The Bush administration is finally realizing war, fear, and violence are not the way to maintain power in the world…and much less have certain opposing nations “listened” to them. Diplomacy is the newest tactic the Bush administration has discovered. Former and current US officials have agreed that the Bush administration realized its mistakes and is correcting them by reopening diplomatic channels of communication with Iran, North Korea, and Syria and attempting to engage heavily in Middle East peacemaking. As one former high-level Bush administration official said in “The Washington Post” on March 11, “I think we’ve been slow in applying those means and seeing the reality of the situation. Ultimately North Korea and Iran will be solved through diplomatic means.”

Following six years of US reluctance to sit at the same table with the communist, nuclear country, the US conceded swiftly to negotiations with North Korea. As part of an agreement to eventually end Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions, Washington agreed to begin talks with North Korea that could lead to lifting of financial sanctions. In New York last month, officials from both countries met to start normalizing relations. Finally, on March 10, US officials sat in the same room as Iranian officials for a more than needed regional conference on Iraq’s sectarian violence.

Ironically, to the Bush administration’s dismay, there is a need to have diplomatic relations with the key nations in the Arab world, Syria and Iran, especially since peace efforts in the Middle East have gone downhill since 2000. Also, with the Bush administration openly declaring its support for Israel and labeling Syria and Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil,” the image of America in the Middle East continues to fall more and more every day. Furthermore, the shift to diplomacy could be also attributed to plummeting Republican ratings and growing congressional opposition to Bush’s foreign policy, basically in Iraq. Senior administration officials continue to deny that difficulties in Iraq and Bush’s plummeting popularity have brought a shift.

“Bush’s shifts are a recognition that the US will not succeed diplomatically unless it is willing to engage in a more serious fashion with the needs of other countries,” Nikolas K. Gvosdev, editor of the “National Interest,” a foreign policy journal, told “The Los Angeles Times.” The US position in the world is slowly plummeting and unless it starts to take positive steps to hearing other nations out it will continue to be isolated and its foreign policy hated abroad. Before Bush, the US had friendly relations with other nations as well as a positive image around the world.

Who knows what will happen after Bush?