Soft Power

Via Garance Franke-Ruta, a fitting rejoinder to Mahmoud Ahmadenijad:

Meanwhile, Roger Cohen turned sensible all of a sudden:
"nonproliferation must prevail. It has prevailed in the past — in South Africa, Libya, South America. It must be made to work in Iran." Quite so (NB: in the business "nonproliferation" means diplomacy as opposed to "counterproliferation" which means blowing things up) and we should keep in mind that these real issues on the US-Iranian diplomatic agenda have, at the end of the day, nothing to do with Ahmadenijad's cartoonish antics.

Comments

Any chance we can get "deproliferation" into the business speak? The idea is one that already exists, and that I suspect you might support: encouraging nonproliferation in non-nuclear powers by taking concrete steps to reducing the capacities of existing nuclear powers. Shift the momentum of proliferation to the opposite direction rather than trying to maintain a freeze (which can be severely undermined by a single country going nuclear) on the status quo.

Posted by Khaled | October 1, 2007 12:27 PM

Aaaaand the video's yanked.

No worries, you can still watch it on Daily Motion.

Posted by rachel | October 1, 2007 12:35 PM

'Any chance we can get "deproliferation" into the business speak? '

South Africa deproliferated. It is possible to go back.

It is hard to do it globally. Nuclear weapons are probably the only thing that stopped WWIII from happening. It is pleasant to believe we're beyond that sort of thing, and won't fight world wars anymore, but I don't know if it is realistic.

Posted by Njorl | October 1, 2007 12:39 PM

Saw the Samberg/Ahmadinejad video Saturday night. Frankly, about a minute into it I really couldn't wait for it to be over with. In contrast to earlier Samberg efforts I just didn't think it was funny.

Posted by Curt M | October 1, 2007 1:01 PM

You have a nice ability to take an SNL piece that was posted within a few minutes at FARK and make it all seem so snooty, boring, and irrelevant by posting it "via The Garance."

Posted by phlegm | October 1, 2007 1:16 PM