I disagree that deception is necessary in almost any (if any) situation.
I don't think anyone's actually being fooled by it. I highly doubt Kim Jong is under the impression that the US supports him or is even remotely sympathetic to his motives. It's just a game being played by both sides.
Most of the time we create our own complexity, and then build even more complexity on top of it. Eventually it becomes impossible to explain our motives for anything without attaching an enormous amount of context to it. Context which few people have the attention span to fully understand, so you can eventually do whatever you want via abstraction and just blame it on complexity. "Here's a 50 page legal document which clearly shows why I lied to you ok? Anyone who calls me a bad guy just lacks the proper context."
If our diplomacy practices are so complex that they require underhandedness, deception, head-fakes, etc. then it's time to refactor. I'm sure there's a certain level of necessary complexity, but not to the point where being dishonest is justified.
Honesty and transparency are practically a religion to me and this may come across a little zealous / attacking, so I apologize for that.
I'm sensitive to this viewpoint. However let's say you are running a company. There are a huge number of situations where secrecy is necessary. Negotiations with an aquirer, pending layoffs, legal wrangling, customer pipeline, etc. If someone got a hold of this information and released it in an untimely way, they would be fired and possibly prosecuted. I'm completely in favor of honesty and transparency but it is unfortunately not always the best policy.
In a corporate setting you're totally right that secrets may be necessary (not always, depending on your business model), but even then we're talking about witholding information and not deception. In fact you can be totally up front about the fact that you have trade secrets, and while some people may criticize that, I won't be amoung them.
I don't think anyone's actually being fooled by it. I highly doubt Kim Jong is under the impression that the US supports him or is even remotely sympathetic to his motives. It's just a game being played by both sides.
Most of the time we create our own complexity, and then build even more complexity on top of it. Eventually it becomes impossible to explain our motives for anything without attaching an enormous amount of context to it. Context which few people have the attention span to fully understand, so you can eventually do whatever you want via abstraction and just blame it on complexity. "Here's a 50 page legal document which clearly shows why I lied to you ok? Anyone who calls me a bad guy just lacks the proper context."
If our diplomacy practices are so complex that they require underhandedness, deception, head-fakes, etc. then it's time to refactor. I'm sure there's a certain level of necessary complexity, but not to the point where being dishonest is justified.
Honesty and transparency are practically a religion to me and this may come across a little zealous / attacking, so I apologize for that.