Neocons are fond of screaming that Obama saying he would simply talk with our enemies is a serious error that amounts to appeasement. They often cite the Kennedy/Kruschev summit as an example, which they claim emboldened the USSR and led to the rise of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis (they fail to mention, of course, that we had already provoked the USSR by moving nuclear missiles into Turkey and Italy).
Of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis passed with Kruschev being forced to back down, and neither the Berlin Wall nor the USSR still exist, calling into question whether this summit was such a bad idea in the long run.
Some folks insist that Kennedy “appeased” Kruschev by meeting with him without preconditions. Spare me. Kruschev was NOT “appeased” after Kennedy. Unlike the situation with Chamberlain and Hitler, Kruschev made no land grabs, launched no wars, and obtained no significant, long-lasting economic or political advantage from having had a chat with Kennedy.
But regardless, that was then and this is now. There are some key differences between the situation then, and how it exists now. Before going there, however, it is worth noting how eight years of Bush’s refusal to talk with our enemies has affected the foreign policy stance of the United States:
–Bush refused to talk with North Korea, and it now has nuclear weapons.
–Bush refused to talk with Iran, and it is well on its way to developing nuclear weapons. In addition, Hamas and Hezbollah are stronger and better-financed than ever before in history, and these three entities collectively pose a much greater threat to our interests in the region than ever before.
–Bush refused to talk with Iraq (and refused to let anyone else do so either), and had he done otherwise he might have discovered the lack of any WMD’s and held back from launching a war that will end up costing thousands of lives and $1 trillion we cannot afford.
–There is probably no country more reviled in the world today than the United States. Our name, our currency, our principles, our reputation are all in the toilet because of our insistence on acting like a petulant child (much like many neocons do), refusing to talk and being all too willing to play the part of the schoolyard bully.
In short, this so-called foreign policy of refusing to talk has been a complete disaster, from which the United States will need a generation to recover.
Now, to the present. The USSR differed from Iran in a couple of key respects:
–they had the ability to annihilate us off the face of the Earth within minutes, whereas Iran does not;
–Iran directly possesses a precious commodity that we need for our economic survival–oil–whereas the USSR had no such leverage.
–Now, unlike then, our forces are bogged down, worn out, and practically helpless in a country we foolishly chose to invade, vastly decreasing our ability to leverage the threat of sustained military force.
The implications of foreign policy are very different when you have submarines bristling with nuclear missiles off your shores on the one hand, and dealing with a country that poses no military threat to your survival but has something you badly need on the other. One was outside of our control, forcing us to attempt to contain it (the USSR), the other one IS within our control–or rather, the terms of how we deal with that country are within our control if we chose to exercise it.
Let’s put it another way: suppose Iran had no oil. Wouldn’t a decision to bomb Iran’s facilities to prevent its acquisition of the bomb be SO much easier? Of course it would be. Furthermore, Iran would be well aware of its vulnerability and act accordingly–perhaps even thinking twice about developing nuclear technology.
But no, we instead choose to let Iran put its hand on our collective economic testicles, and then pray we can somehow bully it into submission. Fat chance.
The problem with Iran isn’t just them, it’s us. It’s hard to to make these two propositions work together while refusing to talk:
–They shouldn’t have something that we have (nukes);
–They must continue to supply us with something western civilization needs (oil).
I’ll leave the “we can have it but you can’t” issue for another day (I believe that the US’s insistence on that particular nuke doctrine completely undermines our moral authority on the issue, but it’s not worth arguing here). On the second premiss, we would be far better served by taking control of our addiction to oil and removing Iran’s hand from our economic testicles.
It all comes back to the desperately urgent need to develop progressive energy policies in this country that wean us off carbon fuels, which has the marvelous secondary (or primary, if you’re a conservative) consequence of freeing the US from being dependent on anybody else for its energy.
On that score, Obama beats McCain hands down. McCain idiotically thinks that drilling a few more holes offshore is going to solve the current energy crisis (when it will take 5-10 years for those wells to come online and even government documents show that such wells would only shave a few dollars off existing barrel-of-oil prices). Obama gets that we have a long emergency on our hands, one we can’t dig ourselves out of with more holes in the ground–one that requires a revolution in the way this nation consumes energy.
Until that revolution gets underway, we better talk with Iran–because talking is just about our only palatable option until we get our own act together.
Sphere: Related Content
