I give up

A view of non-Euclidean R'yleh, via hppodcraft.

Binyamin Netanyahu was unable to schedule a meeting with President Obama, so he asked famed foreign policy expert (and self-described "Israeli parent") David Brooks to step in:

Over the past centuries, Western diplomats have continually projected pragmatism onto their ideological opponents. They have often assumed that our enemies are driven by the same sort of national interest calculations that motivate most regimes.

Spoiler alert: He's talking about the last 1.15 centuries, specifically, since the time when "Western" first meant "British and French and whoever they happen to be allied with at the moment", and it's kind of true up to here. They have indeed projected pragmatism, sort of "continually", on the people they're negotiating with, because that's the tool diplomats have; the assumption that other governments take national interest into pragmatic consideration is a working assumption without which modern diplomacy can't proceed.

Sometimes it worked (see among others Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, People's Republic of China), sometimes it didn't. Not making the assumption has never brought anything but war. Of course you still have a few governments like that of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where the assumed national interest is really just a mask for a royal family interest, or other ways in which the situation can fail to be what you assume it to be (as in Israel, where the Likud government's apparent understanding of what the national interest is so destructive to the Israeli national interest that the country's intelligence veterans are now being forced to call it out publicly), but making the assumption nevertheless is the way to get things done. On the surface of the earth, no two lines are really parallel if you extend them far enough, but geometry works great for most purposes pretending that they are.

They assumed that the world leaders before 1914 would not be stupid enough to allow nationalist passion to plunge them into a World War

That's a novel account of the causes of World War I. Nationalist passion is definitely part of the normal account, but it ranks pretty low, and refers mostly to people like Gavrilo Princip who are not conventionally regarded as world leaders; the world leaders in the usual sense of the term were calculating like mad, but unhappily calculating wrong.

that Hitler would not be crazy enough to start a second one

Hi Hitler, thought you'd never show up! Drinks are in the kitchen.

that Islamic radicals could not really want to send their region back into the 12th century

Which Western diplomats were negotiating with which Islamic radical enemies who turned out to want to send their region into the 12th century? I'm guessing Afghan Taliban in 2001-02? Less negotiation and more shock 'n' awe would have accomplished what exactly? Or what? I think Brooksie really forgot what paragraph he was in here.

that Sunnis and Shiites would never let their sectarian feud turn into a cataclysmic confrontation in places like Iraq.

Yep, he totally forgot. Western diplomats were actually involved, too! The assumption of Western diplomats, or at least President Cheney, in 2003 about one place so like Iraq that it actually is Iraq was that President Hussein couldn't be negotiated with because he was so unpragmatic and insane. If they'd asked him he could have told them some stuff about Sunnis and Shi'ites that they might have found helpful. Even though he really was as evil as it gets. It was a country quite unlike Iraq, Libya, where that crazy liberal Bush administration decided that the dictator Muammar Qadhafi could be negotiated with in spite of his wickedness to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction and it, um, totally worked.

The Obama administration is making a similar projection today. It is betting that Iran can turn into a fundamentally normal regime, which can be counted upon to put G.D.P. over ideology and religion and do the pragmatic thing.

Do I really have to go through all this again? Given the bad faith and ignorance of those first two paragraphs? Given the recent documentary proof that Netanyahu has been informed by his own intelligence agency that his assertions about Iranian plans are false and he's as much of a liar as I've been saying since this blog began? And yet he continues to make them? I should act under the assumption that David Brooks's arguments on his subject are somehow worth taking seriously? Sorry, I just can't even.

(I will, however, repeat my usual assertion that nobody in the very complex Iranian political situation is anywhere near as interested in building a nuclear weapon as they are in getting rid of sanctions without appearing to have surrendered, and that a diplomatic accommodation between Iran and the US is the most important thing the Obama administration can accomplish in the Middle East. Keep it up, Mr. P!  Driftglass, unsurprisingly, had an even harder time than I did getting beyond the first two paragraphs, but he has a lot more to say about those. On the actual issues, with which Brooks is not really too familiar, see the fine recent piece by Trita Parsi.)