The Failures of Non-Diplomacy

The Washington Post Fact-Checker:

John McCain is stepping up his attacks on Barack Obama for being willing to meet with various petty tyrants and thugs, including the leaders of Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. At a town hall meeting in Miami on Tuesday, he contrasted Obama's position with the stand taken by previous presidents, such as FDR and Ronald Reagan. But a review of the historical record shows that there is a long-standing tradition of U.S. presidents, both Republican and Democrat, meeting with brutal dictators and mass murderers over a period of many decades.

The article goes on to note that Roosevelt met with Stalin (20 million dead), that Nixon met with Mao Tse Tung (40 million dead), and that Reagan met with Gorbachev "well before" the Soviet leader introduced any reforms.

Yglesias:

The United States really only has two experiences with a sustained effort at the Bush/McCain approach to diplomacy. One would be our effort to deny recognition to Communist China during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. This, it's generally acknowledged, was a strategic fiasco that denied us the opportunity to gain leverage vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Indeed, it was a fiasco of such enormous proportions that Richard Nixon's role in undoing it actually manages to stack up in a non-trivial way against his otherwise terrible record in office.

The other is our fifty year effort to starve the people of Cuba into rebelling against Fidel Castro. McCain actually defends continuing this policy, but everyone with a functioning brain understands that it's been a ludicrous failure. So that's the path Bush has been taking with Syria and Iran and used to take with North Korea. McCain wants to keep on taking it, put North Korea back under the interdict, and perhaps add Russia to the disfavored list. Like McCain's apparent belief that it would be better if we'd spent another decade or two fighting in Vietnam, it really calls into question whether he has any understanding of what he's talking about.