“The power of moral suasion is minimal. Talk is cheap, and everyone knows it.”
Saturday, August 16, 2008
President Bush is fond of telling other countries – Russia, for example, in the context of its invasion of Georgia sovereign territory – that they should or shouldn’t do this or that, often intimating that he is personally offended by their behavior.
In deference to President Bush who is a particularly poor speaker, his counterparts through history and contemporaries in other countries may be more eloquent, but no more effective. The simple rule, if you’ll pardon the dangling preposition, is that countries will do what they can away with. The power of moral suasion is minimal. Talk is cheap, and everyone knows it.
Who cares what President Bush, or we or world opinion thinks? Does anyone believe for a second that Prime Minister Putin gives a you-know-what about how we react, that he can’t anticipate our rhetoric, and doesn’t discount the effect of our shock and alarm to zero?
Consider the following excerpts from President Bush’s comments on the subject which he delivered Wednesday, August 13, 2008…
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