Diplomacy Is Not Complicity
But now, if the clerical junta prevails, anyone who shakes hands with Ahmadinejad will have a hard time washing the blood off his own hands. ~Jonah Goldberg
This will come as news to some, but metaphorical blood is non-transferable. Nixon did not pick it up from Brezhnev or Mao, Reagan did not somehow acquire the blood of Afghans by engaging with Gorbachev throughout his two terms while Afghanistan was under Soviet occupation, nor Kennedy did leave Vienna screaming, “Out, damn spot!” If negotiating with thuggish regimes means that our leaders partake of the crimes of that regime, I assume Goldberg must be in high dudgeon about the bloody taint afflicting…well, pretty much every President since FDR. There was a time when people on the right were more resistant to the temptation to reduce foreign policy to a morality play or some sort of childish game in which negotiating with “bad guys” gave you cooties. For almost the last ten years, they have been far less so, and it’s pretty embarrassing.
Embarrassing yes. And there are no signs of it stopping any time soon. Again, I wonder if these people actually believe this or if it is merely politics.
I suppose Jonah’s being vaguely consistent here. If Hitler’s deeds have bloodied the hands of the Progressives and the entire political left, on account of Hitler and the left at one point or another holding similar opinions about something, then diplomacy is complicity and support. I think I’m vaguely beginning to understand his MO: If you believe in X as an ideal, Goldberg’s position is that you are compelled to support X+100, or X to Nth degree, otherwise you’re inconsistent, and in the end your support of X is equivalent to your support to X^N, because they are equal in principal. (Lenin used to call this mode of reasoning “objective.”)
It is reasonable, when we talk about what people actually do, to conclude that obedience of a regime is support for a regime, on the individual level — I remember Arendt once said that “politics is not a nursery”. But I think implicit in diplomatic relations between two states is the agreement, at the foundation of the relationship, that neither side comes to the table with the power to compel the other to obey, and that both sides are completely free to do as they choose.
Note also: The US FoPo establishment is habitually concerned that North Korea will take some secondary issue, like reporters it arrested, or Japanese citizens it kidnapped, and try to use them as leverage or bargaining chips to work its angles on the nuclear issue; it continually wants to use non-germain issues to get more nuclear leverage. And now, we find many of these people demanding that we use Iran’s human rights abuses as a bargaining chip in our diplomatic relations with it.
There was a time when people on the right were more resistant to the temptation to reduce foreign policy to a morality play or some sort of childish game in which negotiating with “bad guys” gave you cooties. For almost the last ten years, they have been far less so, and it’s pretty embarrassing.
Well, as Buchanan said, isn’t that where the right went wrong? It’s the ideological certainty at the heart of movement conservatism that requires this dichotomous, black vs. white outlook. About as un-Realist as you can get.
“And I said to myself, this is the business we’ve chosen. I didn’t ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!”
-Hyman Roth, to Michael Corleone
I’m afraid that in the process of arguing for realism, and arguing against moralizing, non-interventionists are going to go overboard and end up sounding like Hyman Roth (even if that quote isn’t quite exact).
There’s got to be a middle ground between Jonah Goldberg’s handshake metaphor, and saying things like “metaphorical blood is non-transferable.” Do you really believe that? That statement seems to reject the existence of moral complicity, which I don’t believe you do. Diplomacy isn’t complicity, but rewarding, perpetuating, or ignoring any behavior can be. Before you deal with a brutal dictator, you might at least consider whether you’re sufficiently distant from their brutal acts, that you’ve not ignored them and that you will not reward them. And if people everywhere are watching you closely, you might consider declaring your distance, too. What good does that do? Big question. What good does any directed moral statement ever do? Maybe Obama didn’t capitulate to the hawks; maybe he asked himself that question, and answered it, and allowed the answer to be a part of business. So what? That’s to his credit as a human being. You can call Jonah Goldberg’s imagery childish, but you shouldn’t belittle anyone’s concerns about complicity, and I hope that’s not where the discussion is going.