Khouri’s op-ed in the Middle East Times cautions against seeing the US’/Britain’s/et cetera’s choices to engage governments like the al Asad regime in Syria or the Iranian theocracy as necessarily evidence of a shift in viewpoints. Isolation was not really getting the West anywhere it wanted to go, so reversing that policy isn’t necessarily a principled decision. It may merely be a pragmatic one. In Khouri’s analysis, we will get some idea of whether that is the case by observing the way these new dialogues are framed. Are talks with Syria just a test to see whether al Asad is ready to handle diplomacy, and might the United States be able to suspend talks at any time and blame Syria? In his words:
While this shift in American and British attitudes is positive, sensible and to be applauded, the lingering danger is that some in the United States and the West will offset their neo-rationalism with a resurgent Orientalism, i.e., they will say that “carrots and sticks” should be used to test the troublemakers and see if they are really able to have a meaningful political dialogue and eventually change their ways.
The unspoken subtext in such an attitude is that you have to deal with these countries and groups like you deal with a donkey you are trying to train – hit them when they misbehave, and feed them to entice them to follow your lead.
The “carrots-and-sticks” approach is only a mildly different version of the previous policy of threats, attacks, sanctions and regime change. It will fail, as the former policy failed, because it is based on the assumption that the policies and approach of the U.S.-led camp is legal, righteous and generous, and that this camp defines the rules that others in the world must abide by.