During the latest dustup over whether talking to foreign leaders that disagree with US policy is reasonable or somehow "appeasement", while witnessing some commenters on the Right trying to move the goalposts they planted a thought came to mind. An obvious one, but one I'd say is key: Talk, in and of itself, doesn't cost anything.
 
The modern Republican philosophy seems to begin and end at "actions speak louder than words".  Constantly, they make vague references to "strength", which translates as far as I can tell to arrogance and lack of foresight.  Sure, it is true that actions speak louder than words, but when it comes to foreign policy -- specifically, concerning nations skeptical of us or worse -- actions mean people, um, die.  As much as the loudest corners of the Right wish we could just drop bombs on anyone that disagrees, that benefits no one.  Well...except weapons manufacters.  
 
Besides, such an openly antagonistic policy is completely unfeasible in many cases; take Hamas, for example.  If one agrees with the conventional political wisdom that we must be involved with the Israel-Palestinians conflict (full disclosure: I do NOT agree), then barring an unlikely scenario where they pose direct threat to the US we can't bomb Hamas no matter how much we think they're scum.  Such an operation would inevitably kill innocent palestinians, infuriating the palestinian people even more than they are now, and making the aforementioned threat to the US more likely in the long run.  Besides, they won the PA's elections, so doing this would make us open the can of worms marked "yeah, you can attack an elected party", and something tells me they'd take better advantage of that than we would: thanks to 1st-world military superiority, the only choice of the underdog in such a fight is to cheat.

 

The assumption behind equating talk to "appeasement" is that the only purpose of talking is to give away the shop.  Yet people talk all the time and disagree, loudly in fact.  Also, the context the talks are taking place within changes everything: it's called "leverage".  If the parameters either party sets are so outlandish that they can't be agreed to, then the other can simply break it off and we're back to square one.  Armed conflict doesn't have that option.