How Diplomacy Fails.

• Author: Cotter, Michael W.

How Diplomacy Fails

By Ambassador (ret.) Chas W. Freeman

Video: http://hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2014/08/when-diplomacy-fails/

Text: http://chasfreeman.net/how-diplomacy-fails/

Ambassador Freeman is one of the distinguished American diplomats of the latter half of the 20th c. He served as a deputy assistant secretary of state, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, and ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the 1999 Gulf War. He remains active, serving on the boards of several think tanks and foreign policy organizations. He is much in demand as a speaker and is a prolific writer. American Diplomacy is proud to have published a number of his articles and reviewed several of his speeches.

In these remarks at an August 19 forum sponsored by UCLA's Hammer Museum, Ambassador Freeman drew a parallel between the failures of American diplomacy leading up to World War I and what he describes as similar failures since the end of the Cold War. He asserts that military strength alone is not sufficient to guarantee world order and that refusal to talk to opponents until they meet our moral standards is a recipe for impasse. He identifies the "moral absolutism inherent in American exceptionalism" as a fundamental problem for American diplomacy, leading Americans to see diplomacy primarily as a way to communicate disapproval rather than a tool for narrowing or bridging differences.

Freeman argues that the failure of diplomacy in...