Following up on an item from yesterday, the NYT ran a piece today about the Bush administration’s new-found respect for, well, doing the opposite of what it’s been doing for six years.
In the span of just two weeks, the United States has agreed to hold high-level contacts with Iran and Syria, and to start down the path toward formal diplomatic recognition of North Korea.
Has the Bush administration gone soft on its foes?
Overall, the article is a solid piece of work. But noting the NYT’s unfortunate choice of words, Pacific Views raised a very good point.
[The New York Times’] Helene Cooper, in only the second sentence of her article, explains everything about why belligerence and bullying can be described unblinkingly as diplomacy. She explains everything about why it’s taken more years than it should for this administration to have sat down to seriously, and successfully, address the situation with North Korea. It’s why it’s taken four years for them to come around to the position that it would be worth engaging in talks with two of Iraq’s most influential and directly impacted neighbors. It’s that word: soft.
One of the worst things you can call someone in American politics today, and for as long as I can remember, is soft. No one wants to be accused of being soft on crime, or drugs, or enemies, or the so-called lazy. Soft is weak, ineffectual, insufficiently poisoned with aggression and cruelty. Soft is also merciful, conciliatory, apologizing, forgiving, generous and gracious. It conveys an expansive catalog of traits, all demonized, all confused and jumbled up with each other. All ideologically damned and unexamined. Nothing characterized as soft can usually be seriously discussed in terms of its effectiveness.
I hadn’t initially noticed this when I read the article, but that’s probably because I’ve unfortunately internalized too much of the conventional wisdom and existing media narratives.
Dems want to negotiate; Bush wants to threaten. Dems believe in diplomacy; Bush believes in preemptive war. Dems believe in building international coalitions; Bush believes in going alone. The Dems’ way is “soft”; the Bush way is “tough.”
The point isn’t to pick on the NYT reporter, who probably wasn’t trying to disparage diplomacy, and whose article really wasn’t bad at all. But the more the media plays into this characterization, the harder it is to change the broader discourse.
As Pacific Views concluded:
This is the poison of our debate…. This is why a bully like Condoleezza Rice can be appointed as the nation’s chief diplomat, why an unapologetic thug like John Bolton could have been advanced as our representative to the United Nations without unleashing a storm of outrage. This is why it seems shocking and novel to try any foreign policy tactic besides getting a bigger hammer.
The sooner we stop associating diplomacy with weakness, the better.