With what kind of language do the diplomats and political leaders of the democratic world address the fomenters of these threats? All too often, they default to lingo also applied these days to naughty 4-year-olds.
"Disappointing."
That's how British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon described Burma's recent verdict on democratic dissident Aung San Suu Kyi. Having spent the past 19 years under the boot of the Burmese junta, Suu Kyi has become a symbol of an entire people stripped of any rights, brutalized, impoverished and--during mass protests in 1988 and 2007--slaughtered in the streets. Now she has been sentenced to another 18 months under house arrest.
Was this actually "disappointing"? Or, to be fair to Brown and Ban, and tack on the adjectives they threw in, was it not only disappointing, but "profoundly" and "deeply" so? What were these gentlemen expecting? In putting Suu Kyi through a sham trial, Burma's despotic junta clearly set out to grind down internal opposition, as it always does. The results were hideous, malicious, vile and repugnant, but to call them disappointing is either disingenuous or utterly clueless.
Here's another one of the policymakers' favorite words for addressing rogue regimes: "Unacceptable."
That's from President Obama, in a series of statements he's made about Iran's regime variously murdering demonstrators in the streets, detaining Western embassy staff and acquiring nuclear weapons. What "unacceptable" means in practice is anyone's guess. In polite company, it usually befits offenses such as jumping the lunch queue. Addressed to kids, it might serve as a strong hint to stop kicking your sister under the table. At the Obama White House, it has been invoked, along with such other favorites as "unsustainable," to deplore everything from cost overruns to current health care arrangements to letting children get fat.
But "unacceptable" has also crept into political discourse as the chiding of choice for rogue states trying to rack up a nuclear arsenal. A classic of this kind is Obama's comment in June that North Korea's record of proliferation "makes it unacceptable for them to be accepted as a nuclear power."
Not that this began with Obama. The George W. Bush administration, especially as the president turned to soft-power diplomacy during his second term, had officials roaming the world pronouncing themselves "concerned" and "disappointed" by various "unacceptable" activities on the part of regimes in places such as Russia, Iran and Libya. At one point, in 2006, both Russia and South Korea chimed in with former Bush envoy Chris Hill to describe North Korea's nuclear ventures as "unacceptable." Trying to nail down exactly what that meant, NPR at the time aired a segment trying to translate this "diplomat-ese" into English. The results were, one might say, disappointing. Three years later, all we know for sure is that North Korea has not accepted "unacceptable" as a constraint on its nuclear program.
There's a comic side to this, as over-use and misuse combine to empty this already vacuous jargon of any real meaning. In March, protesting U.S. sanctions on Iran, the speaker of Iran's parliament, Ali Larijani, scolded Obama's actions as "disappointing." And in May, perhaps trying to speak the local language during a visit with Obama at the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Iran's open calls for the destruction of Israel as "unacceptable." One might read that as wry understatement.
But there's an alarming aspect to it as well. This lingo goes with a mindset that equates the behavior of rogue tyrants with that of unruly children. Rather than describe something as flat-out wrong, or evil, or so genuinely "unacceptable" that even at high cost it will be stopped in its tracks, the aim seems to be to nudge the evil-doers gently in a better direction. The paradigm appears to be one in which the transgressors are seen as still unformed, as malleable and as needing merely a firm (but not overly wounding) word to guide them toward more "acceptable" behavior.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton articulated this view quite precisely just last month, when she likened North Korea's regime to a bunch of misbehaving juveniles: "The experience I've had with small children and teenagers and people who are demanding attention: Don't give it to them." Clinton explained, "Maybe it's the mother in me."
Memo to Clinton: These are not children. They have reached a form of maturity in which, however warped they may be, they function as capable and extremely dangerous adults.
Tyrants, as a rule, have made a long series of deliberate choices to become what they are. By the time they reach the cockpit of your average rogue state, they are heavily invested in systems which reward them for atrocious, underhanded and often murderous acts. In places such as Iran, Burma, North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Sudan, the incentives for those at the top are not to lie awake at night wondering if they should try to be less disappointing or more acceptable to the matrons now tending the world's leading democracies. They are much more likely to be wondering what they can get away with next.
Had Franklin Delano Roosevelt used today's political vocabulary, he would have denounced the bombing of Pearl Harbor not as "A date which will live in infamy," but as something along the lines of "A deeply disappointing cause for concern."
Ronald Reagan, instead of calling the Soviet Union the "evil empire," would have had to fall back on something like "an unacceptable framework from which we would like to see more positive results."
Should today's leaders of the free world wish to come up with more vibrant language, where might they turn for inspiration? For a lesson from the master, turn to Shakespeare's "Henry V," Act I, scene ii. In answer to King Henry's claim of certain dukedoms in France, the French Dauphin sends a mocking tribute of tennis balls. Does Henry reply that he is "disappointed" and this mockery is "unacceptable"?
No. His message for the Dauphin is:
"When we have matched our rackets to these balls,
We will in France (by God's grace) play a set
Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard."
(Let's indulge; the world today could use a lot more Shakespeare.) He continues:
"And tell the pleasant Prince this mock of his
Hath turned his balls to gun-stones, and his soul
Should stand sore-charged for the wasteful vengeance
That shall fly with them; for many a thousand widows
Shall this his mock mock of their dear husbands;
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;
And some are yet ungotten and unborn
That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's scorn."
Not that we should expect anything like this from the State Department, or from a White House that has translated the word "war" into the phrase "Overseas Contingency Operations." But I suspect that even a pale imitation of King Henry's retort would give pause--in places such as Tehran, Pyongyang, Damascus and Rangoon--in ways that no amount of "disappointment" ever will.
