OP-ED: "Foreign policy rookie makes public gaffe," by Charles Krauthammer, Indianapolis Star, 28 July 2007, p. A16.

No offense to Krauthammer, but his scolding of Obama comes off as weak and ill-informed, making graduate student mistakes that betray a lifetime of learning through others instead of actual experience.

We are told Obama's answer on meeting baddies without preconditions would put the country at risk by making situations worse.

Then the killer put-down:

Moreover, summits can also be traps if they're not wired in advance for success, such as Nixon's trip to China, for which Henry Kissinger had already largely hammered out the famous Shanghai communique. You don't go hoping for the best.

Bullshit on several levels, because that's exactly what the Nixon team did: they went hoping for the best. Remember the timeframe: We're sinking on Vietnam, Nixon's under attack at home from war protestors, and Mao's nuttier than a fruitcake, debilitated by all sorts of maladies and still in a buzz over the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, which he could have revived at a moment's notice.

Proof? Imagine Zhou does not come to greet Nixon at the airport. Imagine no televised state dinner. Imagine no F2F with Mao.

Think the Shanghai communique would have saved the summit? Only the perpetual grad student would swallow that nonsense.

First, the Shanghai communique is hardly "famous" or consequential. Like most communiques, it contained a lot of platitudes signifying nothing. It was not what constituted the success of Nixon's trip. If you got the graduate student history book on the subject, you might have come to that conclusion, but read Margaret McMillan's great When Nixon Met Mao and tell me that trip was "wired" to be an automatic success. Nixon's entire mania across the week was the photo-ops, not the communique. It was the symbolism of the trip: Who would meet him at the airport? Would he get to meet Mao? How would the toasts go?

Second, none of this was "wired" and all came down to last-minute scheming and finessing, all well captured in this book that shows that people make foreign policy, not organizations. You read your average grad-level foreign policy history and its a load of impersonal forces. You actually live through any of it, and it's all personal and amazingly so.

The main reason why I wanted to pen a history from inside of what it was like to participate in the formulation of the Navy white paper "From the Sea ..." is because the grad-level versions were so comically off the mark, with great man Admiral Snuffy Smith bequeathing the entire document, fully-formed, like some grand strategy Zeus, out of his head. The truth was messy, very personal, and full of all sorts of accidents and feuds and semi-goofy stuff. The neatness factor simply wasn't there.

Nixon's performance made that summit, as did Zhou's. The communique is what the wonks swoon over in retrospect, but pretending that constituted the success of that summit is truly grad-level analysis.

The second whiff?

Obama enthusiasts might want to write this off as a solitary slip. Except that this was the second time. The first occurred in another unscripted moment. During the April 26 South Carolina candidates' debate, Brian Williams asked what kind of change in the U.S. military posture abroad Obama would order in response to a hypothetical al-Qaida strike on two American cities.

Obama's answer: "Well, the first thing we would have to do is make sure that we've got an effective emergency response--something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans."

Asked to be commander in chief, Obama could only play first-responder in chief. Caught off guard, and without his advisers, he simply slipped into two automatic talking points: emergency response and its corollary--the obligatory Katrina Bush-bash.

When the same question came to Hillary, she again pounced: "I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate."

So let me get this straight in this, the great asymmetrical struggle of our age: our strength is not found in our ability to withstand and mitigate attacks but in symmetrical--and often knee-jerk--retaliation against state-less enemies?

Talk about a grad student answer right out of the 20th century! Somebody is definitely beyond his analytical expiration date.

Our resilience is our deterrence in the 21st century. If you don't get that, you shouldn't be anywhere near the levers of power in a moment of danger. If your answer is just to pull triggers to get your rocks off as quickly as possible, you might as well hand over power to the bin Ladens right now, because our future foreign policy will consist merely of those guys plucking our strings.

I say, go to the back of the class and write Robb's book out in chalk a couple of times til something different sinks in.

Krauthammer ends this embarrassing display of sophomoric analysis with the specter of America sharing the stage--unwittingly--with a "malevolent clown like Hugo Chavez."

Good God Almighty!

That's what we've come to after 8 years of Bush? Living in fear of Chavez?

Nixon sits down with Mao, a guy who killed about 80 million, but we're supposed to fear treading anywhere near the fantastically evil Chavez?

What kind of midget superpower does Krauthammer fear we've become that he's so entranced by such imagery?

Just chalk it up to another Boomer (and former Mondale speechwriter) infatuated with visuals over reality, armed with his graduate-level understanding of both history and the complexity of the world we now live in.

ZENPUNDIT MAKES A SOLID REJOINDER IN A COMMENT:

Hey Tom,

Krauthammer is simplifying because he doesn't want talks, granted but Nixon's trip was hardly improvisational theater. The diplomatic minuet began in Nixon's first term via all kinds of soundings in the Warsaw talks, through the Romanians, Nixon's speeches at state dinners where he sent signals to Beijing, through Yayah Khan, Kissinger's secret trip - there was real spadework done beforehand and much time and thought on Nixon's part for the strategic goals he wished to accomplish ( though I also will grant you, he clearly reveled in his photos on the Great Wall and toasting with Mao as a personal political triumph. Nixon was a complicated figure)

MY REPLY:
Zen, points all well taken and well documented in McMillan's book.

The point isn't about whether there was preparations. There can't be a summit without preparations, all fantastic, debate-posed-questions aside.

The point is whether we had preconditions in hand before committing ourselves to the summit and executing. Scan the communique and tell me we got anything other than a bunch of maybe's and sort of's and could be's. What exactly do we pin China down on prior to agreeing to meet with them? Mao will reform his country? They promise to bail us out on Vietnam? They promise alliance against the Sovs? China gives up its nukes or even speaking in insanely aggressive terms about their use?

None of the classic preconditions we were angling for were delivered either before or even after the summit. So in the end, we were indeed "hoping for the best."

And you know what? We actually got it.

What I rebel against in this exchange is this foggy, rose-colored view of history whereby the calculating Nixon and advance man Kissinger were risking nothing by the summit, because it had all been hard-wired in advance ("We can always fall back on the communique to save our asses!").

Nixon and Kissinger went knowing the symbolism of the opening would be the main gain. We weren't going to get any real goodies that conservatives or liberals were demanding, just the promise of further dialogue. Hell, Beijing barely dialed down the propaganda on many issues.

So compare that amazingly far-sighted and courageous act to our hear nothing-see nothing-say nothing diplomacy of today, where we expect potential dialogue partners to give up their nuke programs in advance before we'll deign to talk with them.

And then we wonder why we're so isolated and taking such cheap and easy shots from dinosovs like Gorbachev!

ZENPUNDIT AGAIN:

Gorby must be slipping into old man reverie, he used to be sharper than that.

As I read the background of writing the Shanghai Communique, it seemed to be at once a must-have saving of face gesture for Mao and Zhou and a pragmatic papering-over long-term differences in order to get on with more pressing business. Both sides were flexible and wisely no one insisted on backing anybody into a corner on language.

The communique certainly wasn't why Nixon went to China as Krauthammer contends, it was more of a price Nixon was willing to pay at home on his political Right in order to get to Beijing in the first place ( and the pro-Chiang Kai-shek China lobby Right went nuts - but to no lasting effect on Nixon). So you call out Krauthammer correctly there, he's locked in hindsight bias.

While there were not any promises per se, both sides were facing the reality , especially the Chinese, of an increasingly aggressive Soviet Union, a matching of interests. Both sides profited immediately simply by demonstrating to Moscow that the China card was on the table. That symbolism was, in effect, substance by changing the " correlation of forces" as Gromyko, Brezhnev and the rest would have seen it. Given our Vietnam wind-down and problems in the Mideast and at home, we needed that breathing space at the time.

ME AGAIN:

Exactly, Zen, meaning both sides, as McMillan points out so well, were effectively reading the correlation of forces.

I really fear more years of Boomer presidency in which every possible diplomatic overture is pre-villified with charges of "capitulation," (Nathan's point). I do see numerous coming realignments globally, and I fear we'll be locked out of participating in many of them because of this zero-sum mentality on domestic politics that the Boomers inflict us with. We are mirror-imaging the worst of what we decry globally, and to me, that's the antithesis of leadership, but rather pure reactionism.

Maybe that's why I disdain the Boomer commentators most of all: they exemplify this reactionism in its purest forms. We no longer create visions of futures worth creating. We simply excel at tearing down those of others.

It really feels like we as a nation are still trying to find what should be our post-Cold War foreign policy, and I blame that on the Boomers. They are so infected with Cold War visions (and their upbringing) that they are unable to lead us past that historical moment. We are surrounded by the success of the containment strategy (the massive expansion of globalization modeled on us) and yet we have become so amazingly uncomfortable in this world of our own creation.

in the end, what impresses me most about Nixon's vision on China was that, despite some possible lightening of his load, the real payoffs would be decades down the road. Nixon here was playing for the ages (Kissinger, the pure operator, took a while to catch on), and that's not something I see the Boomers managing, except in the most escapist way (global warming as the Calgon-take-me-away alternative). Their great fault is their tendency to live in this moment, judging all political losses as the end of the world and all victories as judgment day--thus the absurd focus on preconditions, which tells me they value the appearance of leadership more than leadership itself.