What concerns me about the statement of President Obama’s that Helene Cooper quotes in her column in the New York Times:
Now that there is a new team at the White House, guess who is knocking down straw men left and right? To listen to President Obama, a veritable army of naysayers has invaded Washington, urging him to sit on his hands at the White House and do nothing to address any of the economic or national security problems facing the country.
“There are those who say these plans are too ambitious, that we should be trying to do less, not more,†Mr. Obama told a town-hall-style meeting in Costa Mesa, Calif., on March 18. “Well, I say our challenges are too large to ignore.â€
isn’t that it’s a strawman argument, Ms. Cooper’s complaint. It might be or it might not be. I think it more closely resembles the “appeal to an unnamed authority” fallacy.
What I think we should be concerned about is the prospect that President Obama believes that meeting with our adversaries or those with whom we have disagreements is doing something. Would I be making a strawman argument of my own if I suggested that our European cousins seem to have that view?
Simply meeting isn’t doing something. It’s temporizing. Failing to reach an agreement isn’t doing something. Reaching an agreement that neither side plans to implement or can implement, as I interpret the agreement reached between Rabin and Arafat with the famous handshake photo op, isn’t doing something.
It is the implementation that is doing something, not the meeting.
Meeting for its own sake is only doing something if the mere passage of time furthers your objectives. President Obama meeting with the leaders of Iran but failing to reach an agreement that both sides implement and that doesn’t convince China or Russia to support further sanctions against Iran would be no accomplishment for us but it could be a major achievement for the Iranians since it would allow them to continue to do whatever it is they’re doing.
Meetings that bear no fruit aren’t doing something. They’re just a different way of ignoring your problems.
That’s rather troubling, although meetings are always the start (and sometimes, it just takes bloody forever, round after round of meetings and coffee, to actually get people to do something – this is very common in the Middle East leadership).
I think I know where you’re coming from. God knows I’ve sat in multiple meetings between adversaries, and it sure as hell isn’t a solution on its own.
Yes, you would to some extent. The greater view (and this is largely on continental Europe, and by no means completely agreed upon there either) is that they think negotiation can solve most if not all things. They tend to think that everybody can fundamentally reach some type of agreement with the right type of incentives (usually positive incentives), and if things turn to violence or conflict, that’s not an inevitable result of a bad situation – that’s bad negotiating.
It’s not completely out of line with reality – the European Union in its current form exists largely because of complex, long-lasting negotiations in which incentives played a part.
It’s not completely out of line with reality – the European Union in its current form exists largely because of complex, long-lasting negotiations in which incentives played a part.
Yes, but the EU also exists in large part because Western Europeans are (inderstandably) gun-shy after two world wars, AND have had the benefit of sitting under the US security umbrella for many decades, with little or no cost to themselves.