On
June 19th, 2014, guest columnist Roger Cohen penned an article in
the NYT called The Diplomacy of Force (see http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/opinion/cohen-the-diplomacy-of-force.html?_r=0 ). It is about as solid and clearheaded an analysis as I have seen from
a traditional perspective about how power works, and why American diplomacy and
use of force is off track. Cohen’s article is so good that I hesitate to
attempt a summary. But in short he argues that by insisting on waging diplomacy
without the force to change the balance of power, President Obama has violated
a fundamental principal of statecraft. If
you don’t bring a big stick to the negotiating table, bad people refuse to be
reasonable. It is a great point.
But it is also wrong -- or maybe more
accurately, inadequate -- for the same reason that all the major theories of
diplomacy since WW II have recently come a cropper. They failed to properly
account for the nature of man.
They either assumed
that man is RATIONAL (the central theory is called Realism) and will make a
rational analysis of the balance of power.
Or that man is REASONABLE,
(the Yen to Realism’s Yang is called Liberalism) and doesn't really want war
and destruction, if we could just get rid of bad leaders and the bad ideas they
teach.
These approaches are both mistaken. Men
-- all men -- have some really bad ideas of their own. Some of those bad
ideas are really attractive -- even contagious. Pretending that bad ideas
always bow in the face of superior power is dangerously wrong. Pretending
that men will let go of bad ideas if power is shared is just as dangerously
wrong.
And these two concepts are at the
core of pretty much every military, diplomatic and economic theory, strategy
and policy in the West today.
The seed of this failure does not
reside in democrats or republicans, or even the foreign policy elite. Nor even
with the bureaucrats who seem to be spinning out of control all on their own.
They are just adapting the theories that best serve their own interests.
The seed of failure lies with the priesthood that has generated those ideas,
and preaches them to the masses and the acolytes alike. And that is the tenured
professorial class. The worse their theories have performed, the more
sacrifice they have demanded to the false gods of equality, diversity, and
universality. But somehow these offerings don't seem to appease our opponents, or get them to the negotiating table, with either threats or promises.
So nice try Roger Cohen. Very solid
reasoning from a traditional perspective. But dangerously inadequate. Shifting
the balance of power against the ISIS while empowering the Shia lunatics who
oppose them is not the solution. At this point, bad theories generated by
academic theorists have backed us into a terrible corner. Nothing short of
actually understanding the nature of our enemies is likely to help us get out.
