Remember Gunboat Diplomacy?

Not so long ago, the response of a superpower like the U.S. to the current Arab oil embargo would have been foreseeable and blunt. As in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Lebanon, the U.S. would probably have seen its interests as best served by some form of military intervention. Even now there is fantasying here and there about seizing the Libyan oilfields or parachuting forces into Saudi Arabia, but no one really believes it could happen.

In the Wall Street Journal, Author-Professor Irving Kristol, a wise and sometimes truculent intellectual, suggests that such forbearance is all wrong. What's more, he claims, this view of the world overlooks an important segment of reality. A little blackmail is nothing new in international relations, he observes. "What is not comprehensible is the apparent Arab belief that they have both the right and might to use their oil to destroy the economies of Western Europe, the U.S. and Japan, to 'bring these countries to their knees,' as the Arab press puts it. And what is least comprehensible of all is the apparent impotence of these same nations in the face of such extreme behavior ... in truth, the days of gunboat diplomacy are never over. Gunboats are as necessary for international order as police cars are for domestic order."

That is a bracing view but designed more to stimulate nostalgia. Since the Viet Nam War, armed intervention has come to seem anachronistic at best --and not very effective in the end.

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