Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton has written an op-ed called Obama “naive” for his proposals to negotiate with enemies of the United States. What Bolton overlooks, however, is how easy it is to reverse his charges to apply to his side equally well.Basically, Bolton’s claim is that by turning to diplomacy as the primary tool of international relations, Obama risks overlooking the realities of hard power. To Bolton, engagement by negotiation is a sign of weakness, signaling to an adversary an opening for increased aggressiveness.

Consider [Obama's] facile observations about President Kennedy’s first meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, in Vienna in 1961. Obama saw it as a meeting that helped win the Cold War, when in fact it was an embarrassment for the American side. The inexperienced Kennedy performed so poorly that Khrushchev may well have been encouraged to position Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, thus precipitating one of the Cold War’s most dangerous crises.

I am not going to argue that Bolton is completely wrong, but rather that he is overgeneralizing in an equally naive way. Bolton’s read on the origins of the Cuban Missile Crisis are in accord with Khrushchev’s own comments about his impressions of Kennedy, so it is not possible to claim that embracing negotiations will not sometimes be taken as a signal of weakness. But Bolton’s claim that any negotiations will be taken as weakness is going quite a lot further — way too far, in fact.

Bolton’s position begs the question of alternatives. Bolton is closely wedded to an aggressive faction in U.S. foreign policy thinking that prizes highly American military preponderance. But always preferring military confrontation is just as much the “fallacy of the hammer” (give a little boy a hammer and the whole world appears to him to be made of nails) as the always-negotiations position he critiques as “naive”. Negotiations can at least sometimes increase strength if they fulfill the purpose of building international coalitions by bringing in allies and mollifying critics. In such situations, the embrace of negotiations is not a signal of weakness, it is a harbinger of strength.

Obama’s position is that a U.S. willingness to negotiate will strengthen this aspect of power-building that has been neglected during the reign of Bolton’s ideological allies in U.S. foreign policy. Is Bolton right to question taking this adjustment too far? Sure. Is it fair to debate specifically which type of situation U.S.-Iran relations specifically are in at this point in time. Yes. Perhaps if Obama’s critics ever tire of sophomoric name-calling, such substantial debates will become possible. But as it stands, Bolton’s typically over-broad and ham-handed drawing of a black-or-white universe is just as naive as he accuses Obama of being.