How to Win a Presidential Debate

As much as we want substance to triumph, Frank Luntz is correct: style points win debates, especially in a social media reels cum cable news “analysis” world.

The well-delivered quip lingers longer than the litany of facts, and the visual often trumps the verbal. It’s not just that the electorate tends to be drawn more to younger and more attractive candidates (like Mr. Obama, Mr. Clinton and John F. Kennedy) or to those with more commanding stage presence (which Mr. Reagan had over Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, and George H.W. Bush had over Michael Dukakis). While the 2016 and 2020 debates featuring Mr. Trump certainly upended our collective expectations about what exactly is presidential, listening to the voters describe each debate and their gut impressions of the candidates is more instructive about the eventual election winner than getting swept up in spin and punditry.

Ideas of substantive points made, facts checked, and parries foiled will dominate. They are part of the game.

Rhetorical styles will clash—between the direct, instinctual Trump and the prepared (for a lifetime) politician president.

But Luntz argues that he who can “ crystallize the stakes of the race and the choice in November with a single memorable line” wins. (At least the debate, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?

Did COP26 Work?

If you look at the recent global climate change Glasgow conference through the lens of negotiation, a great deal of work produced a measurable outcome. John Kerry tried to sell this line. Ian Bremmer agrees (mostly) that COP26 represents a corner turned where the world begins to take some collective action on greenhouse gasses.

But when looking at the science of warming global temperatures, industrial output, and the latest models, COP26 seems weak and inadequate.

Consider this fresh take by writer Nathaniel Rich, who sees that summits and big negotiations with world leaders aren’t where the action happens.

The daily news report is solid. We get a fairly good sense of what’s happening. I think there’s less attention drawn to the fact that these meetings, just like every other climate conference that’s preceded it over the last 30-some years, are more or less symbolic. They’re covered often in the press as if it’s the negotiation of armistice or an arms agreement when in fact they’re much closer to diplomatic meetings between heads of state to express shared principles to say that we believe in human rights, say.

Interview with Brooke Gladstone, On the Media

Also, sees a change in messaging from activists–who tend to be young and represent an entirely new demographic. They take a “moral approach” that is more personal and honest, according to Rich.  He notes, “They don’t really bother to get into those bad faith debates and they move straight past that into, “I am being harmed, you have failed.” It’s a different register, it’s angry, it’s personal, it’s emotional.” And even just in the time from Obama to Biden, it seems to be working.

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On the 40 Vote Filibuster Idea

Should we kill the filibuster? Or does it just need a reform?

This arcane yet powerful U.S. Senate parliamentary rule has been at issue with the Democrat’s slim governing majority the deciding factor on whether major infrastructure or other policies get passed into law.

The Senate cloture rule requires 60 votes to close the debate and move into voting. It’s a high bar–and the point of contention. Further, Molly Reynolds writes:

Rather, its emergence was made possible in 1806 when the Senate—at the advice of Vice President Aaron Burr—removed from its rules a provision (formally known as the previous question motion) allowing a simple majority to force a vote on the underlying question being debated. This decision was not a strategic or political one—it was a simple housekeeping matter, as the Senate was using the motion infrequently and had other motions available to it that did the same thing.

(Thanks, again, Burr.)

What to make of Senator Manchin’s embrace of Norm Ornstein’s idea? Ezra Klein explains:

It’s possible to imagine a set of reforms that would restore something more like the filibuster of yore and rebuild the deliberative capacities of the Senate. This would begin with a variation on the congressional scholar Norm Ornstein’s idea to shift the burden of the filibuster: Instead of demanding 60 votes to end debate, require 40 (or 41) to continue it.

That would return the filibuster to something more like we imagine it to be: Impassioned minorities could hold the floor with theatrical speeches, shining public attention on their arguments, but the majority could end debate if the minority relented. To sustain this kind of filibuster would be grueling, which is as it should be. The filibuster is an extraordinary measure, and it should require extraordinary commitment to deploy.

The majority, for its part, would have to carefully weigh the consequences of proceeding with partisan legislation: They would gamble weeks or months of Senate time if they chose to face down a filibuster, with no guarantee of passage on the other end. A reform like this would demand more from both the majority and the minority and ignite the kinds of lengthy, public debates that the Senate was once known for.

Former Sen Tom Harkin has an idea: amend Rule 22 to create a diminishing filibuster that would protect minority power to block a vote but still require compromise. After each motion, the number of required votes to invoke cloture would decrease–thus encouraging further negotiation and taking more time.

Other reform options exist. But a functional and deliberative Senate doesn’t just yet.

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A New Super Security Council to Run the World?

Like many other international institutions the Security Council is outdated and needs a reboot. The discussion on what the composition and form of this new body to manage war and peace has been exhausting and going on for a long time.

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The idea of more regular major-power coordination got a boost last March 2021 from two influential commentators. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan advanced the idea of a newly institutionalized “concert”:

The best vehicle for promoting stability in the twenty-first century is a global concert of major powers. As the history of the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe demonstrated—its members were the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria—a steering group of leading countries can curb the geopolitical and ideological competition that usually accompanies multipolarity.

Haass and Kupchan believe the Security Council itself is not the right vehicle for this new concert diplomacy and instead propose a new grouping:

A global concert would have six members: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States. Democracies and nondemocracies would have equal standing, and inclusion would be a function of power and influence, not values or regime type. The concert’s members would collectively represent roughly 70 percent of both global GDP and global military spending. Including these six heavyweights in the concert’s ranks would give it geopolitical clout while preventing it from becoming an unwieldy talk shop.

Arguments against the idea should be considered, including why this approach (called “plurilateralism”) won’t likely work and however appealing it may be, draws on Europe’s 19th century past instead of crafting something that could work down the road.

Trends Undermining Global Cooperation

In his usual strategic approach to writing, Thomas Edsall explains in the NYT that the reality behind nationalism, hyper-partisanship, and ethno-politics stem from larger forces, not just Trump or those who appear to mirror his success surfing “the ubiquity of loss” across workers and groups on the outs.

In a world building walls of steel and tariffs, does cooperation work? Edsall quotes MIT scholar Daren Acemoglu on the urgent need for international organizations:

It is imperative that we build better international/supranational institutions, but I do not see us going in that direction. On the contrary, I think whatever institutions we have (which are highly dysfunctional, including the WHO) are getting weaker and more captured.

Citing Jack Goldstone at George Mason University, we can see how, ultimately, international cooperation works best as a solution, but

… unfortunately, global governance has been a great disappointment. Russia has basically pissed on it; Trump repudiated it, and China sought to benefit from it by seeking to call the shots in old and new multinational organizations in which it has sought a leading role.

Further, Daniel Etsy of Yale explains how these forces decreases the chances for global cooperation:

The broad-based rise of tribalism/nationalism sharpens “us” versus “them” thinking and makes cooperative responses to any realm of international policymaking — pandemic response, climate change, and trade — more challenging.

He ends with Goldstone’s optimism for Joe Biden’s agenda (and a warning if it fails) as well as a pessimistic take from Jeffrey Sachs as “the U.S. is not a constructive problem-solving actor in this drama”.

The piece is worth a read to see all the arguments in full display. (Thankfully, Edsall is a “show your work” kind of writer, which is greatly preferable to the columnists who parenthetically cite their ideas but with less rigor and importance.)

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Walter LaFeber, Diplomatic Historian, 1934-2021

We should all be so lucky to know a rock star teacher. At Cornel, Professor Walter LaFeber fit the bill.

Influenced by the Wisconsin School of diplomatic history, he saw the university as a place, first and foremost, of “rational discourse.” He became a “giant in the field” and reoriented historical approaches to foreign policy around the idea of relationships to power.

In his role as a notable diplomatic historian and foreign policy scholar, LaFeber used his academic career to display how “he had imbibed the Wisconsin lessons of empiricism, criticism, and a suspicion of power” throughout his work.

In a thoughtful obit, Sam Roberts writes:

Professor LaFeber (pronounced la-FEE-ber) did not like to label himself or others, but he was widely considered to be a “moderate revisionist.” He was a disciple of the so-called Wisconsin School of diplomatic history inspired by William Appleman Williams, which challenged conventional accounts of American exceptionalism by suggesting that United States foreign policy was also motivated by imperialism.

Professor LaFeber valued the roles that institutions played in shaping history, but he never underestimated the influence of individuals. He enlivened his books and lectures by fleshing out characters from Aaron Burr and John Quincy Adams to George W. Bush and even Michael Jordan. His book “Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism” (1999) was about basketball as a metaphor for globalization.

 

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Remembering George Shultz

Who was this late Republican SecState who engaged thoughtfully in the world? He seems out of place–even though he occupied a completely different political time and space. Perhaps Henry Kissinger, another notable holder of the top diplomatic office, said it best:

George left us at a moment when our national arguments are too often vindicated by passion rather than reason, by the debasement of the adversary rather than the uplifting of purposes. He also believed that if you were blessed with great gifts, you had a responsibility to apply yourself, and if you cared about your country, you had a duty to defend and improve it. He was skilled in presenting his convictions, but above all practiced the art of making controversy superfluous by encouraging mutual respect. Trust, George used to say, is the coin of the realm.

George’s outstanding attribute was his combination of wisdom and humility.

Wall Street Journal, 2.10.21

According to Paul Wolfowitz, Shultz demonstrated that strategy was essential and relished in thinking about the big picture. He demonstrated reflection in confronting the “tension between opposites” between action/inaction. Likewise, Shultz recognized that diplomacy is like “gardening than architecture or engineering” so his approach: “keep the weeds out and apply fertilizer.”

Two Stanford colleagues observed that above all, Shultz saw “trust as the coin of the realm”

In Shultz’s view, mu­tual trust was nec­es­sary to achiev­ing progress in all walks of life. Be­tween a gov­ern­ment and its di­verse cit­i­zens, it was es­sen­tial: “Above all, gov­ern­ing di­ver­sity re­quires trust among all. With­out trust, reg­u­la­tions to im­pose stan­dards of con­duct pro­lif­er­ate . . . bring­ing more and more lit­i­ga­tion, which only keeps di­verse peo­ple apart and ob­structs the goal of E pluribus unum.”

The eminent Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis saw Shultz “as a stabilizer” who keeps the great ships on its course.

In his own word, Shultz will inspire future diplomats and public servants—as he reportedly has done for the current SecState Anthony Blincken. Consider this which Ahuktz wrote with other former cabinet officials:

Nu­clear weapons to­day present tremen­dous dan­gers, but also an his­toric op­por­tu­nity. . . . Re­asser­tion of the vi­sion of a world free of nu­clear weapons and prac­ti­cal mea­sures to­ward achiev­ing that goal would be, and would be per­ceived as, a bold ini­tia­tive con­sis­tent with Amer­i­ca’s moral her­itage. The ef­fort could have a pro­foundly pos­i­tive im­pact on the se­cu­rity of fu­ture gen­er­a­tions. With­out the bold vi­sion, the ac­tions will not be per­ceived as fair or ur­gent. With­out the ac­tions, the vi­sion will not be per­ceived as re­al­is­tic or pos­si­ble.

“A World Free of Nu­clear Weapons,” writ­ten with William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, Jan. 4, 2007:

Did Pandemic Diplomacy Work?

How did it work? Can diplomacy operate just as effectively on Zoom screens and negotiating virtual documents as in person?

One number to consider is the number of major global agreements negotiated in 2020: ZERO.

As Pierre Vimont writes in Carnegie Europe, international organizations haven’t been able to get a lot done–like many of the rest of us last year.

Common opinion has it that the coronavirus has presided over a global geopolitical deterioration. It may not have been a game changer, but the virus certainly accelerated the ongoing, negative trend toward a more polarized and fragmented world.

At the multilateral level, respectable efforts to promote peace have met with considerable impediments. The UN secretary general’s call for a global humanitarian ceasefire at the start of the pandemic fell on deaf ears. Diplomatic attempts at channeling this political message through a UN Security Council resolution took three months to conclude positively; in previous virus crises, the same diplomatic process was achieved in less than a week. In the same vein, efforts have so far failed to convene a virtual summit of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council to discuss the coronavirus fallout.

For anyone working from home and facing yourself on the Zoom screen with daily meetings, this isn’t a surprise. Last April, things were already getting off to a rough start, as noted here:

At the United Nations Security Council, the apex of global diplomacy, one sitting ambassador says the problems are already piling up. “It took three weeks to get a Security Council meeting on coronavirus. If it hadn’t been online it could have happened much, much earlier,” Estonian Ambassador Sven Jürgenson told POLITICO.

When it comes to high-stakes diplomacy, “WhatsApp chats can’t replace the corridor diplomacy for getting consensus,” Jürgenson said.

Are there bright spots? As Katie Shonk writes in the Harvard Program on Negotiation, a few appear, namely “more time to talk,” “more connections at the local level,” and “more variety in negotiation format”.

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How did the pandemic change global diplomacy? Can diplomats discuss and female agreements when they can’t do it face-to-face?

“Weaponizing” Dialogue

When did reportage on politics adopt a sports analogy? Who knows, but we can see a visage of this approach at least 50 years ago:

Writing in 1968, Milton Rokeach, the social psychologist, articulated what would become a perennial complaint. “The kinds of data obtained by public-opinion research and disseminated in the mass media seem designed more to entertain than to inform,” he wrote. “The quality of the information conveyed seems not much different from that conveyed in the sports pages or, better yet, the daily racing form.” The press, especially during election years, frequently failed to exercise “journalistic conscience”; it had internalized a “racehorse philosophy.”

John Herrman, New York Times Magazine, 3/14/17

The Trump era personifies trends that have been steadily rising. Perhaps it has reached its apotheosis in “weaponizing” political dialogue. What does that mean for politicians, journalists, and citizens?

“Weaponization” works as a throwing up of the hands, and as a suggestion — or an admission, or a strategic claim — that the discourse has failed us. Or, more accurately, it suggests that the discourse has become something dangerous: no mere fight but a terminal conflict without decorum or limits. The language of sports had a maddening tendency to flatten and trivialize the serious consequences of politics, creating constant suspense but obscuring life-or-death stakes. Militarized language moves in a different direction: It intensifies the news it’s describing while simultaneously obscuring actual threats.

“Weaponization” is used to describe both rhetoric that might incite violence and criticism of violent rhetoric. It is lodged against the state, with its legal monopoly on violence, but also, incoherently, against those who challenge the state. It is a shortcut to false equivalence, and it manufactures excuses for those with a vested interest in drawing blood themselves.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, document markup-style

Celebrate the holidays in the best way that diplomats (and lawyers) know how: using document markup-style to get it right (on the 21st revision).

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Celebrate the holidays in the best way that diplomats (and lawyers, too) know how: using document markup-style to get it right, likely on the 21st revision.

Cheers!