Straw man

Michael O'Hanlon says:

If elevated to a doctrine, reliance on presidential-level diplomacy is a mistake. It risks rewarding foreign leaders who cause the most trouble, creating perverse incentives for those desiring the attention of the U.S. It also can confuse us about the nature of diplomacy. Foreign leaders, nice or not, make deals based on assessments of their interests, and any new diplomatic doctrine that fails to recognize as much would ignore centuries of history and potentially damage American security.

Ilan Goldberg responds:

This is a classic case of an unfair strawman. O'Hanlon is basically implying that Obama's foreign policy doctrine is that he will rely solely on talking to dictators as a way of dealing with them. That's just absurd. What Obama has said is that direct talks (instead of Bush's high school or kindergarten theory of diplomacy of not talking to people we don't like) need to be a central element of a broader strategy.

Anyone who thinks that America's strategy should be to talk to dictators all day, without laying the necessary groundwork through lower level negotiations, offering incentives, and sometimes using threats, is a moron. So, there are a number of options: A. O'Hanlon thinks that Obama and his whole team of advisors (including Tony Lake, Susan Rice, Richard Danzig and Greg Craig) are just a bunch of morons; B. He is deliberately misrepresenting Obama's position; or C. He hasn't actually paid close enough attention to figure out what Obama's policy really is. I'll go with some combination of B & C.

It seems plausible to me that if he reflected for a moment upon his own ubiquity, O'Hanlon might realize just how backwards he has things. The great threat to America's diplomatic leverage is not that a hostile foreign leader might disgrace himself by lying to an American president. The great threat to America's diplomatic leverage is that cozy foreign leaders are often allowed to lie to the American president with little cost to their prestige--if any at all. Note, similarly, that Michael O'Hanlon's long-standing willingness to provide American officials bad advice in the service of self-interest has done nothing to diminish his reputation as a Serious Person, and standing as a go-to expert on a wide variety of things he doesn't understand.