I’m no fan of Obama—his social programs are enough to make him a no-go in my book—but much of the hoopla over things like his foreign policy are ludicrous. Take the “negotiate without preconditions” bit. Is that really so outrageous? Many people here have argued quite vociferously that it is tantamount to retreat, surrender, appeasement, or capitulation, somehow rewarding the world’s thugs for their bad behavior. Negotiations, of course, are not a panacea, but they are a marked change from the current Administration’s mostly ineffective foreign policy, and, according to History Professor Ralph Shaffer, actually quite a good thing.
While Bush and McCain seem unmoving in their opposition to meetings between an American president and those they consider terrorists who head foreign governments, it is inconceivable that they would rule out lower echelon diplomatic contact. But their uncompromising position on high-level meetings was not held by several of their Republican predecessors. Instead, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and even George H. W. Bush met with foreign leaders whom many Americans considered to be terrorists, radicals or just plain evil dictators
The most glaring instance in which a president refused to meet with the head of a potentially threatening nation occurred not under a Republican conservative but a Democrat. In 1941 Franklin Roosevelt ignored pleas from Japanese Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoye for an urgent meeting to resolve differences between the two nations. Konoye felt that his civilian government could best be strengthened by talks between himself and Roosevelt. Throughout the summer and fall, 1941, American insistence upon detailed agreements prior to a conference aroused Japanese fears about delays that would bring a crisis before diplomats could meet. Roosevelt held firm and, with their oil supplies running low, the Japanese moved into the Dutch East Indies and simultaneously attacked American possessions in the Pacific.
Republican Cold War presidents, on the other hand, blustered publicly about “evil empires,” but went to the conference table, sometimes in secret. Dwight Eisenhower, proponent of massive retaliation and rolling back the Iron Curtain, held a crucial summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin at Geneva in 1955. This effort to relieve the tension that had developed between East and West over the previous decade proved more symbolic than substantive. Still, the Geneva meeting set a precedent for more productive meetings in subsequent years.
Perhaps what Bush and McCain have in mind is the danger inherent in meeting with a powerful and potentially threatening head of state without a proper awareness of your opponent’s ability and toughness in such negotiations. That situation faced an unprepared diplomatic novice, not unlike Obama, when a recently inaugurated Kennedy engaged a summit-hardened Khrushchev at Vienna in 1961. Kennedy later admitted: “He beat the hell out of me.”
Indeed, the larger danger is that Obama is not skilled or experienced at these sorts of meetings, not that he wants to hold them. “Negotiations,” as he says, “are not appeasement.” They might go nowhere. But if they do, then that is itself an important step to go through, not whether we can make them jump through the required number of hoops before we’ll even talk. That has its own set of dangers.
The point Shaffer raises about Taiwan is key as well: many of us gloss over the fact that we sold out a small democratic country in exchange for a broader goal of normalizing relations with the country everyone knew would be the regional power. Only we didn’t—Taiwan is still Taiwan, China is still China, and there is really very little danger of one taking over the other any time soon.
Perhaps there is a lesson there.
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