The reasons for President Obama’s cautioning of the parties to Mideast conflict and American politicians to refrain from “loose talk of war” ought to be intuitively obvious, but unfortunately most people have not taken university level courses in foreign policy or international relations and this isn’t the kind of subject the average person will really understand in the absence of serious study. The average person has never subscribed to media like Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, or International Security (I used to subscribe to all three, which are respectively the left, middle, and right on international relations [I.R.], but any important opinions of any perspective in I.R. winds up making the rounds of all three of those magazines in due course anyway, so now I only read Foreign Policy which is published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace).
A national leader who wants to negotiate differences with an adversary nation cannot box the adversary into a corner where its leaders will appear to be humiliated or even bullied. Nobody is going to risk losing face in international relations unless overwhelming destructive force is imminent. Just look at the Japanese response to two Atomic bombings: even then the Japanese still needed the concession from the United States that their emperor would technically retain his throne even though he’d be stripped of all real power.
Look at the issue of Iranian nuclear power development from the point of view of the hardliners who run the national political structure in that country. They likely view themselves as surrounded by hostile American forces — just as Saddam Hussein probably felt before the invasion of Iraq.
If you really want to negotiate as opposed to go to war to achieve your foreign policy aims, most of your negotiating will be out of the public spotlight. There is less chance of risking public loss of face by any side in negotiations which is a non-starter because of the public perception in the nation that appears to have backed down. Publicly humiliating a reformist leader can have disastrous effects as evidenced by United States treatment of relations with the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev. His attempts to reform the Stalinist system collapsed when he appeared weak when dealing with the United States and he was thrown out of office by far more intransigent hard liners. The Cold War was thus exacerbated and prolonged far longer than necessary.
Just days ago, the world woke up to the announcement of a new accord resulting from secret negotiations in North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons program. Nobody was humiliated and it has achieved American foreign policy goals without bloodshed. Had there been “loose talk of war” with North Korea while these negotiations were going on, the negotiations would probably not have been successful, let alone that they might have been abruptly and prematurely broken off.
