he the fanatic, the mystic that an old Persian friend tells me he is, that is, a believer that only out of an Armageddon would come the return of the lost Inmam and the kind of paradise on earth he publicly talks about? Or is he a shrewd, opportunist, corrupt politician using his version of Islamic fervor for political gain and power? Not only do we nor anyone else have answers to those questions, but to approach a meeting with him without some concept of our own of what he believes and how he would act, is to play political clown that may be okay in a presidential campaign – but not in the most powerful public office in the world.
What we do know is that the UN International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] with its rather waffling Egyptian chairman this week says it does not know if Iran is working on nuclear weapons, that it has not been given satisfactory answers to its questions, but that there is every reason to believe that Tehran is proceeding with its enrichment of uranium. That procedure, more than the “weaponization” but less than the development of a delivery “platform” is the hard part of building such a weapon.
Analyzing those possibilities and their aftermath are the problem. That, not looking into the blood-shot eyes of Ahmendinajad is the problem before us.
For in the always acute way Shakespeare spells out the problem for his Lady Macbeth, the mullahs of Tehran long ago learned:
“To beguile the time,
“Look like the time, bear welcome in your eye,
“Your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower,
“But be the serpent under’t.”