Catching Up On My Weekend Reading -- Henry Kissinger's Warning

One of the great problems with today's Middle East is that diplomacy is constantly being outstripped by events. Those who talk can never keep pace with those who do. Dr. Kissinger recognizes the danger inherent in a situation where the major powers are determinedly devoting themselves to inconclusive talk while revisionist powers like Iran are acting. The current situation portends disaster.

He writes:

The analogy of such a disaster is not Munich, when the democracies yielded the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, but the response when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. At Munich, the democracies thought that Hitler's demands were essentially justified by the principle of self-determination; they were repelled mostly by his methods. In the Abyssinian crisis, the nature of the challenge was uncontested. By a vast majority, the League of Nations voted to treat the Italian adventure as aggression and to impose sanctions. But they recoiled before the consequences of their insight and rejected an oil embargo, which Italy would have been unable to overcome. The league never recovered from that debacle. If the six-nation forums dealing with Iran and North Korea suffer comparable failures, the consequence will be a world of unchecked proliferation, not controlled by either governing principles or functioning institutions.

He warns us that:

The risk of war lies in exceeding objective limits; the bane of diplomacy is to substitute process for purpose. Diplomacy should not be confused with glibness. It is not an oratorical but a conceptual exercise. When it postures for domestic audiences, radical challenges are encouraged rather than overcome.

In other words, it's well past time to get serious. The major powers have to quit playing to domestic audiences or advancing narrow but conflicting interests and get tough. There has to be a plausible price to be paid for their current course of development.

Diplomacy can only be effective if there is some underlying consensus on which the parties can agree. But with Iran, and Korea.

There is not even an approximation of a comparable world view. Iran has reacted to the American offer to enter negotiations with taunts, and has inflamed tensions in the region.

And what is needed?

[T]he Six will have to be prepared to act decisively before the process of technology makes the objective of stopping uranium enrichment irrelevant. Well before that point is reached, sanctions will have to be agreed on. To be effective, they must be comprehensive; halfhearted, symbolic measures combine the disadvantage of every course of action. Interallied consultations must avoid the hesitation that the League of Nations conveyed over Abyssinia. We must learn from the North Korean negotiations not to engage in a process involving long pauses to settle disagreements within the administration and within the negotiating group, while the other side adds to its nuclear potential.

In other words, quit fooling around and kicking the can down the road. We need strong, united, and decisive action now.

And just dealing with Iran is not enough, because there will always be another threat coming around the bend.

A next step should be the elaboration of a global system of nuclear enrichment to take place in designated centers around the world under international control -- as proposed for Iran by Russia. This would ease implications of discrimination against Iran and establish a pattern for the development of nuclear energy without a crisis with each entrant into the nuclear field.

Past regimes, from Carter to Clinton acted as if it was sufficient to isolate rogue regimes like Korea and Iran. But what Dr. Kissinger makes clear is that such isolation not only doesn't solve the underlying problem -- it makes it far worse.

We today are living with the results of the fecklessness of past regimes. We cannot afford to do so any longer.

It is time to repudiate the diplomacy that has characterized the post-cold war world so far and to forge a comprehensive solution backed by great power force and the willingness to use it. If we don't our children will curse us.

Read Kissinger's comments here.

I wonder if Vienna would be willing to host another congress....