The Leader-Post (Regina, Saskatchewan)
October 19, 2007 Friday
Final Edition

Big sticks and wasted words

by David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen
Pg. B10

Theodore Roosevelt’s excellent foreign policy advice for superpowers
— "Speak softly and carry a big stick" — was uttered a few days
before the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 thrust
Roosevelt himself into the presidency. He was quoting, incidentally
— an old West African proverb. And out of that quote came the
phrase, "big-stick diplomacy."

It was a moment when the United States was coming of age as a world
power, and asserting herself in new ways. Yet the phrase developed
the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, in which an earlier American president
had served notice to the European powers, that while the U.S. would
be neutral in rivalries elsewhere in the world, she would not abide
any further European imperial adventures in the Western Hemisphere.
As late as 1962, this secular doctrine was being invoked by President
Kennedy to warn the Soviet Union off an imperial adventure in Cuba.
Yet like most constructions in words, it had borne a variety of
interpretations in the intervening time, including Teddy Roosevelt’s
use of it to justify the United States’ own imperial adventures in
Panama, Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

Not that I’m always opposed to imperial adventures; nor opposed to
making dogmatic statements about world affairs. There is a time and
season for everything, including "big-stick diplomacy" in its
broadest sense. This is what the Bush administration is doing today,
or trying to do, in confronting Iran. It is a task in which some days
their only ally appears to be Hillary Clinton — who, trying for her
own purposes to sound presidential, seems no less willing to
contemplate the use of force than the current U.S. defence secretary.
And just this week she repeated Bush’s exact words in Washington:
"All options must remain on the table."

Well, not quite the only ally in pressuring Iran, for the new French
president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has also uttered the words "all options,"
and already we see some prospect that the "Bush Doctrine" will
outlive George W. Bush. It must: or there will soon be no West.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin, visiting Iran after a little game he
played with the Russian media (in which his security services leaked
an implausible assassination threat against him in Tehran, so that he
could swagger and shrug it off), has been enunciating something like
the Monroe Doctrine in Russian.

Russia and China together have been Iran’s chief diplomatic
protectors, sheltering the vicious regime of the ayatollahs against
sanctions proposals at the UN. Russia has been the principal public
source of aid and technology for Iran’s vast nuclear complex at
Bushehr.

In Tehran this week, speaking directly of a common interest in the
resources of the Caspian Sea, at a conference with all the states of
the Caspian littoral, Putin was nevertheless able to insinuate
indirectly that the affairs of nations in that region "ain’t nobody’s
business but their own." The general impression in the West, and my
own impression, is that he is seeing how far he can get with words
alone, since the Russians themselves have been using every available
pretext for withdrawing their workforce from Bushehr.

Likewise with Putin’s recent threat to respond very negatively to the
new U.S. missile shield, and the advanced bases the U.S. requires for
it, on what the Russians call their doorsteps. But Russia is already
behaving as if the Cold War never ended. What more can they do?

We now have another profoundly complicating factor, consisting of
words, and in the very same region. The Democrat-controlled U.S.
Congress, under what passes for the direction of Nancy Pelosi — a
great enthusiast for empty gestures — recently proposed a
declaration condemning the massacre of well over a million Christian
Armenians in the twilight moments of the Muslim Ottoman Empire,
1915-17.

One might say that this remains a sensitive issue in Turkey. And one
might add, that the Turkish threat to withdraw American access to
NATO bases in Turkey (through which a considerable proportion of
supplies are directed to Iraq and Afghanistan), is real. Similarly,
the Turkish threat to begin armed incursions into northern, Kurdish,
Iraq, to settle scores with Kurdish ethnic incendiaries in Turkey
itself. Or the Turkish threat to settle scores with neighbouring
Armenia, directly. One might even understand why the Bush
administration, from the president down, has gone apoplectic in
resisting this exceptionally stupid Congressional move.

Which is not to say the Armenian massacre didn’t happen, or that it
does not merit the remembrance and condemnation of every sentient
being.

My point is rather Theodore Roosevelt’s: that it behooves the U.S.
and the West not to waste words in shouting, or in pointless
historical scab-picking that will yield unintended present results.

It behooves us rather to carry a big stick, and to be ready to use
it. That, and that alone, is how peace is maintained, in this grimly
real world: by powerfully discouraging potential aggressors.

– Warren writes for the Ottawa Citizen.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress