It Depends on What the Meaning of “Diplomacy” Is

I’m uncertain as to whether I agree with the editors of the New York Times’s advice that we should be using more diplomacy and less military intervention or not:

While the United States needs a strong defense, it also needs to develop a national security strategy that doesn’t rely on limitless, sometimes wanton, military spending — the Pentagon failed its first audit last year — and that calls for restraint in deploying forces overseas. Such a strategy would also invest far more in diplomacy, development, economic justice, free and fair trade, nuclear nonproliferation and a reversal of climate change.

Such rethinking is gaining traction among some Democratic presidential candidates. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have called for an end to America’s endless wars. Ms. Warren has proposed doubling the Foreign Service and the Peace Corps and opening new posts in underserved areas around the world, an approach worth considering. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., a military veteran, has rejected conflicts with ill-defined missions, and former Vice President Joe Biden has said the “use of force should be our last resort, not our first — used only to defend our vital interests, when the objective is clear and achievable and with the informed consent of the American people.”

There’s no reason these could not be bipartisan goals.

Maybe I should see it as a sign of growth on their part. They have, after all, supported a lot of military interventions over the years, e.g. they supported our bombing of Libya that led to the fall of Qaddaffi and the present chaos there.

I guess a lot depend on what they mean by “diplomacy”. If they mean leaving it to the professional diplomats, I disagree. I don’t think anything in American government instantiates Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Bureaucracies more than our State Department. If they mean initiatives like the Obama Administration’s support for the Syrian rebels, I disagree. It should be obvious that we shouldn’t be providing aid to Al Qaeda which is exactly what we were doing in Syria. It may be somewhat less obvious that the reason we have gained a reputation for supporting rebels, even anti-American rebels against the legitimate governments of other countries is that we have been supporting rebels against the legitimate governments of other countries.

For the last 50 years our best diplomats have been the American people. Maybe we should leave diplomacy to the amateurs for a change.