Here’s my latest piece at PunditWire, looking at President Obama’s UN speech (both substance and technique) and what it says about negotiating:

Even the President of the United States drifts into the tritest clichés on such occasions:

We come together at a crossroads between war and peace; between disorder and integration; between fear and hope.

Around the globe, there are signposts of progress. The shadow of World War that existed at the founding of this institution has been lifted …

Crossroads. Signposts. Shadows. The mediocre metaphors of the earnest student debater.

The most important part of President Obama’s speech was his message to the world that the terrorist group known as ISIL had to be “degraded and ultimately destroyed”:

At the same time, we have reaffirmed again and again that the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam … And when it comes to America and Islam, there is no us and them, there is only us — because millions of Muslim Americans are part of the fabric of our country. So we reject any suggestion of a clash of civilizations…

Hmm. By putting America and Islam in the same sentences as he did in his ill-fated Cairo speech, President Obama surely repeated a key rhetorical category mistake that undermined his own argument? He continued:

There can be no reasoning — no negotiation — with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force. So the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death.

President Obama is right that there can be no negotiation with ISIL/ISIS, in the usual meaning of the word ‘negotiate’. How to negotiate, exactly? Sit round a fancy conference table to haggle over their insane ambitions or their disgusting methods? Yet a deeper negotiation is going on. A clash of civilisations is under way: to be precise a head-on collision between one view of what civilisation means, and another that violently rejects our civilisation from top to bottom.

ISIL/ISIS has grown into the monstrous force it now is precisely because plenty of people do flock to support what it represents. Western unease at how best to deal with this phenomenon is the subject of the negotiation, with the Russians and Chinese watching with smirking ‘we told you so’ noises on the sidelines.

ISIL/ISIS murder Western aid workers because they think that we are weak and indecisive. The audacity of their atrocities is part of their negotiation with us: they want to show Western populations that they represent something unimaginable – and unstoppable. They want us to get dragged in to retaliating. They hope to play on our internal divisions, and believe that now at long last numbers and momentum are on their side. They are unlikely to murder many Russian or Chinese citizens live on YouTube. Why? Because they know that they are dealing with something much more ruthless.

Now (finally, and arguably many months too late) a major effort is under way, led by the United States, to ‘dismantle’ ISIL/ISIS. This bombing is our negotiation with these forces. Can we do what it takes to inflict enough pain on Islamist nihilism to drive it back underground for a few more decades, thereby empowering what we hope can be a much more pragmatic Islam?

We’ll find out soon enough…