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Thursday, March 28 2024 @ 09:23 AM CDT

This just in: 'diplomacy' works

Age of Reason

Rosa Brooks

Christopher Hill, U.S. assistant secretary of State, stunned reporters Wednesday by announcing that North Korea has agreed to disable its nuclear facilities – and by attributing the breakthrough to a "a previously unknown but surprisingly effective" method of foreign relations recently discovered by U.S. officials, which Hill dubbed "diplomacy."
"This is a real first for us," Hill explained proudly. "And I won't pretend that the idea of using this 'diplomacy' technique didn't initially strike me as wacky. But so far, so good!"

In a written statement, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice elaborated on Hill's announcement: "This is an exciting moment in U.S. foreign policy. Now that we have discovered this innovative new method, 'diplomacy,' our nation will no longer have to rely exclusively on more traditional forms of foreign relations such as mockery, insults and unilateral military action."

Not everyone agrees that diplomacy is "new." Professor Richard F. Burton III, William Moreson Chair of Ancient History at UC Berkeley, notes that the art of diplomacy was fairly well known to past civilizations, from China's Eastern Zhou dynasty (771-221 BC) to the U.S. administration of William Jefferson Clinton (AD 1993-2001).

"The idea of negotiating directly with your enemies, as well as your friends, isn't novel. But from AD 2001-2007 – the New Dark Ages – diplomacy was vigorously suppressed, and by 2007, the art was presumed lost, along with the art of hand-carving accordions. It's nice to see young persons taking an interest in diplomacy again."

Hill added: "I knew there was a board game called 'Diplomacy,' but I had no idea it was based on an actual lost foreign policy technique."

So what gave Hill the idea of resurrecting a long-vanished art?

"To tell the truth, I got the idea from the State Department's new blog," Hill explained Thursday in an exclusive interview with the Los Angeles Times. "It's a cutting-edge communications experiment called 'DipNote.' Naturally, I at first assumed that 'DipNote' was a play on the word 'dipsh-' um, 'dipstick,' which is often used to refer to the dedicated public servants charged with carrying forward the administration's foreign policy goals."

In fact, DipNote is short for "diplomatic note," a term State Department bloggers noticed on some crumbling papers buried in the State Department archives. "Well," chuckled Hill, "as you can imagine, no one around here had any idea what a 'diplomatic note' was, but the whole thing got me thinking – maybe those archives are worth checking out!"

White House insiders hint that not everyone is equally delighted by Hill's rediscovery of diplomacy. A senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney was sharply critical: "Don't you think there's a reason our office has worked so hard to suppress knowledge of the art of diplomacy? In the wrong hands, diplomacy is flat-out dangerous. Imagine what would happen if all our enemies started using it!"

Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton concurred: "You let these State Department dipsticks use diplomacy, even just for a few weeks, and the next thing you know they're promising to take North Korea off the list of terrorism sponsors in exchange for some piddling nuclear concessions. Keep that kind of thing up and there won't be anyone left in the 'axis of evil.' Then who are we supposed to bomb?"

Details on how diplomacy works remain scant. When asked if diplomacy requires participants to sing "Kumbaya," play trust games or share stories of their most embarrassing moments, Hill refused to comment, though he did note that discussing the Iraq war was "a very effective icebreaker with the North Koreans because it's definitely embarrassing for us. Getting those painful feelings on the table helped encourage Kim Jong Il to open up about some of his own personal issues, and that's when we really started seeing progress in the nuclear negotiations."

Opinion in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang was positive, with many residents expressing the hope that the United States would offer further therapeutic encounters, as well as diplomacy, to Dear Leader.

In Washington, Rice strove to reassure critics unnerved by the apparent change of course. Diplomacy, she suggested, holds great promise, but "it's only one arrow in our quiver. I'm fully aware that diplomacy is probably pointless when you're dealing with the truly intransigent, such as John Bolton and Dick Cheney. In such cases, we may still have to fall back on force, which seems to be the only language they understand."

Bolton offered no direct response. When pressed, he said, "I only hope the president has the good sense to bomb Iran before this diplomacy nonsense spreads any further."

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
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