"Won't listen? Then feel" Foreign Policy

I wrote these notes before Russia's Putin commandeered the world's stage about Syria. The press of other matters delayed posting, but my friend and colleague, Mark, read what follows and said it reminded him of his own father's approach to deterring undesired activity. If you won't listen, you will just have to feel consequences. No protracted debates. No soapbox sermons. Thanks for a more memorable subject line than something with the word lessons in it, Mark.

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Ah, the tumultuous Middle East, where villains savage their own rival tribes and issue death threats with all the gusto of a thespian preening for a debut on Broadway. How does one put the noise into context? Consider some events from recent history:

Hostile Talk

- During the Six-Day War, the Egyptian Air Force was proudly announcing air superiority of its fighter aces as Israel was neutering Egyptian air power.
- Circa 1986, as tensions between Libya and the U.S. spiked after a Libyan-sponsored bombing of U.S. servicemen in a nightclub outside an American military base, Qaddafi announced a "line of death" which, if crossed, would mean complete devastation for American forces. The latter bombed Qaddafi into silence, after narrowly missing him in an air strike that killed his son and obliterated any subsequent talk of lines of death.

Meaningful Action

- Earlier this year, after catching Syria in the act of arming Hezbollah with weapons whose target would only be Israel, Israel bombed weapons caches in Syria without fanfare or hesitation. Syria expressed outrage but knew better than to attack Israel in retaliation. Nor did war rhetoric follow from either side.
- In the days when kidnappings of journalists and diplomats were common fears in Beirut, legend has it that one terrorist group tried its hand with abducting a Soviet official. The Russians, as the story goes, did not engage in media pleas for release or hostage negotiations. Instead, they found the first relative traceable to the instigator, his nephew, and sent the nephew's private parts in a package to the instigator. The Soviet hostage was then released without fanfare or rhetorical exchanges in the press.

Lessons

Deterrence still works, but perhaps in inverse ratio to proclamation and palaver. Action still speaks louder than words, and sometimes loudest when uncluttered with words. In the foregoing cases of the Israelis and Russians, one may only wonder if the reaction by those on the receiving end was not something like, "Well, no one ever explained it that way to us before."

Even the French get this, which is why they see no double standard in calling us cowboys if we move without coalitions, United Nations' blessings, and favorable press. Meanwhile, whenever France perceives a threat to its interests in Congo, Algeria, or Mali, the French definition of nanosecond becomes the degree of hesitation they experience in worrying about such imprimaturs before sending in their expeditionary forces. And those forces go in, gloves off, to do a job -- not to send a message.

-- Nick Catrantzos