What Careless Diplomacy Looks Like

Ted R. Bromund

Sometimes, careless diplomacy looks like a mistranslated Russian phrase, or a set of incompatible DVDs. But those things, though damaging and indicative of superficiality and carelessness, are the stuff of day-to-day incompetence. The real work of diplomacy centers on presenting the government's policy, reporting home, and negotiating treaties.

Last week, during his visit to Mexico, administration officials confirmed that President Obama will push the U.S. Senate to ratify the "Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and Other Related Materials." The Clinton administration signed the treaty, better known by its Spanish acronym CIFTA, after the Organization of American States adopted it in 1997. The Senate has not ratified it, but as the administration acknowledges, the U.S. has abided by the spirit of the Convention.

The Convention has several problems, about which I've already written at length on Heritage's Foundry. The biggest one is that it criminalizes speech: under its terms, it is illegal to "counsel" the illicit manufacturing of or trafficking in arms. This requirement is unlikely to hold up in the U.S., thanks to the First Amendment. But it provides international legal cover for criminalizing speaking of armed rebellion. That will come in very handy in Venezuela. The Convention also obligates the U.S. to assist other signatories who are investigating the crimes it creates, including the crime of "counseling." This could put the U.S. in the awkward and undesirable position of being Hugo Chavez's bloodhound as he hunts down dissidents abroad.

My question on this is a simple one: how in the world were U.S. diplomats involved in the negotiation of a treaty that criminalizes speech? You can blame the pro-gun control biases or the bad faith of the Clinton administration all you like -- and I do -- but this goes beyond bias or bad faith. It is incompetent. Any sane U.S. diplomat should have realized that a treaty that criminalizes speech is going to face a very tough ride in the Senate, and is guaranteed to be used abroad in ways that are profoundly illiberal and repressive.

So what to do now? The obvious answer is easy to give: get it right the first time and negotiate better treaties. Sadly, that opportunity is now denied us: the Convention is what it is. The second alternative is for the U.S. to ratify the Convention, but enter a series of reservations against its more obnoxious elements. The Convention does explicitly allow for reservations, but only if they "are not incompatible with the object and purposes of this Convention": it is a judgment call whether the reservations the U.S. would have to enter fulfill that criterion.

In any event, the Left often objects to the U.S.use of reservations when signing treaties. It is clearly better to enter a reservation when necessary than not to do so; therefore, case by case, this criticism is valueless. But in the broader sense, there is something to it: if the U.S. can only sign a treaty after entering reservations, the suspicion must always be that the treaty is not a very good one.

In this sense, reservations are undesirable not because they protect U.S. interests, but because they imply that U.S. diplomats were not able to do any better. And in this case in particular, no reservation can protect against the fact that the U.S. is tacitly endorsing the repression of free speech abroad.

The third alternative is to ratify the Convention and simply refuse to uphold the parts the U.S. objects to. This is not a good idea: it is wrong in principle, and, again, it associates the U.S. with foreign malpractices. And given the transnationalist impulses behind legal scholars like Harold Koh, the administration's nominee for Legal Adviser to the State Department, it is hard to have a lot of confidence in a strategy of prosecutorial discretion: if Koh has his way, international law will become the law of the land, whether the Senate ratifies it or no.

The fourth and final alternative is to stay the course: abide by the Convention's better parts in practice, but refuse to ratify it in order to avoid being obligated by its wrongs. That was the policy of the Bush Administration, and it was the correct one. The Obama Administration's decision to push for ratification is part of their broader desire -- I refuse to call it a strategy -- to make nice with the world through symbolic (and worse than symbolic) gestures.

And that, too, is careless diplomacy of a kind -- careless, because it is based on the belief that the way other states act will change if we do a pretty show and tell. Good diplomacy begins with taking the job seriously, and part of that is recognizing that other places have interests and beliefs of their own that are not simply a reflection of what we do. Diplomacy not based on this belief leads to errors because, among other reasons, it encourages U.S. diplomats to conclude agreements like the Convention for the purpose of impressing others, rather than to get it right for the purpose of addressing the problem. And that is not just careless: it is, ultimately, the diplomacy of solipsism.