COVER -> DAY ONE
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One hopes for the sake of the virtuous that virtue is its own reward, for they get little else for their trouble. Because Ronald Reagan was the President of a mightily wealthy nation it did not matter that he was incapable of imagination and magnanimity.
For all the opprobrium which Reagan thoughtlessly (inevitable if you lack intellect) heaped on him, it was Gorbachev who made the world a safer and better place.
Perhaps it really was the apparently lunatic Star Wars project which convinced the Russians that equaling American might was beyond its reach; perhaps it was the recognition that what Lenin had started in hope had turned into unendurable ennui; perhaps it was the sleepless nightmare of Sisyphus. Perhaps; but I think more likely what brought the Soviet era to an end was the very materialism which Russia boasted and America has always pretended to regard as inferior to Christianity. It was trade unionism and Western television that levered out the first major blocks from the Kremlin's grim political architecture.
Still, the victors write the history and it will be Reagan who receives the echoing tributes of the textbooks whilst Gorbachev will be seen to have been weak.
These thoughts were prompted by the recent conduct of negotiations between Irish Nationalists and Ulster Unionists, which have been conducted by both sides on the basic undiluted assumption that to make any concession is a sign of weakness which can only encourage a demand by the other side for a further concession. Making a generous gesture is thought to be synonymous with "blinking first". Both sides have called for confidence measures but from both this has been a confidence trick.
Reciprocal confidence building measures, if taken seriously, would have solved the Irish, and many other problems, decades ago. But one of my working definitions in diplomacy is that there is no appeasing a fascist; he only cares about the next concession. To that extent the most recent negotiators in Ireland have had to spend most of their time and energy appeasing the fascists on their own side.
The truth is that the majority of Republican and Unionist activists do not want a settlement, no matter what the people want. There is no room for criminals masquerading as political idealists if there is a democratic consensus.
So when a chief negotiator sees the complete sense of making a concession in order to build confidence, the likelihood is that he will be despised by his opponents and his own side.
Look what has happened to Barak; he came to power with a mandate to make peace so his 'opponents' have treated him with much less respect than his more hawkish predecessors; and since he announced a timetable for Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon every effort has been made to embroil his troops so that they can not be withdrawn. As most negotiations are of this sort, no wonder the planet lurches from crisis to crisis.
It was a complete failure of diplomacy which led from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to the outbreak of the ridiculous but catastrophic First World War; it was diplomacy that gave us the egregiously cruel Treaty of Versailles which largely accounted for the outbreak of the Second World War; and ever since diplomacy has been giving us a daily diet of slaughter from the exotic morsels in Latin America to the mayhem of Africa and South East Asia. Of course, diplomacy as Machiavelli described it, has had its successes; but put against the slaughter of the Twentieth Century, successes like the aversion of a nuclear war as the result of the Cuban Missile Crisis is a somewhat modest achievement; after all, the prospect was so grim, what else could Kennedy and Khrushchev have done?
The time has surely come for a new diplomatic rule book. We may say "blessed be the peace makers" but we reward the brutal. We may call for our opponents to be reasonable but we treat them as naive fools if they are. We bemoan the general anarchy of the world but have found no way of controlling the international armaments trade.
The international community should establish new rules which reward those who make sensible concessions and who are prepared to make the first move in reciprocal confidence building. I cannot see this happening. We are so addicted to warfare and the 'macho' politics that go with it and we are so bound up with games theory and brinkmanship that there is no room in international diplomacy for the sort of negotiation which all of us carry out every day of our lives.
Conversely, it is difficult to understand why a country so overwhelmingly rich and powerful as the United States should behave like a virgin at a tea dance. After vaguely fluttering over Ulster it has behaved like the proverbial shrinking violet over the mess in West Africa, the impasse in the Middle East and the chaos in much of what was the Soviet Union; as for its conduct over Kosovo, it is difficult to imagine anything more bizarre.
In years to come when we reflect on this state of affairs we may have cause to be grateful. If the American people are misguided enough to prefer Bush's blandness to Gore's grimness there might, if Congress is roughly balanced or Republican-dominated, be any number of forays of the Grenada and Panama kind. But for now, the world can only hope that the glutted giant that is America will emerge from its post prandial fuddle and begin to care about us all just a little more and put its weight behind efforts for a more sensible international order.
