What George Shultz could learn from Don Corleone

National Review, August 1, 1986 by Tom Bethell

At the same time, offers to negotiate came pouring into Washington from Havana (suggesting that the invasion plan may have leaked out, incidentally). There were inevitably those who argued that the offers to negotiate the fate of Grenada should be accepted. Others argued that we should only pretend to entertain such offers, while secretly proceeding with the invasion plan.

"At that point it dawned on me,' the official said, "that that is the way the Communists behave all the time. I knew what it was like to be in their shoes. They negotiate only for the sake of appearance.'

BUT THERE IS something else, something that I have not touched upon. I have represented the failure of the State Department professionals to understand the situation they are in as a kind of defect of breeding: a fatal asymmetry between those who are schooled in civility and those who are willing to use force--indeed who would not be in so privileged a position at the bargaining table if they were not willing to use force. But there is another asymmetry and a more basic one: between faith and a lack of faith.

In his remarkable foreword to Witness, "A Letter to My Children,' Whittaker Chambers wrote:

Communists are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weakness of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even into death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world. Their power, whose nature baffles the rest of the world, because in a large measure the rest of the world has lost that power, is the power to hold convictions and to act on them. It is the same power that moves mountains; it is also an unfailing power to move men. Communists are that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die--to bear witness--for its faith.

At the beginning I noted, as does Richard Pipes, that State Department professionals cannot believe that their interlocutor believes his own outrageous manifesto, and the reason why they cannot believe it is that they themselves quite reliably do not believe in anything in particular. Goodness knows, they have been trained not to be "true believers.' It is a message that our culture most insistently dins into all of us. The intensifier "true' here mocks the very notion of belief and is intended to discredit it. Faith tends to be inflexible. How can a State Department negotiator be "pragmatic' if he believes that some indispensable principle is at stake? Such "ideologues' are not suited to the Foreign Service, and in fact the Foreign Service examination itself tends to weed out those who display any such rigidity in their thinking.

Every Foreign Service Officer knows that he must be flexible; that he is the giver in the arena of give-and-take; that he must graciously hand over the carrot of his office; that it is his duty to surrender the salami and his prerogative to slice it thin.