Gunboat Diplomacy!

It's the most efficient kind of diplomacy, after all. Lots quicker than dressing up in striped pans and handing around little bits of chocolate wrapped in gold foil during embassy receptions while that annoying string music they always play in movies during fancy shmancy black tie receptions plays in the background (you know the music... dah dah dah dah DAH! Dah dah... dah dah...)

(Irrelevant tangent: this came up in a Google search for "those songs they always play in movies".)

Look, I'm just some moron with a moronblog, not someone who's opinion actually matters. I don't have the jorb of coming up with a good, solid, workable strategery to deal with that evil little troll in Tehran who is busily trying to get nukes and is crazy enough to use them if he ever got his evil little claws on them. I do know that one good thing, at least, has come out of the Iraq mess.

People know that the current Administration is crazy enough to actually go to war with anyone who pisses them off sufficiently.

They aren't, of course, not really. (Shhhh. Keep that little tidbit to yourself.) But speaking softly and carrying the big stick only works if people think you really might take the big stick and start getting all LAPD on a country. People know the difference between a promise and an empty threat. If Clinton or Carter told someone "behave or I'll bomb your country", no one took them seriously, and for good reason. But when, say, Ray-Gun spit in the eye of the Evil Empire and told them that the United States of gosh-darn America was no longer taking no guff from nobody, people listened, because the crazy senile old whackadoo was really seriously gonna push the button and laugh while he did it.

Is this the ideal way to conduct international intercourse? No, of course not. But if, for example, Denmark began a nuclear program, we could talk to them, reason with them, buy furniture and cellphones from them. You can reason with the sane. The insane sometimes will listen only to a tazer.