The End of a Listless Time

Foreign policy is often couched in cryptographic language. Things are enciphered, coded, deciphered and compared. Plain language is dangerous because it often causes wounds. That’s why “diplo-speak” is universally spoken by the professionals in the formal world of foreign policy and security.

The professionals attending the Munich conference had an epiphany. The heavens above the conference opened and everyone spoke with one tongue. A love-fest, as the Americans would put it – warm fuzzies for everyone and harm to no one.

The Western security community’s heart suddenly beat again as one. The leaden Bush days, with their brutality and their transgressions had suddenly disappeared.

If you closed your eyes and listened to Joe Biden’s speech, you were rewarded with a trip back through time; a trip back to Munich in 1999 when Senator Joe spoke and everyone agreed with him.

Among the Germans who apparently feel the need to turn to someone else to do the work, smug joy broke out – and just as quickly evaporated. Despite all the harmony in analyzing the world’s weighty problems, in the end it will still come down to the fact that difficult decisions must be made.

Opium production in Afghanistan can’t be talked away – we either allow the poppy farmers and drug runners to continue or we give them some alternative that will work. Either Germany feels threatened by an Iranian nuclear-tipped missile and does something about it such as supporting a missile defense system and convincing Russia of the seriousness of the situation, or it avoids such confrontations just as it has avoided more serious sanctions.

Either/or. There are dozens of such difficult alternatives. The Bush years were easy years because the ruthlessness was so pronounced and the alternatives so repulsive that refusing him was easy. But now a new era is beginning where the United States is abandoning its “my way or the highway” approach.

The style change is noteworthy but it’s not the same as a policy change. The Americans have a wonderfully honest way of putting it: “Put your heart where your mouth is.” The crypto-speak has to be followed up by deeds.