Slate's Fred Kaplan last night posted what is, to my mind, the best answer so far to the question of whether it's right to sit down with hostile foreign leaders. As he points out, this is the "question of the moment," the issue that will rear up over and again in town hall meetings and debates, the issue the Republicans in general and John McCain in specific will use to portray Obama as weak on national security issues.
Just as an aside, though: John McCain's piercing wisdom on the matter of international affairs remains hidden to me, and the naïveté evidenced by the current Republican administration in foreign affairs has been breathtaking. But whatever. We all know that. Even if you don't admit you know that, you know that.
Anyway, back to Kaplan. He traces the origin of the meme:
The notion stems from the Democrats' CNN-YouTube Debate of July 23, 2007, when a viewer named Steve asked the candidates whether—in the spirit of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's bold trip to Jerusalem—they would be willing to talk with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea "without preconditions" during their first year in office.
To the surprise of many, Obama answered, "I would." Clinton countered that she would not make such a "promise" (though Obama didn't either—the question was whether he would be "willing").
After the debate, she went further and called Obama's response "irresponsible and, frankly, naive."
So Steve started it! And McCain, inventive and fresh as always, picked it up:
On Tuesday, hours before Obama clinched the Democraticnomination, McCain, signaling the start of the general election, told a crowd in New Orleans, "Americans ought to be concerned about the judgment of a presidential candidate who says he's ready to talk, in person and without conditions, with tyrants from Havana to Pyongyang."
And Kaplan reminds us what Obama really said: That he would meet with those leaders because "the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them—which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration—is ridiculous. ..."
Why is it ridiculous? Because -- I hate to break it to the right-wing blogosphere, but we're not a superpower anymore. A presidential visit used to be a reward to leaders of countries who had earned it. It wasn't about negotiations, but about sealing an already agreed-upon pact: "success must be virtually guaranteed before such a high-stakes trip is taken," Kaplan writes.
But here's a fact of our times (and Obama seems to have a grip on this, perhaps because he's not so immersed in the diplomatic subculture): A presidential visit is not the cherished commodity that it once was, because the United States is no longer the superpower that it used to be.
Thank you! Finally, not just a rant about how wrongheaded the Republican strategy is, but a talking point I can use when I sit down with adversaries of my own. Which I do, incidentally, without preconditions.
I'm no foreign affairs expert (though, as a shout-out to the Republicans in my family, I was exactly right about Iraq), it seems axiomatic to me that we accomplish nothing in the international arena unless we talk to people -- this is as true for exchange students as it is for world leaders. If we call people enemies, we should know who they are; if we want to make them friends, all the more so.
Never for a minute have I defended going to war in Iraq, but who doubts it would have turned out better had the people who launched that war actually had a clue about the culture they were overturning?
Says Kaplan:
No matter who is elected this November, the next president will have to take extraordinary steps to translate this global reach into power and influence—to restore American leadership. One of the main challenges in this effort will be to prove to others that this leadership is desirable.
The whole thing is here.
(Cross-posted to my own little lightly trafficked blog.)