US President Barack Obama laid down a marker in Cairo, Egypt, last week for candor in US diplomacy.
The US, he declared, will “say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs” — a line that drew applause from his Arab audience.
But candor and diplomacy are not synonymous, and if Obama were to apply the same approach to thorny problems like Iran and North Korea, it might not produce the intended desirable results, according to foreign affairs experts. Some say he risks forsaking the advantages of “constructive ambiguity,” the diplomatic practice of fudging differences, credited to former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
Already, senior Israeli officials are complaining privately that Obama’s call for a blanket freeze in the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank contravenes verbal agreements between former US president George W. Bush’s administration and the previous Israeli government.
As a practical matter, few analysts expect the Obama administration to rewrite the rules of diplomacy, which have always relied on a mix of public pronouncements, tacit understandings and back-channel talks.
“There are two home truths in diplomacy,” said Thomas Pickering, one of the US’ most experienced career diplomats and a former undersecretary of state. “One is, don’t tell lies. The other is, you can say more in private than you can in public, but they have to be consistent.”
On the issue of North Korea, the US is engaged in extremely quiet negotiations with China and Russia over how to respond to the North’s recent nuclear test and missile launches. China, in particular, bridles at public pressure from the US to crack down on the North’s financial flows or to inspect ships suspected of carrying nuclear parts.
In this case, US officials and outside experts said, the White House is likely to say little publicly about Beijing’s role, aside from repeating the mantra that it hopes officials in North Korea will return to multiparty talks with China, the US, Russia, South Korea and Japan.
Washington’s relations with China are founded on one of the most famous examples of “constructive ambiguity” in modern diplomacy: the Shanghai Communique. In the agreement, negotiated by Kissinger, the US implicitly acknowledged the existence of a single China, but left the language vague enough to maintain its support of Taiwan even as it normalized relations with Beijing.
“There are times with authoritarian regimes that you are trying to nudge in a positive direction when you do not want to say things too publicly,” said Nicholas Burns, a former undersecretary of state for political affairs, who handled the talks on Iran’s nuclear program during the Bush administration.
Burns, who now teaches at Harvard, cautioned that such an approach worked only in certain cases. In other cases, he said, the US needed to articulate its values clearly and publicly.
Iran may soon supply the White House with its next challenge in balancing public and private diplomacy. Until now, Obama has rolled out a series of symbolic gestures to the Iranian government a videotaped greeting on Iran’s New Year, invitations to July 4 parties at embassies and so on.
But at some point, analysts say, the White House will have to decide whether to pursue more substantive talks on issues like Tehran’s nuclear program. Given the political realities on both sides, much of those negotiations are likely to be confidential and may involve a creative use of ambiguity on issues like whether Iran should be allowed to continue enriching uranium.
Some analysts pointed out that Obama, in his reference in Cairo to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, did not mention enrichment, suggesting, perhaps, that he wanted to keep his options open.
What makes Obama’s declaration about public and private talks with the Middle East unusual, experts say, is that he applied it to Israel, one of the US’ closest allies.
“The basic rule of diplomacy,” Burns said, “is that with allies, you try to solve problems quietly.”
When he was US ambassador to NATO in 2003, Burns said, he lamented that the US and Europe did not try harder to hash out their differences over the Iraq War behind closed doors.
In that case, two sides said the same things to each other publicly that they said privately. A result was that Congress began renaming the French fries served in its cafeteria “freedom fries.”
Some Israelis, and their supporters here, cite their long-standing alliance in raising concerns about the very public settlement dispute.
A recent letter to Obama — backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the US’ leading pro-Israel lobbying group, and signed by 329 members of Congress — declared, “The proven best way forward is to work closely and privately together, both on areas of agreement and especially on areas of disagreement.”
Indeed, Israeli officials say the Bush administration signaled in meetings beginning in 2003 that it would not oppose building in existing settlement areas to accommodate growing families, even though Israel pledged to freeze settlement construction when it signed the so-called road map for peace.
“I believe we need to talk with honesty and sincerity, and to try to keep the public discourse dignified and more moderate,” said a senior Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to aggravate the dispute between Washington and Jerusalem.
Still, Burns, who supports pushing Israel on settlements, said the Middle East might be a rare case in which candid diplomacy, even with an ally, makes sense.
“Most Palestinians and many Arabs have lost faith in the peace process,” he said. “One of the major issues for the United States is to regain credibility. This is a down payment the Obama administration is making with the Arab world, and they’re saying it publicly.”
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