Sunday, March 2, 2003

In today's New York Times: Turkish member of Parliament: “The Americans dictated to us. It became a business negotiation., not something between friends. It disgusted me.” Hans Blix associate: ”The Americans have been heavy-handed, obvious and clumsy in his dealings with him". ”Speak softly and carry a big stick” (apparently a West African proverb) seems to have been swamped by Dirty Harry's ”make my day.“ The older attitude requires patience and subtlety. However, the pace of contemporary events puts a steep discount on patience. Building a case step by step, keeping with your interlocutor all of the way, assumes that the long process has a good chance of succeeding and not be derailed by random events. But the speed of modern communication and technology's power to amplify action constantly create instabilities and scenario shifts. Those shifts mean that players have less chance to expect playing again, and to learn from repeated play. That seems to make such long-term policies much harder to sustain. This may be more appearance than reality — most of the inderlying forces do not change that quickly — but the appearance seems to have come to dominate decision makers, especially those who think they have the means to prevail in a confrontation. Not a recipe to minimize escalation. The perception problem in Dirty Harry's attitude is that it does not take into account the uncertainty of the outcomes and worst-case scenarios. In the standard movie plot the hero prevails even if he (almost always a he) is down at times. There is no real uncertainty of outcome. Decision makers in the 90s bubble and in the last ten years of international politics seem to have internalized Dirty Harry, and have been encouraged in it by the audience's own impatience and lack of attention span. Recent public worries about in-your-face policies may have much more to do with the reassertion of uncertainty in a weak economy than with ”old World” wringing of hands, which sometimes seems rather self-interested. 9:58:33 AM