MSNBC’s Firstread reports Obama is on the defense over his promise to talk to the leaders of rogue states:
The campaign's surrogates have slowly been walking back his initial declarations and the RNC and McCain folks have been pouncing hard on him.
The Associated Press reports that the issue, and Obama's morphing position, isn't as simple as Obama wants voters to think it is:
Obama gets cheers at his rallies when he declares there is nothing to fear, and potentially much to gain, from talking to enemies as well as friends.
But U.S. diplomacy is not that simple and neither is his position.
This week, Obama qualified his past statements that he would meet the Iranian leadership directly and without precondition by saying he did not necessarily mean Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's hardline, anti-American president.
Nor is it certain lately at what point he, as president, would speak personally with some of the dictators he says should be engaged.
This, despite months of assertions that his willingness to sit down with foes sets him apart from Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and now McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, who challenges Obama on that point.
Yesterday, I took Obama for task for relying upon President Kennedy's disastrous talks with Khrushchev as precedent and justification for Obama's Carter-like naive promise.
Today, in the New York Times, Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins take up the theme that Obama should learn something from the Kennedy experience. In an opinion piece entitled, "Kennedy Talked, Khrushchev Triumphed," they write:
Although Kennedy was keenly aware of some of the risks of such meetings — his Harvard thesis was titled “Appeasement at Munich” — he embarked on a summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, a move that would be recorded as one of the more self-destructive American actions of the cold war, and one that contributed to the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age.
Senior American statesmen like George Kennan advised Kennedy not to rush into a high-level meeting, arguing that Khrushchev had engaged in anti-American propaganda and that the issues at hand could as well be addressed by lower-level diplomats. Kennedy’s own secretary of state, Dean Rusk, had argued much the same in a Foreign Affairs article the previous year: “Is it wise to gamble so heavily? Are not these two men who should be kept apart until others have found a sure meeting ground of accommodation between them?”
But Kennedy went ahead, and for two days he was pummeled by the Soviet leader.
[. . .]
A little more than two months later, Khrushchev gave the go-ahead to begin erecting what would become the Berlin Wall. Kennedy had resigned himself to it, telling his aides in private that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” The following spring, Khrushchev made plans to “throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants”: nuclear missiles in Cuba. And while there were many factors that led to the missile crisis, it is no exaggeration to say that the impression Khrushchev formed at Vienna — of Kennedy as ineffective — was among them.
If Barack Obama wants to follow in Kennedy’s footsteps, he should heed the lesson that Kennedy learned in his first year in office: sometimes there is good reason to fear to negotiate.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. -- George Santayana
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