Yesterday at the funeral of Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama shook Raul
Castro’s hand. You might think that this is a fairly unimportant
event. However, John McCain knows you’re wrong. "Neville Chamberlain
shook hands with Hitler,” said McCain. Now, dear reader, you may be
able to think of one or two little holes in this analogy. For example,
Hitler had attacked Poland whereas the US attacked Cuba. Hitler gassed
Jews to death and Cuba did not. And you would be right. But since
you're arguing with John McCain about foreign policy, that isn’t too
impressive.
The entire ideology behind the quote is wrong and its damaging to our
foreign policy. The basic underpinning behind the quote is the idea
that we have certain enemies or regimes, that work against our
interests in the world, and anything that could help them affects us
negatively. The problem with this philosophy is that diplomacy isn’t
zero sum. Everything that helps them does not have to hurt us.
Take, for example, the Cold War. The US and Russia were clearly
enemies. But they avoided any outright fighting outside of certain
proxy fights, such as the Korean War. And this was done by having open
diplomatic channels between governments, despite the adversarial
relationship they had. Take, for example, the Cuban Missile crisis,
one of the times the world came closest to a nuclear holocaust. In the
middle of the missile crisis, the Americans and Russians were
negotiating in secret, by passing letters through other embassies. In
one case a Russian spy talked to a ABC news journalist and told him to
pass the information on to the US State Department. These channels
allowed the US to avoid nuclear war with USSR until it fell.
Most dictators, even very evil ones, are not like Hitler. They do not
believe in a fundamentally evil ideology. Rather, they are self
serving. For example, no one would mistake Saddam Hussein for a good
person, but when threatened with military action if he continued to
have chemical weapons, he abandoned them. Saddam Hussein did not
suddenly grow a conscience, but eliminated his chemical weapons
program because it was in his self interest, or he thought it was.
Cuba is a country where we could do well to consider more open
diplomacy. But perhaps the most salient case right now is Iran, where
the usual suspects are drumming on the war drums, saying we can’t
negotiate with Iran and the recent deal is doomed to failure. In the
words of Bill Kristol in his November 18th Weekly (sub)Standard
article, “Under Obama, Iran keeps its nuclear program.”
What Kristol doesn't understand is the Iranian leadership’s end goal
is not nukes, but a prosperous country that won’t rise up against
them. One might have hoped that after the debacle in Iraq the neocons
might have reconsidered their ideas. Sadly, they have not. But we
should reconsider whether to listen to the same people who led us so
astray, a decade ago.