Why My Diplomacy Is Smarter Than Your Diplomacy

You remember what diplomacy was like in the days before it was smart, right?  When diplomats let slip undiplomatic truths about Kim Jong Il being a “tyrannical dictator” who subjected his people to a “hellish nightmare?”  When Presidents “loathed” their adversaries instead of sitting down and sharing a bong with them?  Thank goodness change has come!

It says a lot about the North Koreans that they can’t just rise above this and hold the high ground.

So does this mean the North Koreans might just be assholes even after Bush isn’t President anymore?

When you campaign on a platform of “smart diplomacy,” the clear implications are that (a) your predecessors weren’t smart, and (b) that you will be.  We should have doubted that the minute that this campaign hired Joe Biden for his diplomatic suavity, and made its Secretary of State someone who had to fib about getting shot at in Bosnia to demonstrate any foreign policy cred.  Clinton has made gaffe after gaffe since coming into office, and the White House needs a full time spokesman just to explain Joe Biden (no, he didn’t really mean to sow public panic; no, he did not green-light Israeli air strikes on Iran; no he wasn’t really drooling on the nubile Ukrainian hotties, for whom he has immense respect). Clinton’s performance probably isn’t unrelated to her reported loss of influence in the power struggle between State and NSC. Not that sidelining the State Department is necessarily a bad thing.

Look, I’ve been fairly supportive of Barack Obama’s North Korea policy, and would add that so far, it’s been far “smarter” than Bush’s.  In fact, it might just be too good to last. But let’s not make the common Washington error of conflating policy with diplomacy. That error is never greater than in the peculiar case of North Korea, which is seldom influenced by what diplomats say, but which knows that it’s vulnerable to what bankers do. Diplomacy, of course, was the skill that most of the Democratic candidates stressed, and which Obama’s diplomats have done with obvious ineptitude.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has insulted through inadvertence as ably as John Bolton ever did by design.  Please don’t take this as an objection to the idea of insulting the North Korean dictator and system if there’s a design behind that.  If and when it finally occurs to the administration that there’s no way to negotiate Kim Jong Il out of his nukes, we might decide, as a matter of policy, that it’s in our interests to discredit Kim Jong Il in the eyes of his subjects. One way to do that might be to challenge his aura of invincibility by making a global laughingstock of him. In these times, increasing numbers of North Koreans would find out, and there are plenty of underfunded broadcasting services in Seoul who could help us get a churlish message through. Having met Ambassador Bolton for a discussion of North Korea policy while he was U.N. Ambassador, I believe that his remarks were by design, but it was also very clear to me that the Bush Administration didn’t share that design. If, as is now rumored, Hillary Clinton is about to offer the North Koreans a massive new package of incentives — Agreed Framework III — there’s nothing smart about either the policy or the diplomacy.

Update: I see GI Korea had similar thoughts.