Burns: Obama is Right

Nicholas Burns started his career as a foreign service officer in 1983. He served in Cairo and Jerusalem, before working in the State Department’s Department of Soviet Affairs. Then in 1990 he shifted onto the National Security Council staff. In 1995 he became Acting Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, and in 1997 he was appointed Ambassador to Greece. In 2001, the George W. Bush administration made him the United States’ Permanent Representative to NATO, and then in 2005 they made him Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs — the number three job in the State Department. This career diplomatic, widely respected and widely experienced, trusted with key missions by the Bush administration, has an article in Newsweek about how yes we should engage in direct, high-level talks with “bad guy” regimes:

Are McCain and Palin correct that America should stonewall its foes? I lived this issue for 27 years as a career diplomat, serving both Republican and Democratic administrations. Maybe that’s why I’ve been struggling to find the real wisdom and logic in this Republican assault against Obama. I’ll bet that a poll of senior diplomats who have served presidents from Carter to Bush would reveal an overwhelming majority who agree with the following position: of course we should talk to difficult adversaries—when it is in our interest and at a time of our choosing.

The more challenging and pertinent question, especially for the McCain-Palin ticket, is the reverse: Is it really smart to declare we will never talk to such leaders? Is it really in our long-term national interest to shut ourselves off from one of the most important and powerful states in the Middle East—Iran—or one of our major suppliers of oil, Venezuela? [...]

The real truth Americans need to embrace is that nearly all of the most urgent global challenges—the quaking financial markets, climate change, terrorism—cannot be resolved by America’s acting alone in the world. Rather than retreat into isolationism, as we have often done in our history, or go it alone as the unilateralists advocated disastrously in the past decade, we need to commit ourselves to a national strategy of smart engagement with the rest of the world. Simply put, we need all the friends we can get. And we need to think more creatively about how to blunt the power of opponents through smart diplomacy, not just the force of arms.

Consider this part of the trend of realists and career practitioners moving toward Democratic Party positions. And, I might add, of Democratic Party positions coming toward the consensus among real experts and professions. It wasn’t inevitable that the Democrats would wind up with a nominee who was willing to take the political risks that articulating these views entails.