ZERO DIPLOMACY: When Nuclear Brinkmanship Is The Fruit of Helicopter Paternalism
If you don't like the US government is being run by sanctionist 'Soup Nazis', you can blame the obliterating agency of helicopter parenting for currently inept autocrats filtering into public service.
There are a lot of tools in the multilateral tool kit of International relations. Paced policy development & statecraft, diplomacy and patient, aptly timed communication. None of those things seem present in the youngest leaders, who feel entitled to be rewarded for any kind of action, regardless if it demolishes decades of positive relations with our closest allies.
We would ordinarily leave well enough alone, except, that it’s failing America. While helicopter policy is a ridiculous way to run international relations between nation states, it does explain so much of what has happened. It’s also a runious way to run a country filled with working functioning adults, who won’t be infantilized by an up-and-coming generation of Uber Statists. You may recognize them. They cannot handle questions. Their functional negotiations & communications skillsets are weak. Their leadership manner is to cut people off, unless they do what they are told.
The signatures of it are written all over our current administrative leadership. Technical autocrats don’t believe in any kind of self-sufficiency or self-determination. They automate the responses or they do nothing. Sanctions for questioners. The have learned that to demean the truth is how you get through the day. To them meanings to words are subjective business. It’s the stuff of semi-functional psychosis for the rest of us. Who manufactures this as a default setting? A helicopter autocrat.
To completely sever relationships from both resources and basic communication are all hallmarks of helicopter parenting. It has happened regardless of what it does to the kids or severed family & community. Controlling settings, outcomes and perceptions of what “failure” is seems to be the model of the current strength contest between ‘what is misinformation’ and ‘actually censorship’. Over 7 years of Obama autocracy, demeaning privacy and American online security in exchange for the impossible goal of making America live in a free-range prison panopticon fed this.
This is contrary to living in a reality where powers gaslight consent matters to govern private information or anything else you value. They pretended you didn’t say anything on your own behalf -after soliciting you for it. They might also mob you for *not* giving a glowing 5-Star response. To add insult to injury, these young people were driven online, insulted strenuously for wanting more privacy and them blamed for endorsing the enivronments built to overpower natural psychological boundaries. American technocratic leadership has made all kinds of non-meaningful excuses with a big menacing smile, to demonstrate how being deaf and disingenuous to people’s legitimate grievances, to invasion and to personal loss, makes them ‘in control of the situation’. It made them money. It made US society sick.
Well, now the kids get to decide what reality they’re living in!
The kids really took these hack and slash approaches to relationships to heart. The whole world is a cruel and unsatisfying place now because Gen Z cannot cleanly browbeat their way into relations with North Korea or ghost their way out of relations with Afghanistan. Discuss oil trade with Nigeria? Nah, let’s just cancel them. They’ve been used by the Chinese, who set their watches to the song of struggle shaming revolution on TikTok & Pinduodo, adopted by America’s current usefully idiotic generation. These human beings will have to slow down and acquire a diplomacy skillset or this nation is going to be mobbed by a variety of powers who were *not* our enemy, but now cannot be America’s friend if they want to stay on the map of “functional governments”.
Grievances just aren’t grievances unless the kids get a greenlight check in with the mothership about “the current thing”. To bully by committee is how you generate support for absentee and erratic leadership, who walks away from decisions and actions, but is somehow legally still in charge. They did what you wanted. So who else can you blame? YOU CAN BLAME YOURSELF, BALONEY PONY!
Let’s see if that will get any results. No? Well, then maybe let’s do something else.
BRINKMANSHIP WHERE NONE EXISTED
There must be way more paths generated out of this than simply a choke point of mutually assured destruction and “who has access to the red button”.
So what does it mean when, Putin, a world leader who grew to power as soviet KGB, just happens to be the only leader Russia will present to the West? Whatever you think of ‘the oligarchy’, we cannot go recruit another leader for this Russian nuclear power. You get – the great nuclear silo of Putin. It is clearly the work of self-important amateurs if we are all expected to live with the effects of a very limited menu of : permanent regime change or sanctions, as the only way to deal with Russia.
It may be time to crack the diplomacy rule books, dusty from 1987. GenX leadership can exercise some self-restraint to not helicopter-out this time. Take the 5 extra minutes to demonstrate and then ask for a demonstration of diplomatic offer and consequence from your charges. Can we please just try tolerating a LOT of coordinated inter-generational diplomatic tribal knowledge from living members of Reagan and Gorbachev’s nuclear disarmament transition teams? It would make the difference between abandoning people completely with the nuclear problem, to then use exhaust energy covering up and making excuses for conflict. It’s best to actually re-work the problems in the relationship with careful attention, like, now.
No one will care about who looked worse if we are all dead - and that’s where we are headed if we don’t get trainers on the children of the Obama foreign policy set.