Don’t get me wrong. Whether it was Nikita Khrushchev’s first step into the United States or that eerie dawn when Richard Nixon was seen disembarking from Air Force One in China or the sight of the surreal ceremony with Rabin and Arafat and Clinton on the White House lawn the other day, I was as struck as everyone else by the historical resonance and magnitude of these moments and a feeling of relief that something better might be at hand. What I find disturbing is the unbelievable gush concerning the newly welcomed former pariahs that almost always follows. Whatever they were the week before, they are suddenly being congratulated lavishly for nothing more admirable than appearing to be human beings and not snarling at babies or kicking dogs.
We had some of this in Washington last week and plenty when Khrushchev dropped in a generation ago and Americans went around craving to be noticed by him and loved (they thought be would see how nice we were and stop being a Communist forthwith). But nothing equaled the avalanche of gush about China when Nixon first went there. It is worth remembering that this was in the era of the especially terrible human-rights abuse and carnage known as the Cultural Revolution. Much of the press that made the trip would be embarrassed now (I truly hope) to reread its uncritical, even ecstatic, marshmallow-syrupy descriptions of the society, the rulers and the place.
What is so troublesome about this impulse to effusion is that it trivializes what may have been–usually were–serious issues, differences, quarrels that had to be overcome. It seems to repudiate whatever values and principles underlay those disputes, rather than to acknowledge that some ground has been gained in resolving them in considerable part as a result of the tough dealing that went before. Its unmistakable implication is that the whole conflict was probably a mistake, a misunderstanding as in: the fellow is smiling; he looks quite nice; his wife seems cordial; what could this fuss have been about for the past 30 years?
To some extent it is all probably explained as a reflexive swing back from another kind of unreality, an overcorrection for the fact that we do tend to dehumanize and demonize our antagonists, reconstructing them in our minds as outsize reptilian monsters, so that mere evidence that they are not produces in the first instance a kind of slobbery gratitude. They are then immediately transformed in our perception not into the ordinary, life-size political tough guys or worse that they usually are, but rather into Mother Teresa. It is also true that in those instances where dug–in U.S. policy has been excessive, obdurate, petty and peevish, people feel a need to make some sort of amends. But that’s not the whole of it. Particular groups among us have particular tendencies that make them more likely to accept today as bosom buddies the individuals they were considering nuking only the day before.
Chief among these are the geo people–those apostles of geopolitics, geostrategies and all the hifalutin’ rest–who argue against the “sentimentality” of human rights and democratic concerns, claiming that relationships among nations should be based almost exclusively on hard-eyed concepts of national or regional interest. They are consistent in this and can be unashamed new best friends to last season’s worst enemies. I also think that Washington as a whole is predisposed to these “Aw shucks, no hard feelings” turnabouts, since that’s what we do here all day long in other contexts. Senator A presides over a hearing in which he calls into question Undersecretary B’s sanity, intelligence, integrity and manhood and then greets him as a long lost friend two hours later at a reception where all joke raucously about the day’s earlier travails. A political culture of this kind inclines these guys to slap just about any former foe (and current despot) on the back and chortle, “Hell, we all put on our pants one leg at a time…you know what I mean?”
I wish we had, as a nation, a more even temperament, a steadier gaze, a better cruising speed. I am uncomfortable when our government and its representatives withhold handshakes and eye contact and acknowledgment of reality and call it policy. But I am, if anything, even more uncomfortable when, at long last, the beginning of a deal having been struck, a giddiness overwhelms the collective psyche and people begin to talk as if all that had been needed all along was a family counselor, as if there were no fault here, no value at stake, no right or wrong, no history. These effusions in fact deny history and suppress memory and they also generally miss the point. They under-value the achievement of the breakthrough by ignoring where it came from and how it came about and how very much more there is to be negotiated before anything like success can be presumed. We take the current situation and read it backward in time, implicitly denying that there had ever been anything there to worry about in the first place. We say (wrongly on both counts): All is now well and therefore probably always was. We are, as always, asking for another surprise.
