From Fareed Zakaria, himself a Very Serious Person in good standing, breaking ranks with the Very Serious People who have a chokehold on American foreign policy:
The problem with American foreign policy goes beyond George Bush. It includes a Washington establishment that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement.
On a related note, I think this partly accounts for one of my pet peeves: the popularity of the “carrot and stick” metaphor that gets used so often when politicians and pundits talk about how we should deal with foreign powers. Most national leaders are comfortable with the idea of negotiating with us based on competing interests, but I don’t think there’s a leader in the entire world who doesn’t bristle at the idea of being bribed like a schoolboy into cooperation with the United States. It’s a fantastically counterproductive way of publicly describing foreign relations, but nobody on this side of the Atlantic even seems to notice how fundamentally demeaning and offensive it is, or how difficult it makes it for foreign leaders to avoid the charge that they’re “caving in” if they come to terms with us.
A better description of the bargaining process is simple: we have things we want, they have things they want, maybe we can strike a deal. That’s the way adults negotiate. It’s time for the carrot and the stick to be buried for good.