Thursday, May 5, 2016

Diplomacy is footnote-free ...


Via Ambassador Jack Matlock, Jr. on Facebook; from One China, Two Freemans


image from
Excerpt: 
Diplomacy is footnote-free, applied scholarship that seeks truth from foreign facts and tries to use this to influence particular foreigners. It embraces the lore of international interactions but does not seek to state broad hypotheses about their nature. It is hostile to deductive reasoning from theory. It seeks satisfaction in the anonymous achievement of change rather than in the credential-building of the publish-or-perish academic potlatch.
The aim of diplomacy is neither to theorize about nor to explain foreign behavior in general but to anticipate, manage, adjust, or cope with particular instances of it. ...

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