Hammers & Nails? If all you have is discourse, every party to any round of talks looks like Socrates

A Herblock cartoon in the International Herald Tribune from November 11, 1998, has Iraq and Serbia's bloodthirsty leaders laughing at the Western countries' propensity for talks. Of course, both Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević would eventually be taken out, albeit after many years (in Milosevic's case, only after half a dozen years of war in Kosovo, and in Saddam's case, it could easily be argued, only because of the 9-11 attacks), so the Herbert Block cartoon cannot be said to be far from wrong.

In any case, doesn't it seem that the attitude is something that the Kims of North Korea have been doing for decades, right up until the arrival in the White House of a fellow by the name of Donald Trump?

Based on an Abraham Maslow thought, an old phrase regularly brandished by the left's pacifists against the Pentagon and its conservative backers goes like this:

"if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." 

 Well, if all you have is discourse and debate, every party to any round of talks looks like Socrates.