Friday Diplomacy Blogging

by Cheryl Rofer

I'm having connection problems today, so let's get this up quickly before the dsl goes down again!

Let’s try making this a regular feature, as Phila requested.

First a disclaimer: I won’t always be right. Reading diplomacy is a bit more reliable than reading tea leaves, but a number of things can go wrong. I might just be dumb on that day. Events may require a different path than the one begun. And some diplomatic moves are feints – actions to test a response. These moves may be nice or nasty.

For example, I was too generous on Shimon Peres’s Nowruz message. Apparently it was downright insulting, and reports are that the US administration was furious. Obama would have informed Israel of his message (one does that with allies, particularly sensitive ones), so the Israelis decided to do one of their own. The message may have been intended to provoke Iran into an intemperate reply. If so, the Supreme Leader did not cooperate. However, his response to Obama may have been more measured than it would have been in the absence of the Israeli message. He may be wondering if this was a good cop – bad cop maneuver. The Israeli message to the United States seems to have been something like “you can’t tell us what to do, and besides, we may just bomb Iran tomorrow.” Or the Peres message could be an act of desperation.

Something else I missed last week was the possible significance of Putin’s not having a translator in the matching-armchair phot. That could signal that the conversation just wasn’t that important to him, or that he’s overconfident. Or he may have left the interpreter out of the photo, for show, and had one present for the discussions. Only those who are completely fluent in a language will not have an interpreter present for diplomatic discussions. Too much can turn on a word or phrase.

Here’s analysis of Obama’s Nowruz message from the New York Times. It follows pretty much the line that David Sanger, also known as Judy Miller in drag, has been following: diplomacy first to show that Iran is intransigent, bomb them later. And did you know that they have enough uranium to make a bomb? One more time, oh dear.

More positively, both Roger Cohen and (surprise!) Joe Klein are providing some reasonably sophisticated analysis of the administration’s diplomatic moves.

Cohen assesses the Nowruz message from American, Iranian and Israeli perspective, bringing in his recent reporting from the area.

Cohen also gives us some really new news on what one insider group is recommending the Obama administration do on Israel and the Palestinians. Presumably this group gave Cohen their recommendations in the hope that he’d publish them. It would not be surprising if other reporters/columnists had also received the recommendations, but we’re not hearing from them.

The 10 signatories — of both the four-page letter and the report — include Volcker himself, former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Senator Chuck Hagel, former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, former Congressman Lee Hamilton and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering.

My understanding is their thinking coincides in significant degree with that of both George Mitchell, Obama’s Middle East envoy, and Gen. James Jones, Obama’s national security adviser who worked on security issues with Israelis and Palestinians in the last year of the Bush administration, an often frustrating experience.

This overlap gives the report particular significance.

One of the recommendations:

Cease discouraging Palestinian national reconciliation and make clear that a government that agrees to a cease-fire with Israel, accepts President Mahmoud Abbas as the chief negotiator and commits to abiding by the results of a national referendum on a future peace agreement would not be boycotted or sanctioned.

Read the whole thing.

Klein gives us a hunch (which sounds plausible to me) on one aspect of the Obama Afghanistan plan, bits and pieces of which have been surfacing all week. That surfacing is in itself an interesting tactic. The administration has been disciplined regarding leaks so far, or at least able to keep a no-drama-Obama face when unplanned leaks occur. These planned leaks most likely are for testing the waters (also known as trial balloons, to mix the metaphors), but I suspect that they are also to prevent too much surprise and uproar over the full plan when it is presented. [Presented today. WV comment will follow.]

Klein also does a pretty good analysis, taking off from a book by Leslie Gelb, on power. I disagree with the way Klein (or Gelb?) isolates power as an abstraction and clings to the rather Bushian sense of “throwing one’s weight around.” The most effective way to throw one’s weight around is one that would not necessarily seem that way to the participants. I believe Obama is capable of this sort of subtlety, and I might argue that he’s done it already. For just one case, what that Nowruz message must have said to the Israelis: get ready for some changes.

I think that Klein (Gelb?) is still under the sway of too-obvious moves as diplomacy in this piece, but he’s moving toward something like subtlety.

Finally, the man himself speaks on his approch to foreign policy. [Transcript of Obama press conference.]

How effective these negotiations [between Israelis and Palestinians] may be, I think we're going to have to wait and see. But you know, we, we were here for St. Patrick's Day, and you'll recall that we had what had been previously sworn enemies celebrating here in this very room.

You know, leaders from the two sides of Northern Ireland that, you know, a couple of decades ago -- or even a decade ago -- people would have said could never achieve peace, and here they were, jointly appearing and talking about their commitment, even in the face of violent provocation.

And what that tells me is that, if you stick to it, if you are persistent, then, then these problems can be dealt with.

That whole philosophy of persistence, by the way, is one that I'm going to be emphasizing again and again in the months and years to come as long as I'm in this office. I'm a big believer in persistence.

So don’t expect instant results. He doesn’t.

When it comes to Iran, you know, we did a video, sending a message to the Iranian people and the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And some people said, well, they did not immediately say that we're eliminating nuclear weapons and stop funding terrorism. Well, we didn't expect that. We expect that we're going to make steady progress on this front.