Buchanan Hits the Nail on the Head With This One
Patrick Buchanan has a must read on Townhall.com today. The first part of the article talks about the Clinton/Obama spat. I really couldn’t care less about that. The second part gets to the heart of the Bush administrations diplomatic failures.
During World War II and the Cold War, FDR and Harry Truman met with Josef Stalin. Ike invited the “Butcher of Budapest” for a 10-day tour of the United States and tete-a-tete at Camp David. JFK met Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna — after he declared, “We will bury you.” Richard Nixon went to China and toasted the tyrant responsible for the deaths of thousands of GIs in Korea and greatest mass murderer of the last century, Mao Zedong.
I am currently in the process of reading the Reagan Diaries. There are many life leasons anyone could learn from a man like President Reagan. The current group of Republican politicians on any national stage should be at the top of the list. They looooove to envoke the WWRD (what would Reagan do) rhetoric, but I don’t think they really know.
During the cold war, Reagan met with Gorbachev on multilple occasions. Reagan’s strategy was never to ignore the USSR and hope they’ll go away. You see, negotiations don’t have to be nice. You can sit accross the negotiating table from the Iranian president and tell him if he doesn’t comply we’ll turn his country into a glass factory.
The other major diplomatic lesson to be learned from President Reagan is leaving your opponent a dignified way out. President Bush and our Republican legislators have forgotten how to do that. When Reagan had his opponents (be it other nations or the democrats) on the ropes, he toiled over how to allow them a face saving way out the situation. He worked hard to make sure he won the battle, but his opponents didn’t have to lose. Nobody likes to lose.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m all for calling a spade a spade. I liked President Bush’s axis of evil idea, but where was the out? Iran has really never been given a way off that list with their pride in tact.
I’m not advocating we “make nice” with our enemies that are killing our troops, but it’s really time we re-think our middle school strategies of diplomacy. “I’m not talking to you” and “say uncle” just aren’t cutting it. There is such a thing as aggressive finess.
Great post. I agree with it. Another huge blunder has been the Bush Administration pushing the growth of NATO right up to the Russian border. What used to be “buffer states” between Russian and Western Europe now looks to the Russians like aggresive behavior. The Russans are pretty touchy about things like that especially in their weakened post-Soviet condition. I am not at all a fan of the Russians but I don’t think it is wise to poke even a weakened bear with a stick.
July 27th, 2007 at 9:23 am“leaving your opponent a dignified way out.”
Any ideas on how to do that with Iran?
August 9th, 2007 at 6:40 am