Hillary believes in violence. Michael Morell, a former CIA potentate who was acting director in 2012-2013 and a man who knows Hillary well said that of all of the people in the White House situation room, she was “…toughest in terms of understanding that for diplomacy to be effective, that there had to be a belief on the part of the adversary that you were willing and able to use force if necessary, right? She understands that. She understands that diplomacy without that cannot be effective.”
This statement of his places the best face on Hillary, inasmuch as she is Morell’s favored candidate. This statement ignores her taste for actually utilizing violence when diplomacy is not even an issue and when using such violence doesn’t further American interests, as in the former Yugoslavia. But even as it is a biased assessment, it still tells us that Hillary’s tweet is a ruse.
Morell made that statement in an interview with Charlie Rose. That interview is revealing insofar as Morell reflects ideas and assumptions held more widely in Washington. In the above excerpt, for example, he articulates support of coercive diplomacy and suggests that diplomacy must be coercive. This is a widely-held view in Washington and its satellite institutions in academia and think tanks. For an opposite and older view, see here.
Coercive diplomacy ignores the possibility and often the actuality that once a military force is assembled, as the U.S. has done, then diplomacy becomes a poor and neglected relation. The force becomes the primary facilitator of intervention. Weapons become the tool of choice and diplomacy takes a back seat. What seems superficially to be a good thing, to back up diplomacy by the threat of force being used, turns into an evil thing in which aggression rises in frequency and esteem. A superpower U.S. that’s armed to the teeth with advanced weapons, as it is, can pay lip service to so-called diplomacy. It can make demands that are unreasonable. Then, when the other side doesn’t knuckle under or even if it does, a superpower U.S. can ignore or misconstrue the responses and attack violently.
10:11 am on August 10, 2016 Email Michael S. Rozeff
