Christian Brose at FP responds to Fareed Zakaria's much talked about piece by saying, "I'm all for a serious discussion of diplomacy, but unfortunately this isn't it." He then proceeds to offer his own ridiculous rantings which seem to pretty clearly demonstrate that at a minimum Zakaria's observations apply to his world view.
First off, as much as Brose likes to use them as synonims, diplomacy and negotiation aren't the same thing. Diplomacy may involve negotiation, but it also includes dialogue, information sharing, intelligence gathering, exchange, and enforcement. Diplomats and leaders can meet for the purpose of negotiating, but they may be doing another of those activities. The mistake of the Washington foreign policy establishment is ignoring the value of these other functions.
The second elephant in his throwing around of words like "coercion" and "leverage." I think he is roughly right when he notes that negotiating is the "balancing of incentives and disincentives to elicit changes," though I wouldn't be so imperialistic as to include "another party's behavior" since negotiations also changes our bahavior. But he sees it as a zero sum game of horse trading.
It is true that "Damascus's desire to dominate Lebanon is not an interest." But that isn't because they are "illigitimate". Damascus doesn't want nominal control of Beihruit so it can strut around and tell everyone it lords over the capital of a small country witha history of violence and beautiful Mediterranean views. Their interests are internal stability, a chip in their negotiations with Israel, rent, some level of control over a major potential flashpoint in the behind the scenes battle going on between Shia and Sunni, and probably a whole bag of other interests that a white guy in DC who only speaks English could never even imagine. Moreover, even if I thought one of those was "illigitimate" that wouldn't make it any less real or valuable to the Syrians.
In reality negotiating is more a combination of learning (internal and between parties) and arbitrage. The learning comes from the two sides conducting diplomacy, other forms of intelligence gathering, and getting together in a room and talking. Here people reveal their interests (which besides material interests can include things like "I don't want the US to invade my country" or "I want to be able to travel to Europe without fear of being arrested for war crimes"), but more importantly they rank those interests.
Once positive and negative interests are ranked people can trade them. If they can come up with a configuration of trades that each party perceives as providing value in achieving their interests, we have a deal. Finally, the results are codified into an agreement and we all go out an celebrate.
The neocon folly - and the one that I think Zakaria rightly points out as endemic throughout Washington - is our desire to serve as the arbiter of what interests are legitimate. Brose claims Russia's real interest is "to force the United States into a position where every decision we make about our own interests in Europe and Central Asia has to go through the Kremlin first." But given that we live in a highly globalized world, why wouldn't Russia want to have a say in our decisions? And more importantly, are our attempts to foment democratic revolutions and support anti-Russian parties in Eastern Europe any less "craven"?
Andrew Sullivan plucked out Brose's line about how terrible it is that we didn't try to "change Iran's behavior" in 2003. But while it may be a great applause line, the sentiment that undergirds it is the epitome of hubris and imperialism. What was needed was a change in our relationship. The same Amero-centric myopia that makes Pakistan, India, China, Russia, and Israel's possession of nukes acceptable and Iran's tinkering anywhere in the nuclear neighborhood illegitimate is precisely what precludes us from sitting down at a table with Iran and treating them as equals, albeit significantly more resource constrained and insecure ones.
And by the way, it is the mainstreaming of this perspective that more than anything else is responsible for the demise of Charles Freeman. It wasn't his hostility towards Jews or Tibetans that got him in trouble, it was his unique ability to really look at things through the eyes of others and offer opinions untainted patriotism or conceit.
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