Open mouth, insert foot

The New York Times has an article by Mark Landler about the latest diplomatic move by the President:

President Obama laid down a marker in Cairo last week for candor in American diplomacy. The United States, he declared, will “say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs”, a line that drew applause from his Arab audience. But candor and diplomacy are not synonymous, and if Mr. Obama were to apply the same approach to thorny problems like Iran and North Korea, it might not produce the intended results, according to foreign affairs experts. Some say he risks forsaking the advantages of “constructive ambiguity,” the diplomatic practice of fudging differences, credited to Henry Kissinger. Already, senior Israeli officials are complaining privately that Mr. Obama’s call for a blanket freeze in the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank contravenes verbal agreements between the Bush administration and the previous Israeli government.
As a practical matter, few analysts expect the Obama administration to rewrite the rules of diplomacy, which have always relied on a mix of public pronouncements, tacit understandings and back-channel talks. “There are two home truths in diplomacy,” said Thomas Pickering, one of the nation’s most experienced career diplomats and a former under secretary of state. “One is, don’t tell lies. The other is, you can say more in private than you can in public, but they have to be consistent.”
On the issue of North Korea, the United States is engaged in extremely quiet negotiations with China and Russia over how to respond to the North’s recent nuclear test and missile launches. China, in particular, bridles at public pressure from the United States to crack down on North Korea’s financial flows or to inspect ships suspected of carrying nuclear parts.
In this case, administration officials and outside experts said, the White House is likely to say little publicly about Beijing’s role, aside from repeating the mantra that it hopes officials in North Korea will return to multiparty talks with China, the United States, Russia, South Korea and Japan.
Washington’s relations with China are founded on one of the most famous examples of “constructive ambiguity” in modern diplomacy: the Shanghai Communiqué. In the agreement, negotiated by Mr. Kissinger, the United States implicitly acknowledged the existence of a single China, but left the language vague enough to maintain its support of Taiwan even as it normalized relations with Beijing.
“There are times with authoritarian regimes that you are trying to nudge in a positive direction when you do not want to say things too publicly,” said Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of state for political affairs, who handled the talks on Iran’s nuclear program during the Bush administration. Mr. Burns, who now teaches at Harvard, cautioned that such an approach worked only in certain cases. In other cases, he said, the United States needed to articulate its values clearly and publicly.
Iran may soon supply the White House with its next challenge in balancing public and private diplomacy. Until now, Mr. Obama has rolled out a series of symbolic gestures to the Iranian government: a videotaped greeting on Iran’s New Year, invitations to July 4th parties at embassies, and so on.
But at some point, analysts say, the White House will have to decide whether to pursue more substantive talks on issues like Tehran’s nuclear program. Given the political realities on both sides, much of those negotiations are likely to be confidential and may involve a creative use of ambiguity on issues like whether Iran should be allowed to continue enriching uranium.
Some analysts pointed out that Mr. Obama, in his reference in Cairo to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, did not mention enrichment, suggesting, perhaps, that he wanted to keep his options open.
What makes the president’s declaration about public and private talks with the Middle East unusual, experts say, is that he applied it to Israel, one of America’s closest allies. “The basic rule of diplomacy,” Mr. Burns said, “is that with allies, you try to solve problems quietly.” When he was American ambassador to NATO in 2003, Mr. Burns said, he lamented that the United States and Europe did not try harder to hash out their differences over the Iraq war behind closed doors. In that case, two sides said the same things to each other publicly that they said privately. A result was that Congress began calling the French fries served in its cafeteria “freedom fries”.
Some Israelis, and their supporters here, cite their longstanding alliance in raising concerns about the very public settlement dispute. A recent letter to Mr. Obama, backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the United States’ leading pro-Israel lobbying group, and signed by 328 members of Congress, declared, “The proven best way forward is to work closely and privately together, both on areas of agreement and especially on areas of disagreement.”
Indeed, Israeli officials say the Bush administration signaled in meetings beginning in 2003 that it would not oppose building in existing settlement areas to accommodate growing families, even though Israel pledged to freeze settlement construction when it signed the so-called road map for peace. “I believe we need to talk with honesty and sincerity, and to try to keep the public discourse dignified and more moderate,” said a senior Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to aggravate the dispute between Washington and Jerusalem.
Still, Mr. Burns, who supports pushing Israel on settlements, said the Middle East might be a rare case in which candid diplomacy, even with an ally, makes sense. “Most Palestinians and many Arabs have lost faith in the peace process,” he said. “One of the major issues for the United States is to regain credibility. This is a down payment the Obama administration is making with the Arab world, and they’re saying it publicly.”

Rico says he's reminded of Twain's old phrase about lies, damned lies, and statistics, or, in this case, diplomacy.