DIPLOMACY

     I am not well experienced in diplomacy on a world-wide scale. The best advice I have recieved is to walk away from a confrontation. My social media history would demonstrate my inability to follow  that advice, but I have lived through a number of diplomatic crisis, whose importance I was old enough to understand. Others were an important part of the histories I would later read.

     Before my political awareness, I remember reading in My Weekly Reader about when the Premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Kruschev, hosted Vice President Richard Nixon to an exhibit in Moscow that featured American products not available to the beleaguered people of the Soviet Union. This became popularly known as the Kitchen Debates. What I was able to learn as I matured is how this exhibit was designed and paid for by the State Department to demonstrate in front of a television camera the benefits capitalism offered the much beleaguered American housewife. Another diplomatic incident happened a year later when the U-2 spy plane, piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union. This happened as President Eisenhauer was addressing a meeting of NATO. In this incident the USSR was able to show that our newest aircraft could no longer fly over Soviet airspace without being shot down. Yet another incident I barely remember was when VP Nixon was sent to Central America on a "Goodwill mission" where his limousine was plastered with fruit in Caracas, Venezuela. There are some historians who speculated that President Eisenhauer was not completely innocent of placing his Veep in this  situation. 

     After John F Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961 we learned of the depths of his, and his administration's diplomatic skills in the Cuba Missile Crisis. I learned of this from more than the newspapers and magazines that carried the word of the event, but on our new television set that carried breaking news on a scale that Fox News in more recent years can not match. It was here where I began to understand the diplomatic mastery on display. This was a time when school children were taught "duck and cover" drills in class, not to avoid mass shooters, as is the case today, but in case a nuclear bomb was dropped on an American city.  I have many memories of this time. I had a paper route at the time and one of my customers was in the process of building an underground air-raid shelter. Cities and many small towns like mine had civil defense signs directing us to air raid shelters, in the event of an attack. Being in the neighborhood of 13 at the time, and having the usual early teenage penchant for word-play, we often joked about the futility of duck and cover when the operant term between the Soviets and us was MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. Additionally, my dad, who had a small volunteer ambulance company, and taught First Aid classes in his off time was notified that he might be called up, should diplomacy not succeed. Many years later in my early 20s I met and became friends with Doug Griffin, who I was to learn, had spent his military years in the back of a KC-135 flying the perimeter of the Soviet Union monitoring Soviet transmissions. His last deployment before he mustered out was to monitor Soviet transmissions from Russian missile bases on Cuba. In the mid 1970s I witnessed Doug in a conversation with a Soviet fishing boat captain who had brought his ship to Portland for necessary repairs. It was suspected that Soviet fishing vessels were monitoring US broadcasting in those days. They spoke Russian back and forth in front of us, as those of us around the bar in Frank Peter's Inn sat, mouths agape, in front of our drinks. 

    Getting back to my narrative, one story that stayed with me from that incident was that General Curtis LeMay, who led the Strategic Air Command, was eager to meet the Russkies with the full force of our military air forces. In the great Stanley Kubrick movie from 1964, Dr Stragelove, the role of General Buck Turgison, played masterfully by George C Scott, was modeled on General LeMay.

     To our good fortune General LeMay and his military colleagues did not win the argument about how to deal with those nuclear-tipped missiles 90 miles off of the tip of Florida. Diplomacy prevailed and the President and his brother, Attorney General Robert F Kennedy, found a solution acceptable to Russia and the interests of our own country. Few of us realize how close we were to mutually assured destruction. Historians talk about leadership being rational. Nikita Kruschev and JFK knew without a doubt that a nuclear exchange would destroy the planet. They both acted rationally. In recent times we have grown accustomed to believing that all first-world leaders were "rational actors. Boris Johnson in Britain and of course, our immediate past president that refuses to admit he lost, has shaken that confidence.

     President Richard Nixon opened the door to China trade. This was not so much diplomacy but a recognition of the tension between the USSR and China at the time. Nixon was an implacable anti-communist, thus was considered the most unlikely to open trade. We can debate the eventual results, but at that time it drove a wedge between Russia and China, which shared a continent whose eastern terminus was only a few miles across the Bering Strait from Alaska. Sarah Palin was eventually credited saying she could see Russia from her home in Wasilla. A phenomenon since she seems to have suffered from stigmatism. Or, she was clutching republican stigmata, it is unclear which. Next to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Carter administration played an important role in two treaties. One gave Panama back it's canal after our 100-year lease was up. It was not really a diplomatic coup, but acknowledging a reality. A reality republicans were, unsurprisingly, unable to see. The other was the Camp David accords, which were supposed to bring peace to the middle East. Had Egyptian President Anwar Sadat not been assassinated shortly thereafter, it might have succeeded. This occurred in 1978, a decade after the six-day war between Israel and much of the Muslim world. Ronald Reagan's contribution to diplomacy was selling Iran (who had held our embassy captive for nearly two years) aging anti-tank missiles through Israel, so the money could be used to get around a Congressional prohibition on supporting the Nicaraguan Contras.

     Bill Clinton applied his diplomatic skills to ending the strife between the Irish protestants and Irish Catholics. Many of the IRA members who did time in British prisons for their activities were paroled not long ago and some have become members of the Irish parliament. Clinton's sanctions on Iraq did not contain Saddam Hussein, but we did not waste decades occupying a country as we did during the Bush-Obama years, that did

not want us there and were not the existential threat we were led to believe. Two countries, actually, since it was not until 2021 that we finally pulled out of Afghanistan, a country that had the better claim to villainy. 

     The less said about diplomacy in the Trump years the better. By this time, the political expedient was to speak harshly and threaten with a big stick, with apologies to Teddy Roosevelt. It was here that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rose to infamy. In his four years as secretary of state, Mike Pompeo exhibited no particular skill at diplomacy. He imagines he would make a good presidential candidate in the 2024 election. Imagination seems to be abundant among politicians on the right wing. Since he is unapologetic about his party and the President he served, he would fit right in as an existential danger in that presidential post. To display his diplomatic skills to become the USA's Supreme diplomat, he was asked who the greatest threat to our country is. His response, Randy Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. That's right folks, the leader of one of our teacher's unions is a bigger threat, than Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Xi Jinping, or other autocrats with access to high-quality weapons and ready armies. A teacher, because wokeness is the nightmare that wakes republicans in the middle of the night. They wake in fear of woke! They quake in fear of woke. 

     How should we interpret Secretary Pompeo's statement? In normal times we would understand that statement as an ill-advised joke. Most of our presidents, and their diplomats, would save that for a quiet place, with no press in the room. Let me correct that, none of the presidents in my memory would say that about a labor leader, no matter how contentious things got. But we let into one party a core group of zealots who have no regard for diplomacy. Their anti-diplomatic actions actually stir up the base. A base that is racist, fascist, misogynist, and intolerant of sensible thinking. Even if Pompeo was, "just kidding," how would that activist base, possessing high-caliber weapons and devoid of high-caliber thinking, react to such a statement. Can we say for sure that they are in on the joke? Or would one of them see it as an invitation to take out one of our woke enemies, a teachers union president perhaps. In the play, Beckett Or the Honor of God, by Jean Anuilh, King Henry II is so frustrated by his childhood friend Thomas Beckett, whom he has appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury and who has chosen the honor of God over the demands of his great friend the king, that he yells in a moment of rage, "can no one relieve me of this pestilence?". Two of his trusted barons, seeking to gain the Kings favor, stab Beckett in Canterbury Cathedral. In the play, the two barons were beheaded. Today's MAGA barons are unfamiliar with the message of this and other plays dealing with the delicate balance of power. There is no reason to believe that they are capable of acting rationally.

     Closer to the center of MAGA power, does Pompeo understand the delicate balance of power that his statements endanger? There is no reason to believe he does. Until prominent members of King Donald's court abandon MAGA and return to the rules of behavior that we used to follow unquestionably, we can not trust their judgement on anything.