Only After You Clean Your Room Can We Discuss The Possibility Of Negotiating Your Getting The Car Keys

I'm definitely with Matthew on this one. It is completely, well, insane that the Clinton campaign appears to have adopted the Bush administration theory to foreign policy which says, roughly, that direct negotiations with the US are a reward in and of themselves. The immediate consequence of this is that the standard Bush administration line is approximately:

1) We want country X to do action Y (North Korea to stop purifying uranium, Iran to stop helping the Shiite militias in Iraq, etc.)

2) We probably have something (money, oil, promise not to invade their country) that country X would like from us (call it action Z.)

3) Therefore, once country X does action Y, we can all sit down at the table and begin a nice good-faith negotiation about whether or not we will do action Z.

In other words, it used to be that the point of negotiations is that you sit down and everyone says what they want, what they're willing to give up, and you see if there's some combination that is acceptable to everyone. Under the Bush administration, however, the negotations are their own reward, rather than the US actually taking any real actions, and so we refuse to take part in any negotiations until the country in question completes the action that we are negotiating about.

This is kind of stupid. Really stupid, in fact. And it pisses me off into about the fifth dimension that Clinton apparently accepts it as the proper way of going about diplomacy. Or else, she is saying that merely to be able to accuse Obama of being willing to kowtow to dictators, which is worse.