[sailaway21]

Obama took a bit of a pasting today in the foreign affairs department. His previous statement on being willing to talk with Iran in person was ably dispatched as juvenile by Senator McCain.

Talk goes on all the time between friendly nations with differences of opinion. That's usually the only time it's truly effective.

Talk with enemies is only correctly done from a position of over-whelming strength. Thus there was a difference between Reagan talking with the Soviet and Jimmy Carter doing the same. If all you're going to do is go hat in hand, and acquiese in the end, what good is talk. On the other hand, if you're in the process of arming Europe with Pershing missiles and devoting millions of dollars to space based missile defense, neither of which your opponent can match, you have the ability to talk. Specifically you can talk about the terms of surrender which is basically what Reagan extracted from Gorbachev. Obama's version resembles not Reagan nor Grant but Chamberlin.