I was wrong when I wrote that for the first time in its history, U.S. diplomacy lacked a coherent framework.
I had been led to that mistaken belief by gratuitous concessions to the Cuban dictatorship, the awful preliminary agreement with Iran, tolerance of the excesses of Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela, and the contradictory manner in which U.S. diplomats had handled, for example, the crises in Ukraine, Honduras, and Egypt.
A crass mistake, as historian Diego Trinidad pointed out to me. There is a frame of reference, rarely utilized these days. It is a book, titled How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace, written by Charles A. Kupchan, a professor at Georgetown University and member of the National Security Council, which directly serves the White House.
The work, published by Princeton University Press, can be purchased very easily through Amazon.com. I'll refrain from giving a detailed description of its contents - full of erudite historical references - but it's worthwhile to summarize its central theory because it's very simple: The way to transform foes into friends and sustain peace is to give them big unilateral concessions, to expect or demand nothing in return, to cancel all hostile action, and not try to change the nature of those adversarial governments.
Kupchan's premise is the burial of the traditional diplomatic logic that prescribes carrots for one's friends and allies, sticks for one's enemies and nothing for the indifferent. It is the end of the active diplomacy developed after World War II and aimed at turning the world into a peaceful and prosperous place dominated by democratic regimes where the market economy and human rights and freedoms are respected.
It is a mixture of goodliness and neo-isolationism. It is also the end of the idea that the United States, as the hegemonic power in the economic and military fields, tries to bring the planet stability and to promote good government - the latter defined as the administration of peaceful, democratic, and productive societies that are open to international trade.
Naturally, the regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran surely will watch with enormous satisfaction as the United States gives up trying to stop them, because that leaves them an open field. But this won't change the basic perception that those nations have of the government and free-trade economic system that U.S. society puts on display.
After all, Havana and Caracas are not ethnic enemies of the United States, but rather ideological adversaries of the liberal democracies and the free-trade system that this nation leads. If the United States were a communist nation or shared the vision held by the countries espousing so-called 21st-Century Socialism, anti-Americanism would cease at once.
We need to remember that Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez did not choose anti-Americanism or communism as a reaction to Washington's policy, but - as Fidel Castro has made clear a thousand times - because they believed in the virtues of collectivism, central planning and social control exercised by a single party. They are anti-American by dint of being pro-communist.
Somehow, ironically, this new way to handle diplomacy (which to me seems harebrained) adopted by the United States is not a consequence of weakness but of success. The United States produces one-fifth of what the world generates with less than 5 percent of the world's population and has unbeatable armed forces that consume more than $600 billion a year. That gives it a dangerous feeling of invulnerability.
With those elements in his favor, Obama believes that he can afford to ignore friends and foes. Can he? I doubt it. The international vision of the United States since the era of Franklin Roosevelt and the Bretton Woods accords of 1944, when the German Army was still on a war footing, was conceived to place on Washington the responsibility of leading the so-called "free world" until it achieves the defeat of the enemies of democracy.
That tradition, which is more than 70 years old and has seen the triumph of the West in the Cold War, has generated an entire bureaucracy (today disconcerted) devoted to achieving those objectives.
The inertia of these organizations is very heavy, and Obama has less than two years left in the White House. Fortunately, I don't think he will manage to impose his ideas, which are, it seems, those of Kupchan. A world without a head is a much more dangerous world.
(AP photo)
