It may be time for the United States to admit that everything it needs to know about foreign policy can be learned from an afternoon watching The Godfather, Part II. In a famous scene, Michael Corleone shares with Frankie Pentangeli some wisdom handed down from his father: “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” Essentially the same advice is given in slightly different words in Sun Tzu’s classic The Art of War, in which Sun says, “To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.”
American policy for the better part of a century has taken the opposite track. The government decides upon an enemy for the populace to rally against, and a war of rhetoric (at a minimum) ensues. Enemy nations are typically isolated and vilified (“Axis of Evil,” anyone?), and very little diplomatic intercourse results.
In the case of Cuba, for instance, the policy of the United States has been to demonstrate its support for the Cuban people by starving the island of American dollars. To further demonstrate America’s commitment to human freedom, Americans are forbidden from traveling to Cuba except under very rare circumstances, none of which have to do with sightseeing. The United States also imposes steep economic sanctions against Cuba in order to show the Cuban people what a bad guy their leader is. He is such a bad guy, in fact, that any American who lights up a Cuban cigar can go to jail for it. If that doesn’t make sense to you, then you must not understand what it takes to fight for freedom.
This policy must be working well, since no American president except Jimmy Carter has made any effort to challenge it. The cunning strategy is apparently to have Fidel Castro die of old age in office, thereby achieving the United States’ goal of having someone who is not Fidel Castro take over. Ten U.S. presidents so far have had to wait patiently for the chance to deliver what I’m sure will be a stirring, triumphant speech about how good an idea this policy was.
Somehow, though, the Cuban-American enmity seems like a quaint relic of the drive-in movie era in this new age of saber rattling against Muslim nations and nebulous ideologies. We have a new war now, having declared victory against communism, that godless beast bent on destroying us. Today we are fighting terrorism, a beast that, while not godless, associates itself with a god quite foreign to most of us. Needless to say, we are assured that it is bent on our destruction. It is difficult to say what it is in this case, actually, since terrorism is arguably a political technique and not a system of government. Communism is also not a system of government, in the strictest sense, but we have no need to discuss that, since it is something we are told was utterly defeated. Except in the case of Cuba. And China. And North Korea. But why bother with semantics, when only two of those three countries have nuclear weapons? Besides, terrorism has the great rhetorical benefit of being vague enough to conceivably be hiding under every rock. If only Joe McCarthy could have lived to see the day.
If you ask the Cubans—and policy sternly dictates that you not ask the Cubans anything—it is the United States that is committing acts of terrorism. Of course, this can’t be true for the following reasons: 1. It is a claim made by our enemy, which means that it has to be a lie. 2. The United States is only capable of doing things that advance the cause of freedom and democracy, and we are assured by our president that terrorism is the opposite of those two things. So that settles that.
The United States, if it is serious in its pursuit of the best PR, should consider the tremendous favor it does its enemies by attempting to isolate them. For when each side vituperates against the other, the public that is preached to is left to decide which side (if any) is right. As the other side’s complete argument is never presented in the opponent’s press, the choice that minimizes cognitive dissonance among the public is that the domestic version is the truth. How miserable it would be for the citizenry if it were the other way around. So even under the harshest regimes, a perverse version of the Stockholm syndrome manifests as ardent support for the domestic government and equally ardent hatred for its current opponent. This starts a cycle that weakens any chance for productive dialogue between the two sides, since the powerful specter of an enemy to unite against deflects attention from the nagging cancers that eat away at a society from within. “Conservation of tension” is not a law of physics, but it seems to be a law of politics. Ease it in one place, and it immediately pops up in another.
That the current American administration does not enjoy universal domestic support is evidence that something about our system still works. But we can’t build support for our own ideology by foisting it upon others. Rather, we can only get others to want the American version of democracy by making them believe that we’d rather keep it for ourselves. We do that by showing up around the world and talking warmly to everyone, all smiles, strutting around like someone wearing a brand-new outfit in the hopes of being asked about it, just for the opportunity to say, “Oh, this old thing?”
We accuse other countries of abusing their citizens, so why do we isolate them? If rumors swirl around a neighborhood that children are suffering at the hands of an abusive family, is the best choice for the other neighbors to turn their backs, allowing the horrors to continue behind drawn shades? Or is it better to invite the suspect neighbors to picnics every weekend and drop in on them unexpectedly? Can bruises be hidden when everyone is looking for them? Could all the attention change the parents’ behavior? Could we even find, to our surprise, that the rumors were in fact false?
When nations normalize relations and resume diplomacy, there is a concomitant cooling of rhetoric. Visiting ambassadors are given laudatory introductions by their hosts, and the ambassadors offer kind words in return. News reports of diplomatic visits run with video of smiling people shaking hands and saying nice things about each other. The best part of all is that none of it has to be done with even a drop of sincerity to advance the agenda and standing of each country
When diplomatic relations exist between countries, the rhetoric delivered to the public must at least approximate the attitude projected between the communicating governments. Otherwise, a government that publicly speaks ill of another nation to its citizens appears to them hypocritical when its conduct toward that nation’s diplomats is contradictory. Rather than reveal itself as less than honest, that nation is left to either give up the rhetoric altogether or alter its tone considerably.
The minor swallowing of pride required for us to break bread with our enemies is an essential gambit in the effort to win the hearts and minds of those who would otherwise oppose us. We might even be surprised when one day we forget to fake the smile we so carefully practiced, only to find that the one on our face is genuine.
American policy for the better part of a century has taken the opposite track. The government decides upon an enemy for the populace to rally against, and a war of rhetoric (at a minimum) ensues. Enemy nations are typically isolated and vilified (“Axis of Evil,” anyone?), and very little diplomatic intercourse results.
In the case of Cuba, for instance, the policy of the United States has been to demonstrate its support for the Cuban people by starving the island of American dollars. To further demonstrate America’s commitment to human freedom, Americans are forbidden from traveling to Cuba except under very rare circumstances, none of which have to do with sightseeing. The United States also imposes steep economic sanctions against Cuba in order to show the Cuban people what a bad guy their leader is. He is such a bad guy, in fact, that any American who lights up a Cuban cigar can go to jail for it. If that doesn’t make sense to you, then you must not understand what it takes to fight for freedom.
This policy must be working well, since no American president except Jimmy Carter has made any effort to challenge it. The cunning strategy is apparently to have Fidel Castro die of old age in office, thereby achieving the United States’ goal of having someone who is not Fidel Castro take over. Ten U.S. presidents so far have had to wait patiently for the chance to deliver what I’m sure will be a stirring, triumphant speech about how good an idea this policy was.
Somehow, though, the Cuban-American enmity seems like a quaint relic of the drive-in movie era in this new age of saber rattling against Muslim nations and nebulous ideologies. We have a new war now, having declared victory against communism, that godless beast bent on destroying us. Today we are fighting terrorism, a beast that, while not godless, associates itself with a god quite foreign to most of us. Needless to say, we are assured that it is bent on our destruction. It is difficult to say what it is in this case, actually, since terrorism is arguably a political technique and not a system of government. Communism is also not a system of government, in the strictest sense, but we have no need to discuss that, since it is something we are told was utterly defeated. Except in the case of Cuba. And China. And North Korea. But why bother with semantics, when only two of those three countries have nuclear weapons? Besides, terrorism has the great rhetorical benefit of being vague enough to conceivably be hiding under every rock. If only Joe McCarthy could have lived to see the day.
If you ask the Cubans—and policy sternly dictates that you not ask the Cubans anything—it is the United States that is committing acts of terrorism. Of course, this can’t be true for the following reasons: 1. It is a claim made by our enemy, which means that it has to be a lie. 2. The United States is only capable of doing things that advance the cause of freedom and democracy, and we are assured by our president that terrorism is the opposite of those two things. So that settles that.
The United States, if it is serious in its pursuit of the best PR, should consider the tremendous favor it does its enemies by attempting to isolate them. For when each side vituperates against the other, the public that is preached to is left to decide which side (if any) is right. As the other side’s complete argument is never presented in the opponent’s press, the choice that minimizes cognitive dissonance among the public is that the domestic version is the truth. How miserable it would be for the citizenry if it were the other way around. So even under the harshest regimes, a perverse version of the Stockholm syndrome manifests as ardent support for the domestic government and equally ardent hatred for its current opponent. This starts a cycle that weakens any chance for productive dialogue between the two sides, since the powerful specter of an enemy to unite against deflects attention from the nagging cancers that eat away at a society from within. “Conservation of tension” is not a law of physics, but it seems to be a law of politics. Ease it in one place, and it immediately pops up in another.
That the current American administration does not enjoy universal domestic support is evidence that something about our system still works. But we can’t build support for our own ideology by foisting it upon others. Rather, we can only get others to want the American version of democracy by making them believe that we’d rather keep it for ourselves. We do that by showing up around the world and talking warmly to everyone, all smiles, strutting around like someone wearing a brand-new outfit in the hopes of being asked about it, just for the opportunity to say, “Oh, this old thing?”
We accuse other countries of abusing their citizens, so why do we isolate them? If rumors swirl around a neighborhood that children are suffering at the hands of an abusive family, is the best choice for the other neighbors to turn their backs, allowing the horrors to continue behind drawn shades? Or is it better to invite the suspect neighbors to picnics every weekend and drop in on them unexpectedly? Can bruises be hidden when everyone is looking for them? Could all the attention change the parents’ behavior? Could we even find, to our surprise, that the rumors were in fact false?
When nations normalize relations and resume diplomacy, there is a concomitant cooling of rhetoric. Visiting ambassadors are given laudatory introductions by their hosts, and the ambassadors offer kind words in return. News reports of diplomatic visits run with video of smiling people shaking hands and saying nice things about each other. The best part of all is that none of it has to be done with even a drop of sincerity to advance the agenda and standing of each country
When diplomatic relations exist between countries, the rhetoric delivered to the public must at least approximate the attitude projected between the communicating governments. Otherwise, a government that publicly speaks ill of another nation to its citizens appears to them hypocritical when its conduct toward that nation’s diplomats is contradictory. Rather than reveal itself as less than honest, that nation is left to either give up the rhetoric altogether or alter its tone considerably.
The minor swallowing of pride required for us to break bread with our enemies is an essential gambit in the effort to win the hearts and minds of those who would otherwise oppose us. We might even be surprised when one day we forget to fake the smile we so carefully practiced, only to find that the one on our face is genuine.
