Obama Is a Nice Young Man, But...

The Geek has a hard time keeping the "debates" between presidential candidates straight. They all look and sound the same.

In one the other day, Senator Obama again showed that he is a well meaning, terribly sincere fellow who doesn't have a clue about how diplomacy works or what the nature of foreign policy might be. He may know the politics of Chicago, but the realities of the world and how the US can craft and implement policy both elude him completely.

The senator delivers wholesome sounding generalities such as "new approaches" as he glibly alleges that the "old" ones have failed. Gosh! What's not to like about "new approaches?" We are Americans; we live in the land of "New and Improved!" The old has gotta be bad. Right?

Wrong! Says the Geek.

When not animadverting to spacious and undefined new approaches, the Senator gets back to his old notion of unprepared, without conditions summit talks with the leaders of countries such as Iran who wish us anything but good.

As the Geek has written before, this idea is as wrong as grilled watermelon.

There are some realities that Mr Obama needs to get a grip on.

Historically, "new approaches" to the old topic of diplomacy do not work. Examples litter the landscape of our past like beer cans on a back road. So we'll just look at a couple from the past century.

President Woodrow Wilson, a political scientist by education, promised "open covenants, openly arrived at" in his famed Fourteen Points upon which the Germans sought an armistice in November 1918. It sounds good. Feels good. All kinds of warm and fuzzy. The opposite of those icky-poo secret agreements reached by frock coated gents in plush conference rooms.

We Americans loved it. Just as much as we love the word "transparency" today and use it as a fetish to judge the legitimacy of elections, treaties, government actions generally.

The problem came with the simple fact that the cynical (that is to say, experienced and realistic) Europeans knew that agreements require tough trading, hard bargaining, and hard-to-swallow compromises that might unduly upset the voters or other power elites back home. The open covenants openly arrived at promise of the Fourteen Points was quickly shoved to the side. Wilson was realist enough to go along with the process and retired to the back room with the rest of the boys.

The resulting treaty was a disaster. It made World War II in Europe almost a dead on certainty. It was, however, the best that could be done. And, it could only have been achieved behind closed doors.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the best, if not the best, practitioner of politics in recent US history. He was a master manipulator of public perceptions. An illusionist of the first rank when it came to assuring that the government appeared to be doing something effective regardless of reality.

The Geek admires FDR's professional skill in domestic politics.

At the same time, the Geek as historian must give FDR a severe downcheck for his "new" approach in diplomacy. FDR inaugurated the concept of the Summit Meeting during World War II. His first meeting was with Winston Churchill. To put it bluntly, the old boy from England played the American president like a piano. That didn't hurt. We were on the same side.

Later meetings, and in particular those involving Josef Stalin, were a disaster. FDR honestly believed that he could deal with "The Great Leader and Beloved Teacher" as though he was simply another machine politician. To consider, as FDR sincerely did, that Stalin was an American big city boss with a Russian accent is the same as thinking that the atomic bomb is just another firecracker.

(Note to the Obama campaign: File the FDR summit concept under both "new approaches" and "meetings with foreign leaders who wish the US something other than the very, very best.)

Then there was Jimmy Carter. In foreign policy, the gentleman from Georgia is best remembered for his new approach of making human rights the key component of our policy and diplomacy. Keep in mind that other presidents from both parties had acknowledged human rights had a place in US diplomacy, but these saw it correctly--a tool, not an end in itself.

Before anyone gets all prickly from the belief that the Geek doesn't like human rights, be assured that he does. What he does not believe in was Carter's new approach of making the concept the gold standard of foreign policy. To cite only one result of the Carter approach, it is only necessary to look at Iran and ask, "Have the Iranians enjoyed more human rights since 1979 under the mullahocracy than they did under the Shah?"

(Attention all of you who are youth-advantaged, Carter's human righs litmus test ruled the Shah to be too nasty to merit our support. Carter pulled the plug on the Shah so that the arrival of the mulllahs and ayatollas was inevitable.)

In diplomacy and foreign policy new ideas, fresh ways of viewing the world, its opportunities, and challenges are important, very important. All too often ideas fossilize into dogma so that eyes are blinded to changing realities in the globe. Quite often the pervasive idea of precedent ties the hands of policy makers and diplomats alike.

It is one thing to argue for new ideas, fresh views, even radical reinterpretations of American interests and relations. The Geek strongly supports from his platform of history each and every one of these concepts.

It is something quite different to promise "new approaches." If the words of Senator Obama are taken at face value, they indicate that he would change the way in which the US conducts its foreign policy and relations.

(If the words don't mean what they seem to, then the Geek wants to know just what in hell is the senator talking about? Cosmetic changes? Putting old wine in old bottles and slapping on new labels? Nothing in particular?)

Get a grip on this. Other countries do not want and do not welcome any significant change in the ways by which a Great Power conducts foreign policy and diplomacy. A key prerequisite to effective policy implementation is consistency and a fair degree of predictability. Other countries want to be able to assess in advance the probable range of reactions by the Great Power to any policy option or response they are considering.

A Great Power can seem unpredictable either at some risk to its own interests or as a carefully calculated gambit as the Reagan Administration demonstrated with its brief flirtation with the Crazy American Hypothesis. At all other times, the Great Power must be like a person with high serotonin--predictable, reliable, consistent.

An adrenaline rush of "new and improved" is likely to promote hyperventilating and thumping chests world wide. An administration is well advised to avoid pronounced, rapid change.

Senator Obama should also consider that the US foreign policy community, including the Foreign Service and the Central Intelligence Agency, have a good record of professionalism. Both provide excellent sources of information to the decision makers topside. Both will carry out the orders they receive from the All Highest in the White House with skill.

Along with the military forces, these organizations provide the line troops of foreign policy and diplomacy. A president (or presidential wannabe) who knows this and who knows that while new ideas and views are critical, new approaches are far more likely to fail than to succeed will have a good to excellent chance of performing well on the global stage.

Mr Obama might make a good president if he grows up, gets a good education in how the world works, and gets a grip on history.