Like you, I read about (or maybe just skim over) Trump’s egregiously wacky jabs at convincing everyone he knows what he’s doing. One of the many things he knows nothing about is diplomacy, which demands a grasp of reality he does not have.
Pure coincidence that I just finished reading a history in which a world-changing diplomatic negotiation takes place, a phased-in diplomacy which I believe must be the exemplar for all such international conflicts today. (As I read it, I couldn’t stop my brain from zipping off occasionally to Trump and his incompetence, as a way of doing that old school essay instruction to “compare and contrast.” I compared. I screamed.)
I’ll try to give you the essence of this amazing event, which developed over a period of weeks:
Two countries were at war over land. It happens, right? One country had moved onto the land, signed a lease-purchase agreement with the original inhabitants, and had settled in to become a functional entity at a high level.
The other country had decided, as countries have done over the millennia, that it somehow had the right to that land. (After a recent read of a good world history, I’ve come to the conclusion that most wars, if not all wars, are started by such faux righteous thieves, usually by violent land grabs.)
In this instance, the would-be invasive force established a strong naval presence right in the face of the weaker but doughty military presence of the defenders.
The uneven stand-off produced the expected threat from the offense and expected resistance from the defense. “We are going to own you; ergo, just surrender.” The defense response: “We will fight with all our power to the death.”
“Then you will force us to destroy all of you, your whole population.” Response: “Fuck you.”
You’d expect this, wouldn’t you? Knowing what I had learned about the strength of one side and relative weakness of the other side, I read with growing anxiety, even though I already knew the ending. Until one word, a magic word, appeared in the written exchanges between the two. The word: “However…”
“However,” used by both sides, kick-started a complex negotiation in which Force One did take ownership of the land, but Force Two remained on the land, protected its people, its culture, its possessions, its property — and its laws, although it gave up its name.
Strange thing, a war in which no one was killed and both sides got pretty much what they wanted. Hmm.
What’s so remarkable about all this is that it took place in 1664, on the shores of Manhattan Island, and on the two rivers which created it.
Without email or encrypted apps or Zoom, the whole negotiation was conducted in formal correspondence to and from Peter Stuyvesant and Richard Nicolls (known to his close friends as “Rich” — really), the English colonel and master of the four warships which pulled up in Hudson Bay. And that correspondence was transmitted to and from Nicolls ship and Stuyvesant’s fort by…rowboats, carrying each side’s advisors. Who also talked to each other.
But as I read it — it’s kind of a thriller — it was nearly impossible to believe it hadn’t happened yesterday; that’s how modern it seemed. How rational, even when threats of violence were rowed back and forth, along with that resonant word, “however.”
As the author of Taking Manhattan:The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America, Russell Shorto, puts it, New York and our deeply oddball country began with this merger between the Dutch and the British.
I’m not doing justice to this marvelous book, the sequel to The Island at the Center of the World: The epic story of Dutch Manhattan and the forgotten colony that shaped America.
If you pine for rationality in our current state of delusional exhibitionist displays, read the book yourself. It will inspire you and reinforce whatever dwindling belief you might have in the capacity of human beings to reason.