Shafer has also jumped the shark, and journeyed a bridge too far. He says, “The leaked cables make it impossible for Hillary Clinton to continue as secretary of state.” Impossible. Her heinous crime: She supposedly encouraged our diplomats to spy on foreign diplomats abroad.
Shafer huffs and puffs and tries to blow Hillary’s house down:
"She's become the issue. She'll never be an effective negotiator with diplomats who refuse to forgive her exuberances, and even foreign diplomats who do forgive her will still regard her as the symbol of an overreaching United States. Diplomacy is about face, and the only way for other nations to save face will be to give them Clinton's scalp."This is laughable on its, um, face.
First of all, our diplomats don’t drive around in Aston Martins and introduce themselves as “Bond, James Bond.” They don’t have to. We employ real spies for the requisite skullduggery. American diplomatic officers (including ambassadors) have always collected “soft intelligence,” mainly through passive observation and open sources. That’s no secret, and it’s hardly an American phenomenon. Every Foreign Service does it. Anything beyond routine information gathering falls into the purview of our dedicated intelligence agencies, like the CIA.
Secondly, in the 21st century, “face” is the least of what diplomacy is about. Diplomacy, as David Frost cleverly put it, is the “art of letting somebody else have your way.” Or as Zhou Enlai said more accurately, “All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.” Whatever Madam Secretary Clinton did, I’m certain it was legal and attuned to the world as it is, not as Shafer naively imagines it to be.
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