Western Diplomacy’s Ineffective Iconoclasm: Conflict Resolution With China and the West’s Forgotten Rhetorical Tools

The Alaskan talks of China and America point to the need for a new style of Western diplomacy. The limitations of a bland diplomacy, without pomp and spectacle, become apparent when faced with a party unwilling to display fealty to the current World Order. The renunciation of pageantry points towards a deeper issue of the disavowing of old cultural beliefs. The wager here is that conflicts can only be resolved in these seemingly outdated rituals of excess dependent on cultural symbolic relics. Despite Western diplomats’ beliefs, they like others around the World, must rely on symbolic relics (fetish-idols) in patching together peace in times of intractable conflict. The failure of many programmes of peace (e.g. TRANSCEND, ARIA) can be partly blamed on a dismissal of the value of beliefs in idols, and the inherent value of idols to expose and work with antagonisms to enact positive change. This article relies on homologous theories in Burkean rhetoric, Durkheimian anthropology, Hegelian metaphysics, Ramsbotham’s conflict resolution ideas and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to pave the way for an acceptance of the derided tools of the old for a fresh perspective on finding peace. Broadly, this is a rejection of a popular but vulgar postmodernism warned about by Kenneth Burke in 1945, with a more nuanced post-foundationalism of the transhistorical, transsubjective and the transsubstantive.