Sunday, July 22, 2018

Negotiating with adversaries

Several people have made the point that talking to our adversaries is important. John Bolton noted that FDR met with Stalin (although that was at the end of the WWII); Nixon went to China; Reagan talked privately to Gorbachev (the Walk in the Woods). That's fine in principle, but it's not what many people are concerned about.

While there are always risks associated with this more unscripted approach, two things are have been tacitly assumed; first that the President's only agenda is advancing America's interests, and that he is sufficiently well informed and competent to do so. In Trump's case neither condition is met.

Many serious and well informed commentators including John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and even Dan Coats, Trumps own DNI, have explicitly or implicitly lamented Trump's comments and questioned the wisdom of his approach. Many are wondering whether he is putting personal interests above country.

What serious people are concerned about is not whether such Presidential diplomatic initiatives are a good idea as a means of changing the trajectory of bilateral relations, but whether Trump can be trusted to pull it off. The evidence so far suggests their concerns are well founded.

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