Among the most entertaining characters brought to life in David Simon’s iconic HBO series The Wire was the long-suffering criminal defense attorney Maurice Levy, brilliantly portrayed by the actor Michael Kostroff. Levy’s unscrupulous practice specialized in defending Baltimore’s most unsavory organized criminals. Although he was well compensated for his efforts, the defense attorney was routinely vexed by his clientele’s penchant for revealing their true colors. Though the criminal habits of his drug-dealing clients surely gave Levy routine cause to reach for the aspirin bottle, their wicked instincts ensured that he never lacked for work.
America’s diplomatic establishment increasingly finds itself in the role of Maurice Levy. It is charged with defending the indefensible, obscuring the facts rather than shedding light upon them, and preserving comforting fictions which, were they to shatter, would undermine their very raisons d’être.
Nearly 15 months after a passenger airline carrying civilians was shot out of the sky over war-torn eastern Ukraine, a panel of Dutch investigators has concluded that a Russian-made anti-aircraft missile was responsible for the carnage. The 9N314M warhead that brought down the Boeing 777 was probably affixed to a 9M38M1 missile and was most likely fired from a Russian-made BUK SA-11 surface-to-air missile system. The warhead detonated just outside the cockpit of the civilian airliner, killing most of the crew instantly but leaving many of the rest of the 298 souls who ultimately perished in the crash alive for the agonizing 90-second journey back to Earth.
The “pro-Russian separatists” who, it can be reasonably surmised, fired that missile were armed and equipped by Russia. Many of those units destabilizing eastern Ukraine are actively advised by Russian regular soldiers. Those Russian troops are part of a detachment that has been operating illegally inside Ukraine for nearly a year and a half, following the invasion and annexation of the Crimean peninsula. The campaign to weaken the integrity of the Ukrainian state was a prelude to even more perilous Russian adventurism in Syria, where NATO air assets and Russian forces are operating in dangerously close proximity while shooting at one another’s proxy forces on the ground. And what was the American diplomatic establishment’s kneejerk response to the definitive allocation of blame for the downing of MH17, a war crime that has not yet been fully litigated? To obfuscate and to excuse away bad behavior.
“My heart goes out to the victims of #MH17,” tweeted Will Stevens, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Russia. “What a terrible tragedy. Too much energy spent on trying to cast blame.”
He promptly deleted the message of reconciliation to the revisionist autocrats in Moscow, but the message has surely been received. The United States has no interest in investigating the murder of 298 civilians, much less to oppose with lethal aid the Russian-led war in which they died. To do so would be to invite discomforting conclusions about Russia’s involvement in the ongoing fighting in Europe, and compel the West to seek retribution against Moscow – a prospect that remains too terrible to contemplate.
The impulse to pursue reconciliation even amid egregious violations of standard international norms of conduct is one that is often reflected across the spectrum of American diplomats.
Over the weekend, the Islamic Republic of Iran launched a guided, surface-to-surface ballistic missile. It was a test of the nation’s first weapons platform capable of delivering a deadly payload to Israel. The test is a reflection of the contempt with which Tehran holds their counterparts in the P5+1, who only recently concluded negotiating a sweeping nuclear accord with the Islamist government. It was, however, also a likely violation of a series of international agreements including a United Nations Security Council resolution, according to an Obama administration official who spoke with CNN on Monday.
“Based on information the administration has so far, the test appears to be in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, which stipulates that Iran cannot engage in any activities related to ballistic missiles,” CNN reported. Don’t tell that to the State Department.
Foggy Bottom Spokesman John Kirby insisted that the U.S. would take “appropriate action” if Iran’s tests are found to have violated UNSC resolutions, although he refused to elaborate on what those actions might be and when State’s assessment might be made. He did, however, spend an inordinate amount of time insisting that Iran’s test did not violate the terms of the freshly-inked nuclear accord. Kirby and the State Department have contended that the test does not violate the terms of the deal which stipulate that Iran cannot perform research and testing on ballistic missiles designed to deliver nuclear weapons. However, as the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo observed, Secretary of State John Kerry has in the past indicated that the violation of this prohibition, ratified in UNSC Resolution 2231 which was adopted but not fully implemented on July 20, would be a grave violation of the trust of the international community.
“Since the Security Council has called upon Iran not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology, any such activity would be inconsistent with the UNSCR and a serious matter for the Security Council to review,” Kerry wrote in a letter to Senator Marco Rubio.
Where is the outrage over this supposedly “serious matter?” The focus of the diplomatic community has not been in expressing frustration with Iran and laying the groundwork for consequences, but in shielding the Islamic Republic and the nuclear deal to which it is party from criticism.
For America’s diplomatic establishment the process has become an end in itself. COMMENTARY’s Michael Rubin astutely diagnosed this condition in July as he watched the West endlessly sweetening the pot for Iran and ignoring deadline after deadline in the effort to secure a deal. As violence again spirals out of control in the Middle East’s perennial hotspot and Western diplomats necessarily contemplate the reinvigoration of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, his admonition of the dominant culture in diplomatic circles is relevant today:
As veteran peace-processor Dennis Ross wrote in The Missing Peace, “From the beginning, [Secretary of State James] Baker had one proviso for Middle East policy: he didn’t want to be ‘flying around the region the way [Reagan-era Secretary of State George] Schultz did.” Ross added, “He would not go to the Middle East unless there was a chance of real progress — a point he made to every Middle Eastern leader who came to Washington in the spring of 1989.”
Rubin noted that Baker did not take his own advice. Nor did his successors who served in the role of chief diplomat. The message that this manner of diplomatic conduct sends is that almost any bad behavior from rogue actors will be tolerated so long as the perpetrators can be corralled into grandly appointed hall, ensconced around a circular table, and made to engage in unending talks for their own sake.
American diplomacy can be conducted in a fashion that preserves rather than sacrifices U.S. moral standing. When opprobrium is due, it does not serve American interests to withhold it. The diplomatic process should be a means to an end, and its termination should those ends no longer be achievable must not come to be seen as a failure in itself. Otherwise, America’s diplomats are little more than a bunch of Maurice Levys preserving their careers and sharing in the responsibility for the horrors their clients will mete out.
