The death of diplomacy

Conservatives I ask you, do you remember when diplomacy wasn’t a dirty word?  I am a fairly young conservative but I have studied my history and from that I learned that in the far and distant past diplomacy used to be the art of letting your enemies know that if they messed with the United States of America that we would come over there and blow them back to the dark ages in such a way that it sounded nice.

Now Reagan got it right, when he would talk to the former Soviet Union he could convince them that we intended to build bigger, more advanced weapons than they could hope to develop in a hundred lifetimes and they didn’t see it his way he would simply walk away.  However I am not just talking about specific Presidents, I refer mostly to the culture that lives and festers at a State Department that is polluted mentality stuck in the late sixties.

Also the left wing media seems stuck in the same backwards thinking, take for example the story this last week about how relieved Condi Rice and her senior Management were that enough applicants had been found to go to Iraq that they wouldn’t have to “force” people to go.  We had certainly seen plenty of whining over the last several weeks from career diplomats that enjoy cushy assignments at all the popular places in the world.  Never mind the fact that this duty with the State Department is entirely voluntary to join but they can be assigned duty anywhere in the world.

Diplomats whined about their kids, going to a war zone where they might be killed, never mind the fact that no State Department diplomats have been killed in Iraq to this point.  I thought that this is what modern day diplomacy was all about, go to hot spots around the world and just talk to the people that don’t like us and let them know that we mean them no harm and then everything will be peachy and we can hold hands and sing cum-bi-ya.  Blah, ick.

No my friends, diplomacy was JFK convincing Khrushchev that we are prepared to invade Cuba, fight in Europe, or anywhere else for that matter and that we would not permit nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba.  It was the threat of overwhelming force that was clearly articulated that finally forced Khrushchev to believe that he was wrong.

So when we look for a Presidential candidate we need someone that can redefine diplomacy, someone who will literally clean house at the State Department because there are very few people there that are qualified to be diplomats in the this era.