by Damozel | I still find it extraordinary that McCain---who claims to be the successor to Ronald Reagan---continues to embrace the naive, irrational "No dialogue with our enemies, even if it would serve our own purposes." What, never? Even if it would serve our purposes?
Anyone who has ever been in a relationship should know that punitive freeze-outs never accomplish anything. All they do is delay the inevitable moment when you have to talk things out, while allowing the other person's animosity and arguments to harden---and to find other allies. In other words, it's the diplomatic equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face. I just can't understand how anyone can defend a policy that stands to hurt us as much as it hurts our adversaries.
So I'm always happy to see push-back against the idea of cutting off from people who are on their team. I mean, it's not as if any of them are going to listen to Dems. In Newsweek, Nicholas Burns says:
In each of the three presidential debates, McCain belittled Obama as naive for arguing that America should be willing to negotiate with such adversaries. In the vice presidential debate, Sarah Palin went even further, accusing Obama of "bad judgment … that is dangerous," an ironic charge given her own very modest foreign-policy credentials.
Between 2003 and 2008, Burns--sworn in by Condi herself--as Under Secretary for Political Affairs.
As Under Secretary, he oversaw U.S. policy in each region of the world and served in the senior career Foreign Service position at the Department. He retired on February 29, 2008. He is currently Professor of the Practice of Public Diplomacy and International Politics at Harvard Kennedy School and a member of the board of directors at the school's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. (Burns)
In other words, he knows more than the candidates do about the conduct of diplomacy and about the history of US diplomacy. And what does he have to say?
I've been struggling to find the real wisdom and logic in this Republican assault against Obama. I'll bet that a poll of senior diplomats who have served presidents from Carter to Bush would reveal an overwhelming majority who agree with the following position: of course we should talk to difficult adversaries—when it is in our interest and at a time of our choosing.
[F]or the most part even our most ardent cold-war presidents—Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, none of whom was often accused of being weak or naive—decided that sitting down with our adversaries made good sense for America. They all talked to Soviet leaders—men vastly more threatening to America's survival than Ahmadinejad or Chávez are now. JFK negotiated a nuclear Test-Ban Treaty with his mortal adversary, Nikita Khrushchev, just one year after the two narrowly avoided a nuclear holocaust during the Cuban missile crisis. Perhaps more dramatically, Nixon, the greatest anticommunist crusader of his time, went to China in 1972 to repair a more than 20-year rupture with Mao Zedong that he believed no longer worked for America.
I recommend that anyone who buys into McCain's---and especially Sarah Palin's---nonsense read his piece. He is a Republican---he worked for Bush and Condi. In other words, he's not some tree-hugging eco-loving free-market-doubting libtard.
And yet he agrees with Obama....
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Burns also worked for Clinton and H.W. Bush, so I wouldn't classify him as a Republican
Posted by: Florida | October 29, 2008 at 03:44 AM