Why Don't We Talk Anymore?

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Silicon Valley rationalism fortified by ancient Greek is an admirable education for a philosopher-king. It did not, however, help a green vice consul recognize that a tourist visa applicant actually aspired to a minimarket in Brooklyn. Logical exposition failed to convince a depressed tourist from New Jersey not to venture a second suicide attempt. Humanitarianism wilted at the clammy handshake of a convicted rapist. (I brought him back issues of the New Yorker, but I did not pursue his release from Israeli prison.) I consoled myself that these inadequate people skills of mine would not be a problem once I moved out of the consular section to my real job as a political officer.

After two years in Israel I moved on to Casablanca. My Moroccan interlocutors were hesitant to confide the details of their jobs and lives to a stranger with a heavy accent. My first six months at the consulate general were predictably wretched. I learned nothing of any consequence. Wretchedness is a good teacher, though, and gradually something happened. When Ahmed, the impoverished student cramming under my streetlight, confided colorful details about Islamist movements at his university, when Mohammed the biologist discoursed on overexploitation of fish stocks, and when a royal third cousin gossiped about companies controlled by His Sherifian Majesty, it was not because my French accent had improved (though it had), but because I was no longer a stranger.

Diplomats must persuade non-English-speaking politicians to take the risk of telling us what we need to know rather than what we want to hear. The difficulty is greater when one is representing a superpower at least half those politicians' voters firmly detest. Alcohol-lubricated chitchat at receptions is useful in this regard; sweetening relationships with lunches, expedited visas, and semisecret gossip is par for the course. Our perceived character and the prestige of our country, though, are our most important assets.

I had emerged from my one international relations course at Swarthmore with a B-minus and a hazy idea of 'rational actors' selfishly pursuing specific 'national interests.' George W. Bush must have taken a similar class at Yale. On that basis, encouraged by dire and incorrect secret intelligence, he concluded that Saddam Hussein had to be overthrown by military might and that Kim Jong Il and a growing list of other foreign leaders are madmen who cannot be contained by diplomacy.

It's true that the behavior of foreigners, even when it is described accurately, seldom coincides with Washington's notion of rational self-interest. Still, no madmen resided in the government offices I haunted. The bureaucrats and politicians were at least as rational as I was. The logic they employed was grimy, but it made perfect sense once you looked at the problems that they needed to solve.

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