Editor’s note: This commentary is by Paul Manganiello, MD MPH, of Norwich, a emeritus professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and Susan P. Thomas, of Lebanon, New Hampshire, a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
[I]t is unclear exactly how President Trump will carry out his foreign policy during his time in office. As promised during his campaign, he is proving to be unpredictable, an intentional disrupter.
In that vein, we want to suggest what may, upon first hearing, appear to be an outrageous recommendation to President Trump. Here it is: Consider disrupting the usual order of things on the international stage by practicing intentional vulnerability. Yes, you heard us right. Intentional vulnerability.
And here is why it could work, not only for the president, but for all of us if we put it into daily practice: In life, when someone makes a decision not to be defensive in their interpersonal negotiations, the approach starts to help the individual actually hear what the other person is trying to say. You might learn, for example, what’s really at stake for that person. What is the most important concern among the many concerns they may have?
When you listen and speak without being defensive, people begin to trust you with their fears, their hopes, their not-fully-formed vision of how things could be. In those instances, what may have been fiercely protected and fixed can be disrupted. Bring to mind if you can, the image of dry, firm ground becoming more pliable, disrupted and softened by rain and earthworms and the small roots of seeds working their way into the cracked open earth to eventually become more fruitful.
Could intentional vulnerability, the relinquishing of defensiveness, operate in somewhat the same way for leaders on a global scale as they seek to foster human rights, democratic principles and environmental collaboration?
During the campaign, Mr. Trump pledged to put America first in international negotiations. He also stated that the United States should not act as the world’s policeman. In one of Bill O’Reilly’s last interviews with him on Fox News, he confronted President Trump with the statement that “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin is a killer.” In response, Trump asserted a kind of moral equivalency, comparing Putin’s reputation for extrajudicial killings to the United States, where “There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers, well you think our country is so innocent?”
His response was perplexing. Did he mean that since we have “killers” in the United States that it was therefore acceptable for Putin to assassinate opponents in his country? The United States does not officially condone extrajudicial killings of political opponents.
While we hope he was not condoning those killings, President Trump’s comment implies something else that intrigues us. It implies he doesn’t support the concept of “American exceptionalism.” This term — as old as our country — has often been used to denote a viewpoint of national superiority that should rightly be relegated to the dustbin of history. Social constructs don’t appear in a vacuum. The United States didn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere. Our country’s Constitution was written from principles meant to counter the errors Western European countries had painfully made. Nothing exceptional — our country’s founders simply learned from the mistakes of others. The only thing that is exceptional about the American experience has been the good sense to encourage others from other countries with good ideas to emigrant here. This certainly has served us well despite attempts by the current administration and their supportive nativists to try to thwart people emigrating to our shores.
“Embracing intentional vulnerability, as we should consider doing also in our personal daily interactions, has the potential to break open stuck dynamics between individuals and nations.”
What does it take to practice intentional vulnerability? First of all, the two parties need to want to cooperate, to improve a divisive issue, to clarify a misunderstanding, to resolve a disagreement, or a dispute. Then it’s a three-step process:
· — Party A acknowledges and regrets that in the past they may not have acted properly (they are only human). In this way, Party A lays down its defenses, becomes vulnerable.
· — Party B recognizes the vulnerable action Party A has taken to disrupt the fixed (static) dynamic between them. Party B reciprocates, admitting “we, too, are not without sin and regret our past misdeeds.”
· — Party A and Party B agree to work together to rectify the situation.
A global example might be an upcoming trade deal, let’s say with China. Before getting down to the specifics of the deal, the United States becomes concerned with how China is treating their ethnic Muslim minorities, i.e., the Uyghurs. U.S. negotiators might start by acknowledging our own historic enslavement of an entire race of our people and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of our Native Americans. We realize that this was wrong and we have taken and are still taking steps to rectify the situation. Being guilty of discrimination ourselves makes us concerned about reports of discrimination of ethnic Muslims in China. If we are to be trading partners, we both need to move forward to protect the rights of all of our citizens. Can we agree that in the past we have not acted justly? The vulnerability of admitting our mutual shortcomings can help us discuss how we can work together to attain objective fair trade policies and uphold human rights in both of our countries now.
There are numerous issues in which the United States is called to the moral high ground, not because of a pumped-up view of America being first and exceptional, but because we’ve learned from our own historic mistakes. Embracing intentional vulnerability, as we should consider doing also in our personal daily interactions, has the potential to break open stuck dynamics between individuals and nations. Our president, so fond of disrupting the usual manner in which things are done, could use intentional vulnerability in global bilateral discussions to disrupt — and improve — these negotiations, leading to more trust and common ground with our global neighbors.
We believe that embracing intentional vulnerability would be good for our president, for our nation, for the world, and also for each one of us. The human race has come too far to back away now from a universal civil society.
