Diplomacy is dead. Effective diplomacy “ the kind thatproduced Nixon’s breakthrough with China, an end to the Cold War on Americanterms, or the Dayton peace accord in Bosnia “ requires patience, persistence,empathy, discretion, boldness and a willingness to talk to the enemy.
This is an age of impatience, changeableness, palaver,small-mindedness and an unwillingness to talk to bad guys. Human rights are infashion, a good thing of course, but the space for realist statesmanship of thekind that produced the Bosnian peace in 1995 has diminished. The late RichardHolbrooke’s realpolitik was not for the squeamish.
There are otherreasons for diplomacy’s demise. The United States has lost its dominantposition without any other nation rising to take its place. The result isnobody’s world. It is a place where America acts as a cautious boss,alternately encouraging others to take the lead and worrying about loss ofauthority. Syria has been an unedifying lesson in the course of crisis whendiplomacy is dead. Algeria shows how the dead pile up when talking is dismissedas a waste of time.
Violence, of the kind diplomacy once resolved, has shifted.As William Luers, a former ambassador to Venezuela and the director of The IranProject, said in an e-mail, it occurs ''less between states and more dealingwith terrorists.'' One result is that ''the military and the CIA have been inthe driver’s seat in dealing with governments throughout the Middle East and instate to state (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq) relations.'' The role ofprofessional diplomats is squeezed.
Indeed the very word ''diplomacy’' has become unfashionableon Capitol Hill, where its wimpy associations “ trade-offs, compromise,pliancy, concessions and the like “ are shunned by representatives who thesedays prefer beating the post-9/11 drums of confrontation, toughness andinflexibility: All of which may sound good but often get you nowhere (or intolong, intractable wars) at great cost.
Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund,wrote in an e-mail that, ''When domestic politics devolve into polarization andparalysis the impact on diplomatic possibility becomes inordinatelyconstraining.'' He cited Cuba and Iran as examples of this; I would addIsrael-Palestine. These critical foreign policy issues are viewed less as diplomaticchallenges than potential sources of domestic political capital.
So when I asked myself what I hoped Barack Obama’s secondterm would inaugurate, my answer was a new era of diplomacy. It is not too latefor the president to earn that Nobel Peace Prize.
Of course diplomats do many worthy things around the world,and even in the first term there were a couple of significant shifts - in Burmawhere patient US diplomacy has produced an opening, and in the yo-yoing newEgypt where US engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood was important and longoverdue (and raised the question of when America would do the same with theBrotherhood’s offshoot, Hamas.)
But Obama has not had a big breakthrough. America’sdiplomatic doldrums are approaching their 20th year. There are some modestreasons to think the lid on diplomacy’s coffin may open a crack. This is asecond term; Obama is less beholden to the strident whims of Congress. TheRepublican never-give-an-inch right is weaker. In John Kerry and Chuck Hagel,his nominees for secretary of state and secretary of defense, Obama has chosen twoknowledgeable professionals who have seen enough war to loathe it and have deepexperience of the world. They know peace involves risk. They know it may not bepretty. The big wars are winding down. Military commanders may cede some spaceto diplomats.
Breakthrough diplomacy is not conducted with friends. It isconducted with the likes of the Taliban, the ayatollahs and Hamas. It involvesaccepting that in order to get what you want you have to give something. Thecentral question is: What do I want to get out of my rival and what do I haveto give to get it? Or, put the way Nixon put it in seeking common ground withCommunist China: What do we want, what do they want, and what do we both want?
For diplomacy to succeed noise has to be shut out. There area lot of pie-in-the-sky citizen-diplomats out there these days blathering onabout dreamy one-state solutions for Israel-Palestine and the like. Socialmedia and hyper-connectivity bring huge benefits. They helped ignite the waveof liberation known as the Arab Spring. They are force-multipliers for opennessand citizenship. But they may distract from the focused, realpolitik diplomacythat brought the major breakthroughs of 1972, 1989 and 1995. It’s time foranother.
Roger Cohen is a British-born journalist and author. He is acolumnist for The New York Times and International Herald Tribune. He hasworked as a foreign correspondent in fifteen different countries
