Dead Irish Writers

Aaron Sorkin’s 7-season masterwork "The West Wing" can still teach us important lessons, even three years after it was retired by NBC. In season 3’s episode Dead Irish Writers, the British Ambassador, Lord John Marbury, pleads with the White House to deny Brendan McGann, the Sinn Fein representative, the right to come to the US and meet with the President. The argument is that Sinn Fein, as a wing of the IRA, is a discredited, outlawed terrorist organization, and shouldn’t be given the platform they seek. Toby Ziegler, President Bartlet’s Director of Communications, reasons that Marbury has it wrong, and that it is America’s responsibility to help the UK with an intractable problem they can’t solve themselves.

TOBY

So wouldn't you say we were doing you a favor?

MARBURY

By intervening?

TOBY

That’s the act of a friend. What is left to do but talk? What could be better
for that wounded place than sitting down and talking? What is better than sitting
down and talking?

MARBURY

Not to talk to Brendan McGann.

TOBY

We can't choose who.

MARBURY

Of course, you can't.

TOBY

Then what can we do but talk to him?

MARBURY

Nothing. You must talk to him.

TOBY

What?

MARBURY

Toby, despite appearances, I do have lucid moments, and I know that England is...
running out of turns in this particular... but as, uh, Ambassador to Her Majesty's
Government, I must tell you that...

TOBY

Brendan McGann cannot come to the White House.

MARBURY

Yes.

TOBY

[beat] Understood, Mr. Ambassador.

That fictional exchange is instructive for everyone watching the news today. I’m not talking about Her Majesty’s government and the Troubles in Ireland. I’m talking about the US and Iran, the US and Venezuela, and the US and North Korea. One of the loudest, and frankly most ignorant knocks against then candidate Obama during the campaign was the insistence that his pledge to negotiate with American enemies was somehow treasonous or wrong or a sign of weakness. That was the catastrophic folly of a failed presidency still being adhered to by a cadre of people who simply don’t have the foggiest idea what they’re talking about.

The only way to keep international relations from devolving into multilateral war and universal mistrust is to talk to one another. In fact, there’s a term for this behavior. We call it “diplomacy”. It’s understandable that Americans are unfamiliar with the concept, since it hasn’t been practiced with any seriousness since the turn of the millennium. The unwillingness to engage in serious diplomacy has succeeded in creating worldwide suspicion and enmity toward the United States.

This stops with the Obama Administraion. We will never have a hope of normalizing relations with anyone if we’re not even willing to talk about our areas of philosophical disagreement. The US and Venezuela have long standing economic and cultural ties, and you know what? Hugo Chavez doesn’t want to be our enemy so much as he simply wants to be heard and treated like a head of state, which he is, like it or not. We don’t get to choose who we talk to. Same with Iran. Ahmedinejad (Maureen Dowd calls him I’m a Dinner Jacket) might be an utterly obnoxious, 3 face cards short of a full deck, dangerous impediment to peace in the Middle East who wants Israel blown off the map (and who’s already hosted a symposium on why the Holocaust wasn’t so bad, I know), but having someone keeping lines of communications open with Iran might well be the only thing standing between us and the next major world crisis. If nobody else will talk to them, then we have to be the grownups and do it. Even if we’ve been behaving like petulant, entitled, spoiled children in the recent past, it’s never too late to do the right thing.

That’s the lesson to be drawn from the West Wing, from the recent Americas summit in Trinidad, and from the new thinking in Washington. Republicans like Newt Gingrich, who should know better, and Senator John Ensign of Nevada, who can’t be assumed to have that much sense, don’t understand the bigger picture. It’s our responsibility to be mature and admit that sometimes, we make mistakes too. 2000 to 2008 was a long, almost unending serious of errors and missteps. Jack Cafferty of CNN is off base in saying we’re rushing things. We’re not moving too fast. Why delay? The sooner we open a dialog, not just with Iran and Venezuela, but also with Cuba and anyone else who will talk to us again since Shrub’s departure, the sooner we can show the world that there’s an intelligent, reasonable statesman in the White House again, and it’s ok to take the United States seriously as a superpower once more.