The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

I agree with Ben Katcher…

“Empathy might seem like a foreign concept to policy practitioners used to thinking in terms of the harsh realities of an anarchic international system characterized by realpolitick, the pursuit of self-interest, and ruthless competition. However, the importance of empathy, properly understood as “the capacity to recognize or understand another’s state of mind or emotion,” flows logically from the centrality of self-interest to power politics.

Executing an empathetic foreign policy means both appreciating other countries’ perspectives and understanding how our words and deeds affect their behaviors. In other words, empathy must be part of both our foreign policy development and our approach.

The Bush administration’s greatest failure to empathize in the Turkish context was its inability to appreciate that even a successful overthrow of the Baathist regime in Iraq was likely to result in greater autonomy for Iraqi Kurds and instability along Turkey’s southeastern border. It was this fact, rather than anti-Americanism or weak knees, that was the decisive factor in the Turkish parliament’s decision on March 1, 2003 to prohibit U.S. forces from using its territory to open a northern front against Saddam.”

..& am encouraged by this:

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