Jack Bauer diplomacy

For thousands of years, the Middle East has been fairly consistently a region full of instability and conflict. Despite the efforts of many through the years, the religious and ethnic conflicts in the region have never been solved.\nHowever, that may be beginning to change, at least on one front.\nOn Monday, former president Jimmy Carter announced that after discussions with leaders of Hamas and Syria, both the Islamist group and the Middle Eastern nation would be open to moving toward peace with Israel. The former said it would recognize the creation of a Palestinian state if it were approved by a referendum of Palestinians worldwide. Syria said it believed that nearly all differences between Israel and themselves had already been sorted out, and that they would like a peace deal “as soon as possible,” the New York Times quoted Carter as saying. \nOn one level, all of this has to be taken with a grain of salt. First of all, there have been times in the past where it looked as if peace in the Middle East was becoming a possibility — for example, in 1979, while Carter was president, he negotiated a treaty between Israel and Egypt that was seen as groundbreaking at the time. So this may be another flash in the pan of greater Middle Eastern peace.\nAlso, it’s hard to hold groups like Hamas to their word sometimes, especially when the mediator of the talks isn’t an official representative of the U.S. — or, for that matter, the United Nations, or anyone else. Though Carter holds sway in the international community — possibly more than the current president at this point — he doesn’t have the force of law or the power of a military behind him. He has no way of holding Hamas or Syria accountable aside from asking them to be nice.\nThe reason this is important, though, is because it possibly marks a major shift in the perception of how Middle Eastern diplomacy should take place. Up to this point, the U.S.’s stance on groups like Hamas — those considered by the U.S. to be terrorist organizations — and states like Syria, which the United States considers a supporter of terrorists, has been a sort of Jack Bauer philosophy: “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”\nIf we’ve learned anything during the past seven years or so, though, it’s that Jack Bauer is a fictional character, and his tactics don’t necessarily work. If we as a nation want to really try to make the world a safer place, we may have to actually sit down and talk to some people we don’t like. It is possible to negotiate with an adversary without engaging in appeasement. It is possible to negotiate with an adversary without compromising our principles or disgracing the sacrifices of our military. It is no longer possible, however, to run roughshod over the rest of the world and expect our will to be done.\nIt’s time our country’s leaders learned how to talk.