The interpretive question concerns whether or not the stick is used merely to dangle said carrot or is held in reserve to inflict pain and further persuade the donkey to move. Some involved in the discursive dispute refer to this understanding as “carrot or stick.”

Other disputants argue that using carrot and stick for reward and punishment, when applied to diplomacy, actually combines two disparate foreign policy theories: carrot and stick and the “big stick” ideology of Theodore Roosevelt, who administered one of America’s most vicious periods of imperialism.

Roosevelt apparently was a voracious reader, who read widely as well as often. He summarized his diplomacy with a West African proverb, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” Ol’ Teddy wielded a very big stick indeed, inflicting massive damage to inhabitants of this hemisphere.

Diplomacy, of course, is not the only human activity in which coercion is conjoined with reward to induce desired behavior. Our jurisprudential model is anchored in the almost unquestionable assumption that people will alter their behavior to avoid punishment and seek reward.

Child rearing texts are replete with advice about near-Skinnerian conditioning of one’s offspring in order to inculcate desired traits. We do fashion ourselves (often inadvertently) after something of our parents, even after lamenting their treatment when young.

Nevertheless, anyone involved in raising children quickly recognizes that simplistic notions of reward and punishment fail to achieve preferred outcomes. Carrots and sticks produce the opposite results when dealing with recalcitrant children and adolescents.

Our classrooms similarly are overrun with the failures of this motivational approach. Most assuredly, some students do respond, but the consequences for those who require different pedagogical tools are devastating.

Rather than lifelong learners, we produce “good citizens” schooled in obsequiousness to authority.

On 911, America endured much more terrifying effects from these mistaken assumptions about universal human psychology. Premised on the belief that hijackers would not forfeit their own lives to accomplish their “mission,” airline security proved to be egregiously inadequate.

Iran explicitly rejected Obama’s attempts at carrot and stick diplomacy. “The carrot and stick approach has proven to be useless. It is an unacceptable and virtually failed policy,” responded Hassan Qashqavi, spokesperson Iranian Foreign Ministry. He instead called for an “interactive policy."

Hooshang Amirahmadi, founder and president of the American Iranian Council, observed that coercive diplomacy based on a carrots and sticks framework inevitably fails because it is “based on false assumptions about Iran [and] an incomplete understanding of the Islamic Republic.”

Quite simply, U.S. foreign policymakers, especially Obama, must not project our ethnocentric presumptions about psychology, persuasion, and behavior on the rest of the world and expect compliance. Global history abounds with (often horrific) examples of such jingoism.

Iran is one of the oldest and most storied civilizations in the world, which perceives itself as neither a rogue state nor an irrational theocracy. Amirahmadi cites its history of conflict with the Greek, Roman, Ottoman, British, Russian, and American empires.

A different cognitive map is essential for dealing with Iran. Amirahmadi refers to a paradigm shift, an alternative diplomatic approach that allows Iran to “save face.” One cannot help but recall America’s other failed foreign policies with Eastern cultures like China and North Korea.

North Korea’s proposed launch next week of its Taepondong-2 missile again foregrounds our enormous misunderstanding about how to interact effectively with them. America’s regular inability to constrain their nuclear reprocessing reveals deep-seated, mistaken assumptions about how their leaders respond to threats and promises.

America’s history of relations with China, extending far earlier than Mao’s revolution, would be a veritable comedy of errors, if the planetary and national stakes were not so high. Even my use of “stakes” belies this faulty game-playing mentality at the heart of foreign policymaking.

China’s treatment of Tibet, for instance, exemplifies perfectly the ridiculous and disastrous consequences of coercive diplomacy. No matter how presumptuous the conviction that America understands why every human behaves, China constantly confounds.

Among the many alternatives to this dominant framework is openness to the manifold possibilities inherent in others. Rather than always manipulating others, one might treat them as one wants to be treated, as if they were deserving of respect: interact, not dominate.

After all, we should not base our fundamental relationships with others on how to motivate asses, lest we ourselves become same.