But covert action fails, as at the Bay of Pigs, when frustrated and desperate Presidents seize on secret war as a substitute for a successful declared or open policy that also involves diplomacy, economic measures, and so forth.
And in terms of economic diplomacy, the measures announced Wednesday were almost precisely the opposite of the steps the Obama administration and many Western economists have been urging Beijing to take.
Acutely aware that their Senate leader, Tom Daschle, walked into a hornet's nest two weeks ago when he suggested that the war itself was the inevitable result of failed diplomacy, they measure every word.
These values are best spread globally by the time-tested measures: diplomacy, respect for other countries' sovereign borders, abidance by such international laws as the Geneva Convention and the principle of habeas corpus, abhorrence of torture, cultural outreach, democratic example and, to handle terrorism at home, police action.
With diplomacy exhausted, harsher measures are called for.America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, the six countries trying for four years to talk round Iran's clench-fisted regime, had agreed to give it a last chance, until the end of this year, to show diplomatic willing.
Compared with the lack of success in the previous two decades of climate diplomacy, these two measures constitute technical and economic factors that will make a difference in the 2015 UN climate change conference.
Israel seems to have abandoned government and measured diplomacy to the hot hands of the military.
Clinton's 11-day, seven-nation trip to Africa is a marathon of diplomacy by any measure, and the US secretary of state cannot be faulted for not visiting every state that would receive her. Yet at least one of the Maghreb nations should have made the cut.
That is, in part, a result of Washington's own cautious Syria policy, which has relied on United Nations diplomacy rather than direct measures to support the armed opposition.
