Striped Pants and Other Thoughts

In From The Cold, one of the blogs I read that relate to world affairs, says that the director of National Intelligence, appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that indications are that North Korea is continuing to engage in activities that are related to nuclear research and proliferation. According to the blog, this little tidbit has been ignored because the Bush administration wants to believe that the diplomatic solution they brokered is keeping NK in check. The blog points out that this isn't new; the Clinton administration made the same assumptions, and the result was a nuclear test that apparently took most by surprise.

Diplomacy has a bad sound to me, as a rule. I tend to think of greasy imprecision, people smiling at me while they finger their knife, being pleasant to people who don't deserve the air they breathe, simply because they /run a country we need/ will do something awful if we don't persuade them otherwise/ are hell-bent on killing themselves and their neighbors, and we think it's our duty to stop them/. In an early episode of Star Trek, a Federation ambassador expostulates and fumes because Kirk insists on kicking ass and taking names instead of letting sweet reason have its day; then, when the warring sides see the error of their ways, not to mention the size of the phasers on the Enterprise, they agree to kiss and make up, at which point the ambassador toddles forward to offer help in that process. I know, thats a caricature -- but it is how I see diplomats. I think they're hard-working, as a rule, underappreciated, as a rule, and invisible, as a rule; I also think that their job involves nailing jelly to a wall. Its my hunch -- and I would bet that there are studies, many studies to prove me wrong -- that the effectiveness of diplomacy is tangentially related to the muscle behind it. Or to use that old phrase, how many legions does the Pope have?

I am not discounting diplomacy. I just think that we don't understand (we meaning, of course, me) what the limits of diplomatic expectations should be. And how to tell when we've reached those vague limits, and what we do then.