[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
Last week an event took place that illustrates the folly of negotiating with passionate ideologues and autocrats with whom there is no common ground for a meeting of the minds necessary for a true agreement. This practical wisdom, based on human experience going back 28 centuries to Homer, has been forgotten by most modern Western leaders and foreign policy hands, who believe that negotiations, non-lethal “engagement,” and persuasion can override an autocratic adversary’s passionate interests and ambitions that by nature conflict with our own.
The occasion was a three-day, humiliating meeting that our Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, attended in China. As Gatestone Institute’s Gordon Chang reported, “China, literally and figuratively, did not roll out the red carpet for [Blinken’s] arrival in Shanghai on Wednesday. Only a low-level official was on hand to greet Blinken as he stepped off the plane.”
Charles Burton of the Sinopsis think-tank told Gatestone, “Aside from a calculated insult to the dignity of the United States, the move indicates Xi Jinping is making clear that the accepted norms of diplomacy will not be respected by China anymore.”
So much for the “rules-based new world order” that the West thinks the Rest actually follow rather than engage tactically. But that assumption is a delusion, as Beijing has demonstrated even since George W. Bush welcomed China to the World Trade Organization in 2001, whose protocols and rules China has serially violated and gamed. And why shouldn’t it? What have been the material consequences for doing so? Or for ignoring contemptuously our diplomatic statements of “concern,” or other finger-wagging scoldings?
For example, one of Blinken’s tasks, Matt Pottinger writes in the Journal, during his visit was to repeat Joe Biden’s warning to China two years ago not to provide Russia with materiel and resources to support its war in Ukraine. Biden had also claimed that if Xi continued to do so, “he made sure the Chinese president understood he would ‘be putting himself in significant jeopardy’ and risking China’s economic ties with the U.S. and Europe if he materially supported Russia’s war.”
Of course, nothing significant followed Biden’s stern but empty warning. The Secretaries of Commerce and the Treasury did threaten to impose economic sanctions, which apparently concentrated Xi’s mind briefly. But according to the Journal, “In 2023, when the Biden administration applied only token sanctions on Iranian entities that provided thousands of kamikaze drones to the Russians—drones that have saturated Ukrainian air defenses and caused widespread carnage—the Chinese probably decided that Mr. Biden’s bluster was a bluff. In March 2023, Mr. Xi visited the Kremlin in a bold show of solidarity with Mr. Putin. It turned out to be a watershed in Moscow’s war, effectively turning the conflict into a Chinese proxy war with the West.”
Indeed, two years later as Blinken complained to the Chinese last week, their dismissal of Biden’s warnings has led to China becoming “overwhelmingly the No. 1 supplier” of Russia, and the Wall Street Journal pointed out, “fundamentally changed the course of the war.”
Then there’s North Korea, an earlier beneficiary of Western appeasement. The Norks established the modus operandi, now being used by Iran, for gulling the West by playing the “diplomatic engagement” game until they could present the world with a fait accompli of several nuclear weapons. The history compiled by the Arms Control Association documents how the canny Kims survived over three decades of sanctions and flabby threats; pocketed “incentives” and other numerous “quids” without delivering the “quos”; participated in numerous negotiations and summits, and signed a plethora of “agreements” that they have serially violated. Their aim all along had been obvious: possession of nuclear weapons that can be delivered on missiles capable of reaching the U.S.
And now North Korea is working with China and Russia to weaken the Western “rules-based international order” and ultimately replace it with a coalition of illiberal autocracies. The totalitarian triumvirate recently provided an example of their collaboration. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported, “the United Nations panel to monitor North Korean sanctions expired. It did so because in March Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution to extend its mandate. Russia was the only nation on the 15-member Security Council to oppose the extension—though China pointedly abstained.”
The “panel” was one of many “parchment barriers” the West relies on to create the illusion of action when it is politically too costly. Having appeased North Korea by letting it acquire nuclear weapons, useless “sanctions” were imposed, and the panel was created to “monitor” the Norks and write reports to be filed and forgotten. But replacing action with rhetoric is why the UN was created, and how it has, with few exceptions, functioned for 79 years. We should have by now recognized that such machinations by member states in pursuit of national interests would prevail, if only because its precursor, the League of Nations, had failed for the same reasons.
So while the West dithers and prevaricates by inadequately arming Ukraine, and blusters about Putin’s war, Iran provides home-grown drones partly financed with Biden’s billions in danegeld for the mullahs. North Korea is also helping out: the UN sanctions monitor said “a missile recovered from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv was a North Korean Hwasong-11 ballistic missile. This is on top of 10,000 containers of military munitions the Kim Jong Un regime has delivered in support of Russia’s war effort.” No word on why the “sanctions” haven’t deterred North Korea or Iran, which has brazenly flouted sanctions for years, and now stands on the brink of possessing nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.
Such are the consequences of not learning from history and tradition, the wisdom of those who have come before us.
Instead, we cling to feckless idealism about human nature, and ignore the real, multifaceted diversity of peoples and cultures that belie our arrogant fantasies about the “global community” of nations that want to be just like us––secular, prosperous, tolerant, and peaceful.
No doubt many millions around the world do, but many other millions see our fashionable self-loathing, feckless spending on entitlements, neglect of our military, metastazing government debt, and failure of nerve in the face of our enemies’ challenges, and say “No thanks”–– or strive, like the “axis of evil” 2.0, to replace the West, especially the U.S., as the global hegemon and enforcer of global order.
So here we are, preaching that war is an anomaly, rather than, as Plato said, by nature the default condition of interstate relations, and peace “is only a name.” So we extoll “diplomatic engagement” and negotiated agreements over force, also forgetting the wisdom of Thomas Hobbes: virtues like “justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to, of themselves, without the terror of some power to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like. And covenants, without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”
Finally, we must acknowledge and confront the reality of our enemies’ radically different foundational beliefs and purposes that preclude reasonable and honest negotiation absent a credible threat of force. As Achilles says to the doomed Hector, “argue me no agreements . . . as there are no trustworthy oaths between men and lions, nor wolves and lambs have a spirit that can be brought to agreement.”
Until we restore realism to our foreign policy and stop being lambs negotiating with wolves, we will continue to weaken ourselves and strengthen our enemies.
