From the normally sane Craig Crawford, defending Obama from Clinton’s charge that his willingness to meet with dictators in Syria, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and Cuba is “naive and irresponsible”:

“To voters who are growing weary of the Bush administration’s unrelenting belligerence on the international stage, Obama’s willingness to at least talk to others probably sounds more promising than Clinton’s apparent preference for maintaining a war footing against potential enemies.”

What? Team Clinton will insist they’re willing to meet with these guys, just not with the President and without conditions. And are we actually characterizing a refusal to hold face-to-face summits with Ahmedinjiad & Co. as “war footing”?

I’d ask those who are so critical of our current policies if is there any national leader, past or present, who they believe the U.S. should not have conducted diplomacy with and for whom diplomatic isolation was the appropriate response to?

The Taliban? Osama bin Laden? (not a national leader, I know, unless you want to argue that al-Qaeda eventually became a state within a state in Afghanistan, and/or currently in Pakistan’s tribal areas) The Ayatollah Khomeni? Hitler? Mussolini? Pol Pot?

If the answer is “yes” to any of these, then we’ve established that diplomatic isolation of a hostile state is an appropriate response in some circumstances; we just disagree on which circumstances. (Actually, we’re not even talking total diplomatic isolation, as we have embassies in Damascus, Havana, and Caracas. We just don’t have leader-to-leader meetings with those countries.).I think these face-to-face meetings are usually pointless, and usually end up giving the other side more in propaganda value than we get in return. We legitimize their regimes and we raise them to our level as equals. If any of these regimes were really willing to talk and make concessions ( i.e., Khaddafi) then I’d be all for summits..

Sure, Obama says he would have no “cowboy diplomacy”…