Sometimes, Barack Obama says, you have to negotiate with your enemies.

President
Bush, being a genius, disagrees. He knows that negotiating with enemies
is a sign of weakness, which is why he wouldn't negotiate with North
Korea while they were only trying to build nuclear weapons but waited
until they had actually built them. That way Bush would have no
leverage and could negotiate from a position of sufficient weakness.

This
is also, of course, John McCain's model of tough diplomacy, and Joe
Lieberman's. They too view Obama's willingness to actually talk to our
enemies as a symptom not only of weakness, but of naivete. The fact
that Obama is willing to talk to enemies, rather than simply threaten
them, is taken as a sign that he's some simple-minded kid who will lose
his lunch money to the Iranians before he even gets to the bus stop.

McCain
and Lieberman's preferred method for dealing with international
enemies, like Bush's, is to make bellicose public threats that they may
or may not find themselves able to back up. It's very important that
these threats not be made directly to the party being threatened, but
to large domestic political audiences in front of international media.
The goal is to humiliate one's opponents and make them lose face, while
looking more impressive to one's own local admirers; essentially, this
is the Gangster Rap School of Diplomacy. McCain or Bush or Lieberman
let it be known around the neighborhood that they will give that other
kid a beating, as soon as they see him. The plan is to undermine their
opponent's standing, and intimidate him through third parties. Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad in fact uses the same technique all the time, ranting about
how he will humble America, and Fidel Castro used to be a past master
of it. You see how successful it has been, what with Iran and Cuba
bringing us to our knees. And you can see how effectively our
stump-speech threats have curbed their behavior.

The main
purpose of these public threats is their main weakness: any leader who
gives in to them will be humiliated in front of his own power base, and
weakened. And because they were made in front of the whole world, the
threatened party can't comply without admitting weakness. (If you hide
when the neighborhood bully threatens you, you basically have to accept
his bullying thereafter.) What American leader can give any concessions
to Ahmadinejad, until he changes his tune? Threats like these give the
opponent a powerful motivation to defy you, but punishes them for
cooperating with you.

The other problem of course, is that when
you threaten someone indirectly, they often doubt that you mean it. How
often have you lost sleep over Castro's vows to bring us down? How
often have you worried that those parade-stand threats were connected
to anything concrete he was planning to do? Everybody knows that the
neighborhood bully who goes around talking about how he will beat you
up when he finds is not the same as the bully who actually finds you
and then threatens to beat you up.

Sometimes, and I hope even our most hawkish compatriots would agree, you have to threaten your enemies in person.

That
principle of tough diplomacy was seemingly on display in the Senate
chamber today, when the naive and dewy pushover from Chicago, Obama,
approached the hardened street tough from Connecticut, Lieberman. Roll
Call, via the Huffington Post, has the story:

Furthermore, during a Senate vote Wednesday, Obama dragged Lieberman by
the hand to a far corner of the Senate chamber and engaged in what
appeared to reporters in the gallery as an intense, three-minute
conversation.

While it was unclear what the two were discussing, the body
language suggested that Obama was trying to convince Lieberman of
something and his stance appeared slightly intimidating.

Using forceful, but not angry, hand gestures, Obama literally backed
up Lieberman against the wall, leaned in very close at times, and
appeared to be trying to dominate the conversation, as the two talked
over each other in a few instances.

Still, Obama and Lieberman seemed to be trying to keep the
back-and-forth congenial as they both patted each other on the back
during and after the exchange.

Afterwards, Obama smiled and pointed up at reporters peering over
the edge of the press gallery for a better glimpse of their interaction.

Was Obama threatening Lieberman? I can't say, and neither can you, and
we're not meant to. Perhaps the new leader of the Democratic Party was
simply giving Lieberman, who now caucuses with the Democrats but
campaigns with the Republicans, an enthusiastic restaurant
recommendation. Lieberman can certainly deny that any threats were
made, which means he can cave in without losing too much face. This, of
course, is the point.

Of course, the fact conversation wasn't
supposed to be entirely private, although its substance was. The press
in the galleries, and the other senators in the chamber, were supposed
to notice that Obama was giving Lieberman some personal time, and that
Lieberman wasn't enjoying it. It was important to establish that the
new boss is, in fact, the new boss. Lieberman got a small taste of
public humiliation, as payback for publicly dissing the leader of the
party that gives him his committee assignments. But he also knows, and
was intended to know, that the small taste could have been a full meal,
and that Obama has the power to humiliate him much more publicly and
thoroughly. Lieberman was also allowed the dignity of having the
substance of the threat (if it was a threat) and the substance of the
demand kept private so that he can comply with a minimal loss of
position. And the "friendly" body language allows both parties to put
the best possible face on things, and to stay in the negotiation. The
move gives Lieberman the maximum reasons to cooperate, and the maximum
penalty for not cooperating. It is, dare I say it, nuanced.

And that is the man whom Lieberman was calling soft. Don't spend the lunch money in one place, Senator.