Diplomacy stops when a nation considers its most important beliefs and principals to have been stepped on by another country. Take the United States’ issue with Iran. One of the reasons Iran’s government and some of its people dislike us is because they believe that our western culture began to destroy age-old notions and values, causing wealthy women to dress in a more modern style and religion to lose its place as the center of the nation’s culture. The U.S. was blamed for the crumbling of Iran’s cultural principals causing relations between the two countries to diminish to the point where the U.S. does not even formally recognize the state.
There are also other times when diplomacy has been limited on the basis of protecting principals. After World War II the United States employed the policy of containment. Containment referred to communism and through this policy and the doctrines that stemmed from it the U.S. vowed to stop the spread of communism around the world. Due to the fact that the government was committed to stopping communism at all costs we, for the most part, left diplomacy at the door and picked up the guns. This was particularly evident in Vietnam, where we fought the communist north for years trying to “help” the people when in reality most of them supported the northern, communist leader, Ho Chi Minh. Communism went against many of the United State’s most basic values, so we decided that if we were right they had to be wrong and we therefore had to limit our diplomacy with nations that supported it.
I disagree that diplomacy stops when a state feels disrespected. Even when there are hostile feelings between two states diplomacy occurs both official and unofficial. In recent news I read about the practice in Iran of stoning people to death if they have a relationship outside of marriage. It is acceptable under Iranian law to bury a woman up to her neck and then throw rocks at her head until she dies an agonizing death. Recently in Iran a 38 year old widow was sentenced to death by stoning. When the Iranian government and religious leaders refused to help her, the widow’s children reached out to the world through the internet to share her story and beg for help. Instead of applying sanctions or threatening military action, the United States, along with many other nations of the world, applied diplomatic pressure. Several countries put Iran in the media spotlight as an example of a barbaric state that is centuries behind the rest of the world in terms of human rights and social justice. Iran responded to the pressure by canceling the woman’s execution date for the time being. Even though there are hostile relations between the U.S. and Iran at the moment, diplomatic relations still exist, whether it be attempts to influence or attempts to pressure Iranian policy.
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