- Chinese unfair trade practices. "Unacceptable." (Former Commerce Secretary John Bryson)
- The U.N. Security Council, which, due to a dispute between the United States and Russia over the wording of a resolution condemning terrorist attacks in Damascus, ended up passing nothing at all. "It is unacceptable to the United States that the U.N. Security Council not...express its outrage at the heinous, sustained attacks on innocent civilians that the Syrian regime continues to launch." (Eric Pelton, spokesman for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations)
- Aggression across borders in the Middle East. We "will not tolerate" it. (President Obama)
- The use of chemical weapons by Syria. Unacceptable. Also, intolerable. Also, it would cross a red line, at least if "a whole bunch" of chemical weapons were used or transferred. (President Obama) A "clear red line." (Joe Biden) Also, this is not a bluff.
Uh-huh.
That's just a partial list. Believe me, we find plenty of other things "unacceptable" as well.
There are two problems with this kind of rhetoric.
First, as everyone and their cousins have been lately observing, it's not at all clear how U.S. interests are advanced by declaring behavior to be "unacceptable" when we have no intention of doing anything about it. (There are notable exceptions -- ask Muammar Qaddafi -- but in general, most activities condemned by the United States as unacceptable continue to this day, or, to the extent that they have stopped, they stopped with no credit due to us.) Iran routinely kicks sand on U.S. red lines, as does North Korea. Then, of course, there are all those "red lines" with Syria.
If we aren't willing to take decisive action to stop the Syrian government's appalling activities, what can it possibly mean to thump our chests and claim to have a red line? "Men," wrote Machiavelli, "must either be caressed or annihilated." Teddy Roosevelt proffered similar advice: "Speak softly and carry a big stick." We speak loudly, and though we undeniably carry a big stick, we mostly seem to flail about with it at random.
This isn't an argument for using military force in Syria, or Iran, or anywhere else -- maybe the use of force is justified and useful and maybe it's not. But if we in fact intend to accept the "unacceptable" and tolerate the "intolerable," we would be wise to develop a different and more nuanced vocabulary.
There's a second and less frequently noted problem with our absolutist rhetoric. It's just obnoxious -- and its sheer obnoxiousness makes it dangerous. The rhetoric of "unacceptable" and "intolerable" risks generating and reinforcing the very bad behavior we're trying to stop -- not just because each empty threat further reduces our credibility, but because our general stance toward the world has become so hectoring and schoolmarmish.
In general, U.S. diplomats treat foreign states and leaders like badly behaved toddlers. True, they often deserve it -- but as Machiavelli would surely have observed, that's not the point. The point is to advance our interests, defuse potentially dangerous conflicts, and dissuade others from engaging in brinksmanship. By using "my way or the highway" language, we frequently make things worse, by eliminating the possibility of face-saving compromise.
This is fine if we're not interested in compromise, of course: If our goal is to force our adversaries into corners and then crush them, we should hector and insult to our hearts' content. But if we're actually trying to modify the behavior of foreign states, we might consider being a little more...diplomatic.
Traditional realist theories of international relations posit that states are self-interested rational actors. But "states" are governed by human beings (even vicious dictators are human). And these individuals, like all individuals, are products of their cultures, and influenced as much by ego and the expectations of those who surround them as by strictly rational cost-benefit calculations. A state can't feel insulted or humiliated, but an individual certainly can -- and at the end of the day, it's individuals, not abstractions, who determine Iranian nuclear policy and Syrian military strategy.
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