NOT LACKING THE DIPLOMACY GENE
The GOP are perennially putting their faith in weapons and soldiers-with-weapons.
Therefore, I hope that Obama doesn't waiver on the ground that he has staked out on aggressive diplomacy. I've pushed hard on that, here, especially on Cuba, in the hopes that it would force Obamites to refine and solidify their view.
For one thing, every time McCain starts to go on about Iraq, Obama could use a "core" position on diplomacy to broaden the discussion to the wider question of conducting foreign policy, diffusing the Iraq issue. He can also draw a sharp distinction with the Bush-Cheney lack of a diplomacy gene, even while adopting the strong stances that he has on "striking our enemies".
Among the key points:
- I will make NO apologies for aggressive diplomacy, even to a fault. If taking, listening, or re-engaging, even to a maddening degree of start-stop, saves us from one war or forestalls one aggressive action, it repays our efforts, however vain, hopeless, or silly they might seem at the outset, a thousand fold.
- We will not sit on our arsenal as if it were a laurel wreath, nor expect others to always come to us first because of it.
- As the world's hyper-puissance, our power is best exercised through others, in concert, whereby it is self-reinforcing, rather than self-defeating (that is apparently a lesson that Schultz didn't give Bush down in Texas in 2000...).
MILITARISTS AMONG US - SERVE THEM UP LORENZO Il Magnifico
Last, the GOP are perennially insistent that someone take an oath to accept force (as a last resort). They also trot out all kinds of military examples of how only military force was "real" - and, of course, Chamberlain.
I'm always partial to the story of Lorenzo, who saved the Florentine Republic, bound for almost certain wartime loss, with nothing more than ... a bold stroke of diplomacy.
