The wing nut faction that functions as the Republican Party reached a nadir in foreign policy when President Bush announced that the United States will not undergo diplomatic talks of any kind with unfriendly nations.
So the GOP now sees fit to act like petulant, spoiled brats that refuse to acknowledge those they disagree with – kind of like their domestic policy now that you mentioned it. To put it simply, they have turned American foreign policy for the last 200 plus years on its head because they decided they won't talk to Iran, Syria, North Korea, or any other so-called "rogue" states.
It would be laughable if it weren't so stupid. It is also rank GOPocrisy as the Bush WH has already negotiated with terrorist sponsor Libya and Bush has looked into the eyes of Vladimir Putin and ignored all the dictatorial trappings because Commander Guy TM thinks Vlad is a good guy. As if.
Think about the fact that there has been a "Red" phone line, linking Washington, D.C. and Moscow for the past 45 years. But if Bush/McCain had their way, it never would have existed in the first place.
According to Wikipedia:
The "Hot Line", as it would come to be known, was established following an agreement on June 20, 1963 by the signing of the "Memorandum of Understanding Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Line" in Geneva, Switzerland, by spokesmen from both the Soviet Union and the United States, after the events of the Cuban missile crisis made it clear that reliable, direct communications between the two nuclear powers was a necessity. During the crisis, it took the U.S. nearly 12 hours to receive and decode Nikita Khruschev's 3,000 word initial settlement message—a dangerously long time in the chronology of nuclear brinkmanship. By the time the U.S. had drafted a reply, a tougher message from Moscow had been received demanding that U.S. missiles be removed from Turkey. White House advisors at the time thought that the crisis could have been more quickly resolved and easily averted if communication had been faster. This link was encrypted using the information-theoretically secure one-time pad cryptosystem.
Senator Senile and his merry band of idiots have been running around saying that war is preferable to negotiation!
If McCain were president during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we wouldn't be blogging or using our computers at all since we would either all be dead or bombed back into the Stone Age because you know, negotiation is for "fags" or elitists, you know like Ronald Reagan.
For the intellectually challenged (ie. Republicans), view this as the day that the Republican Party "jumped the Shark".
If this is the official policy of the GOP and the WH, why do we have a State Department and a Secretary of State. You don't need the tools of diplomacy to talk to your friends, but you sure do need them when dealing with adversaries.
To the spoiled poor little rich kids that make up the Republican Party, this is a childish grudge. No negotiations unless they do it my way or the highway, which is what the last eight years have been like under President Bush.
What else what you expect from morons who are too stupid to understand the term appeasement?
Do they realize that part of the mess we are in now in Iraq was started when the appeasing government of GHW Bush signaled to the Iraqis in Aug. 1990 that they would not object if Saddam Hussein limited his annexation of Kuwait to mainly the area around some key oil fields. Only when Iraq decided to annex all of Kuwait did the WH raise an issue. That my friends is appeasement.