Once again the American “peace team” has left miserable Gaza, with its ghostly white Palestinian slums inconspicuously up against the gorgeous blue Mediterranean. Once again publicly expressed “hope for peace” has been duly proclaimed–but not too much hope, you know!
Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in his late 60s now, his hands white and trembling, met at 2 a.m. with the Israelis’ theatrically virtuous Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (An early-bird meeting is supposed to indicate to a watching world a sense of urgency.)
When the two sides, brought together by the U.S. team, had their last meeting–for this time, at least–the pact was “signed” by seemingly sincere pledges to hold regular cooperative talks over practical problems, to meet again and, in effect, to try to stop being so nasty to each other.
The Americans involved–all splendid people individually, but reflecting the Clinton administration’s approach to foreign policy as lots of process–immediately praised the meetings. They were, after all, designed to save something from the breakdown of the Oslo-inspired peace process here, in terms of committees forming and following through.
Two years ago, when the Oslo agreements were really being implemented (“land for peace,” the Israelis and the Palestinians called them then), nine committees were formed. Fine. But now, those committees have been elevated to the raison d’etre of the whole enterprise. After Gaza this October, there were sighs of relief simply because the committees were still in place. They could continue to talk.
The Clinton administration’s able special representative here, Dennis Ross, hogtied by policy, has said that such exercises in “process” can come to be “substantive,” but there’s not been much of either recently. Cynics in Washington came up with a sardonic counter-line: “Now that we’re finished with the modalities, let’s go on to the process.”
Actually, a good tip as to what is going on these days in this new kind of American diplomacy is gained just by looking at the words used to describe it. It is diplomacy by “photo-op” or “paper over the differences” or “process before substance.” Lulls in real progress are marked by a “cross-pollinated hiatus,” during which time facilitators are “cross-pollinating the portfolios.”
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This essentially therapeutic school of diplomatic language differs from the traditional “power politics” school–where nations and empires employed pressures and incentives (and more) to order the world.
Many genuinely well-meaning people will argue that this new form of American diplomacy is better–surely more moral–than the old. We should not be telling others what to do, they say. We have no right to impose even desirable values upon anyone else.
That sounds nice, but is it really? That philosophy, after all, gave us Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Burundi, and now the breakdown of the Middle East peace process.
It raises–but is too “nice” to answer–the moral question of what a great nation is responsible for actually doing, when it has the power to right, or even more important to prevent, terrible wrongs.
Here in Israel, for instance, the advent of the peace treaty between Israel and the PLO, signed with the famous handshake between Arafat and the late Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn in 1993, did not come about because of wishful thinking, dialoguing or photo-oping our way through real problems.
It came about because Secretary of State James Baker III took palpable steps, such as criticizing Jewish settlements publicly and holding back $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, thus effectively influencing the election to bring in a peace-friendly Labor government. And it came about on the PLO side because the United States defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War, thus cutting off the PLO’s backing from Moscow and finally forcing it to try to make peace or perish.
The new neutralist, symbolic, therapeutic diplomacy does not settle anything, but brings already unsettled situations to endless stalemate. It gives all the impetus to the aggressive party, who quickly learns that all you have to do is establish facts. The United States will not rescind those facts but will negotiate using them as the new baseline.
This kind of diplomacy, exemplified by recent events here, also raises expectations that the United States will do something, when in fact it is not employing its power to do much of anything. Soon, America’s will and power may be simply discounted. And perhaps worst of all, it destroys any inspiration for youth worldwide that America is a wise and principled nation–or that the world can indeed be molded and bettered.
It wasn’t always that way, of course. When the Soviets were thinking of putting missiles into Nicaragua in the early ’80s, the State Department had meetings for days and decided we should say that such an act was “unacceptable” or “inadmissible.”
Finally, Secretary of State Alexander Haig Jr. went to Moscow and frankly told them, “You put missiles into Nicaragua–poof!”
I never really thought of it this way before, but I guess I believe in “poof” foreign policy.