Yesterday, the New York Times published a report about Mr Obama's "secret letter" to President Medvedev, the president of Russia.

"President Obama sent a secret letter to Russia’s president last month suggesting that he would back off deploying a new missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help stop Iran from developing long-range weapons, American officials said Monday."

The United Nations was designed, in part, to eliminate secret treaties and shrouded alliances; the transparency fostered by open dialogue would prevent some of the mess of the WWI.

Free Exchange is cynical of that part of the United Nations' mission; I think my position is roughly analogous to the cynicism of those who believe in Ricardian equivalence regarding activist fiscal policy. Open dialogue and transparency, instead of nurturing peace, is much more conducive to war.

American-Russian ties in the second term of the Bush Administration are a perfect example of the failure of open dialogue. In negotiations, both parties always try to demand the most before compromising down from there; America pushed ahead for an anti-missile base in eastern Europe and Russia began to target European capitals with its offensive missiles. Negotiations always involve a certain amount of grandstanding: neither party waters down its demands cheaply as a strategy to get the most out of the compromise.

The problem lies when this grandstanding is public. Diplomats who make grand pronouncements in public are shackled to those pronouncements; they cannot back down. Backing down is seen as "flip-flopping", "weak", or "giving in". The nationalists have a field day. For the Bush Administration, compromise with Russia became impossible because of its public declarations.

Secret negotiations, on the other hand, have the advantage of excluding the media hype, the bloggers (like your correspondent), the talking heads on national television, and the nationalist sentiments. Private negotiations and secret letters allow diplomats from both sides to be concerned only with the hammering out a compromise that maximizes their country's gain.

Open dialogue makes backing down from your grandstanding look like defeat when, in fact, backing down was the whole point (eventually).

Mr Obama's team clearly recognizes the advantages of cloak-and-dagger negotiations. Diplomacy in public ought to be used to make a point that diplomacy in private cannot be used for. Public diplomacy, before the days of open dialogue, could be used to emphasize which points a country will not compromise. The United States was willing to compromise over the missile base; existential negotiations with Russia ought to have been private. America would never, ever accept an Iranian nuke; that was rightly announced loudly and publicly.

Private diplomacy hammers out the more malleable points. Like literary devices, neither type of diplomacy can be used all the time if one wishes the device to remain effective; I'm glad this administration seems to be using public diplomacy, so far, very sparingly. The more sparing the use of public diplomacy, the more effective its employment.