Diplomacy: A Whole ew Meaning...

The Armchair Curmudgeon
News&Views
May 9, 2007


The New Art of Diplomacy

It has always been my assumption that true diplomacy meant people of disparate interests coming together to arrive at a mutual decision that would involve compromise, but each party could live with the outcome and so feel as if their deliberations moved each of their agenda’s forward.

While my definition may not satisfy every nuance of meaning, it seems to suffice as a short hand description of what diplomacy is all about.

But over the past seven years, I have discovered that my definition omits the Bush-Rice conception of what diplomacy is all about.

And this surprising powerful tool seems to have emerged from the actions of our Secretary of State whose conception of diplomacy involves one of two steps: to immediately state that there is no future in discussions because our position is so diametrically opposed to the other country’s position and it would be a waste of time and effort; or, alternatively, the practice of avoidance—which we seem to be especially good at.

Think about it, we pay a very high salary to our Secretary of State for finding a way not to meet with anyone in order to avoid discussing anything for the purpose of having not to accommodate or compromise on issues that we have no intent of moving one centimeter on in the first place.

Avoidance as policy seems to give diplomacy a whole new spin that is something that the Pythons might have thought of if our Mad Hatter government didn’t think of it first.

Imagine such an ingenious policy.

It has all of our competition dashing around thinking that they may have missed something. Why bother to meet and discuss something when you can just as easily not meet and therefore not have to discuss anything. What a bold approach to thinking, the dark side of diplomacy’s potential revealed. Sooner or later someone will write a book about it.

It is brilliant and worthy of Kurt Vonnegut or Douglas McAdams.

Of course, there was a precursor.

It was the lead up to our invasion of Iraq.

We brought in the CIA’s vast research capabilities in order to avoid using them since we had already made up our collective minds to attack Iraq no matter what the research demonstrated.

This school of thought tends to start out with the desired result and works backwards to justify it, sort of like inverting the real world to make the reigning monarch feel that he was right after all. And shouldn’t all ruling monarchs be right?

It is of course much easier and gratifying to invent the ending first without having to be bothered by facts or real content. And, even more so, it proves you right each and every time, even before you hire the scribes to rewrite the news and events so it fits the outcome or hire the staffers to rewrite the text books for our children.

It is too bad that we hadn’t thought this out before. We could have saved ourselves a whole lot of work. And money.

Anyway, Rice will never need to worry. She can always go on the lecture circuit and tell everyone about how she managed to develop a career dedicated to nothing. Judging from the reaction to the concept of work from some of today’s recent college graduates, she should be facing sell-out crowds for the next two decades.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon