It’s another day of light blogging; for the second Saturday in a row I left the award-winning grounds that surround the stately Mead manor in the Borough of Queens to participate in the Grand Strategy simulation exercise at Yale.
The students did pretty well today, we all agreed, although by the end of the day nuclear war had broken out between India and Pakistan, Israel had attacked Iran, and the USS Jimmy Carter was in flames in the Persian Gulf. The students had missed a couple of chances to head off the Ind0-Pakistani conflict and they were locked into an approach to the Israeli-Iranian conflict that wouldn’t end well, but mostly they kept their heads and made sensible decisions as the sadistic faculty hurled one curve ball after another at them. The student’s elected President, the First Lady and top members of his staff made a beautiful picture as they gamely sang “Jingle Bells” at the White House Christmas tree lighting.
As I watched the students handle this week’s crop of deceitful ambassadors, shortsighted critics, self-aggrandizing reporters and pompously self-righteous senators, I was struck by the sincerity and constructive spirit that our students brought to their task of global leadership. This didn’t always work out well for them; a Pakistani diplomat and an Israeli cabinet officer were particularly unhelpful. I was struck also by how much the ideas and the attitudes that our students brought to the table resembled those of the actual diplomats and policy makers I’ve known through the years.
There really is an “American style” of international behavior. Shaped by a society that most of us experience as basically friendly and fair, we bring certain habits of thought into the international arena. We assume that our interlocutors want more or less the same things we do, that displays of trust on our side will elicit similar behavior on theirs, and that there are usually ‘win-win’ solutions that all sides seek. We also tend to assume that our counterparts are seeking the public good for their societies — that while different political factions on the ‘other side’ might have different views about what their society needs (like liberals and conservatives in the United States) the negotiators on the other side are fundamentally trying to do what is best for their societies as a whole.
We instinctively approach these situations as lawyers — not back alley shysters cutting corners but responsible and ethical attorneys from well established firms following canons of good practice and expecting the other side to do the same.
I don’t propose that we change this; that’s neither possible, I think, nor wise. But we do need to be less narcissistic, less convinced that the ‘other’ is just a mirror image of ourselves. The best American diplomats and policymakers have learned through lots of overseas experience that foreigners aren’t just Americans with funny accents and unusual clothes. They can have very different working assumptions about how history works, what the standards of ethical and professional behavior are, what kind of solutions are possible, and indeed whether it is their responsibility to seek some version of the general good for their societies as a whole — or just to get a result that benefits their own family, tribe, region or faction.
We need to understand what the other guys really want and how they really see us if we are going to be effective at the American game. I’m not sure why this is such a hard lesson for smart Americans to learn; for all the emphasis we put in our educational system on valuing diversity we seem to end up producing young professionals who believe that everybody is really the same.
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