https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/30/a-therapeutic-middle-east-versus-a-tragic-one/
Classical diplomacy warns leaders to be neither obsequious and appeasing abroad, nor gratuitously boastful and hard-headed.
The usual advice is don’t-tread-on-me resoluteness, or what Teddy Roosevelt characterized as “speak softly and carry a big stick.” The alternatives – whether “speak loudly and carry a twig,” “speak softly and carry a twig,” or “speak loudly and carry a big stick”- are far worse.
Our current diplomats have unfortunately forgotten that golden mean of guarded language backed with credible warnings of overwhelming force. And the result is a verbal mess, backed by impending attacks called off, confusion, and harsh rhetoric rather than quiet retribution.
Biden and his team give us endless variations on the same loud threat to Iran along the following lines: “If outside actors are considering widening the war, DON’T!” They accompany this by reacting only four times to 83 documented acts of Iranian aggression directed at U.S. forces, by greenlighting a $6 billion ransom to Iran and by lifting sanctions, resulting in a $50 billion Iranian oil windfall.
As a general rule, the more one side appeases the other, or is humiliated, or is shown to be weak or naïve, the more likely it is that the tentative party will vainly seek to restore lost deterrence by ever-tougher language—even though it must know that these ever-increasing verbal threats are becoming increasingly empty. Threats and taunts are like inflation: the more they are issued without reliable backing, the more worthless they become.
The murdered dead were not even buried in Israel, when the Biden State Department’s Palestinian Affairs bureau issued a call for a ceasefire—a plea followed by a similar one in a joint communiqué from Turkey’s Recep Erdogan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Did such calls win either empathy from Hamas or prompt agreement from Israel to transcend any idea of meting out justice to the killers of more than 1,000 of their own? Or were they simply revelations of cluelessness along with an empty signal of “concern?”
Did Secretary Blinken’s invitation to American regional embassies to lower their flags to half-mast to commemorate civilian causalities in Gaza—unfortunately timed to the false news reports of an IDF strike on a hospital—win respect or cool tensions?
In Blinken’s words, the gesture was intended “to observe national periods of mourning following an official proclamation by the host government with respect to the loss of innocent lives at the Al Ahli hospital blast on October 18.” Did that U.S. “concern” work? Did protests abroad wane? Was Biden never snubbed? Did U.S. host countries express loud thanks?
Which was the more likely reaction from Hamas to Blinken’s act of magnanimity?
