Lessons in Diplomacy

It is too early to say if President Barack Obama is a great diplomat. It is obvious to all he is a great speaker. A lot of people also hold him in high regard as a political thinker.

"We will not apologize for our way of live", Barack Obama said in his inauguration speech, adressing dictatorship all around the world, continuing: "We will extend a hand, if you are willing to unclench your fist."

Those two quotations will define the Obama presidency, when it comes to the geopolitical challenge.

It may sound like traditional Democratic foreign policy, but I would argue that there is no such thing as traditional Democratic foreign policy any more.

The anxiousness, for instance, about American isolationism, is thoroughly out of tune with economic and political reality.

Isolationism is simply not a viable option.

I would even say there is no such thing as traditional foreign policy, Democratic or Republican. Neo-conservatism was certainly not traditional, and it was firmly established in the 2006 mid-terms that even Republicans had to modify their geopolitical ambitions with common sense.

A decade of hard earned lessons

In may ways the past 8 years have been a series of hard-earned lessons in public diplomacy, the most important being that all communication is now globalized, setting a new set of requirements for public diplomacy.

Barack Obama addressed this by being remarkably extroverted in his inauguration speech, subtly addressing European concerns as well as directly speaking to leaders and citizens in the troubled Middle East region.

The second most important observation, one that you would think USA had learned already after losing the war for Vietnam, is that democratic societies rely on public diplomacy to win a war.

Subsequent to this, but not necessarily less important, is the lesson that the strength of public diplomacy rests not only on superior firepower, but also on superior justification. You must be able to make your case.

"If you cannot explain it, you cannot defend it" is a rule of thumb in all PR.

Letting go of childish things

Following the 8 years of basic education in geopolitics, the world may now be ready to move on to higher learning. We have established what we cannot do, and what we can only do at the highest cost to human life, national economy and global security.

We have defined the boundaries in which democratic societies must exist in order to remain so: Humanistic ideals, civil rights and strict adherence to principles of good governance.

Letting methods and attitudes that characterize oppresive regimes spill over into democratic societies in the battle against terrorism and dictators and geopolitical troublemakers is not an option.

What we are faced with now is the challenge to restate our commitment to democratic ideals, not just the formal principles of democracy, such as the elections and the public debate.

We must also formulate a vision that includes democratic prospects, nations and cultures that are more or less ripe for reform of a hegemony or increased adoption of parliamentarism and enlightenment ideals.

In the decade to come we must accept and embrace the global vision of a benign Western influence, establish transnational superstructures that accodomate new power balances, financial and military, and build bridges between parties separated by disagreement or alienation in our own societies.

The Western Project

To ensure visions like ecological sustainability, eradication of poverty, equality for men and women, human rights extended to all citizens and military disarmament to further world peace, we must first of all understand our own place in the world.

The Western project is ideally a great good for all men, but influenced by selfishness and greed as it must be, it holds the potential to seriously disrupt developing cultures and economies or even become a new type of imperialism blind to its own shortcomings and destructive side-effects.

In my new essay The Stock Market of Public Diplomacy I point out a number of critical parameters to take into consideration, some of which are not yet mainstream in the public perception or welcomed in the corridors of power.

They are imperatives. They relate to the nature of reality as it appears to the naked eye, abstract from all wishful thinking. The overarching lesson the reader should take is that no matter how fervent your support for the West or the Western Project is, no universal law sets it aside from other forms of government.

The Western Project can only derive its justification from the usefulness to the majority of the people of any given society, not disregarding minorities and marginal interest groups. As such it exists in competition with other ways to organize society and thereby establish relatively better conditions for survival and prosperity than anarchy.

Abandoning the heart of the clan

In order to understand how the Western Project ranks in comparison, viewed from a non-Western perspective, we must free our mind from bias without letting go of the principal commitment to democratic ideals.

We must seek knowledge, not only about the factual conditions of people living in foreign cultures that are, most often, enigmatic to us, but of the way they perceive life, approach philosophy and engage in politics - and the way they judge or evaluate our society and way of life.

A renowned Palestinian poet and political refugee, Sleiman Nazzal, wrote in a critically acclaimed poetry collection titled Without Visa:


Nazzal is frequently published in Middle Eastern papers and currently lives in Denmark after having resided in no less than 19 countries.

His question goes to the core of the challenging in this new era of a new century. The clan mentality, no matter what color or shape it comes in, is enough to foster a cultural and political climate in which none of our agenda - none - will succeed.

As critically important global cooperation may seem to a lot of people, there is still the chance that none of it is more important than the clan mentality we are habitually inclined towards.

If a Palestinian refugee, a homeless wanderer on Earth - son of a people deprived of any prospect of justice or even mercy - can abandon the heart of the clan and its insistence on linear retribution, so should we.

It is time for us to face our own demons, rather than demonize the other. What hampers us, what slows our progress and threatens us with defeat, is our own shortcomings, our own lack of integrity and our own immoral pardoning of ourselves, when we fall short of doing what is right.

As another Middle Eastern poet once said: