The Etiquette of Empire: Which Foes Should the President Talk To

(This post ran earlier this week as an oped piece in the Toronto Star.)

Under what conditions should the President of the United States meet with the leaders of nations that are the foes of Washington? That vexed question is now at the centre of the struggle for the presidency in this year’s elections.

The Republican Party’s game plan for victory is already plain: contrast Senator John McCain’s reputed solidity on foreign policy and national security with Senator Barack Obama’s supposed inexperience and naivety.

The Republican trump card is Obama’s statement at a presidential candidates’ debate last summer that he would meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba without preconditions. Since then Barack Obama has clarified his position, saying that while he will meet without preconditions “that does not mean I will meet without preparation.”

While there is an important distinction between preconditions, where the leaders meet only after the deals have been made, and preparation, where only an agenda is drawn up, it doesn’t cut to the heart of the matter.

The Americans have always had debates about whether it is, or is not, moral to meet with foreign foes. When President Richard Nixon announced that he would travel to China to meet with that country’s revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, the heir to Marx and Lenin, the editor of the Union Leader, in Manchester, New Hampshire, a long-time Nixon supporter, denounced the journey as “immoral, indecent, insane and fraught with danger.”

More than morality has gone into the question of with whom presidents should meet, however. At the centre of a very real, although unacknowledged empire, the United States has developed a pecking order about which foes presidents should meet and those they should shun.

The etiquette is as follows: truly powerful foes are too important not to talk to, while smaller foes should be treated as rogues and should not be accorded respect.

The United States did not establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union until 1933, sixteen years after the Russian Revolution. Ironically in light of current politics, the first meeting between a U.S. president and the leader of the Soviet Union took place in November 1943 in Teheran, the capital of Iran, where Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill to plan the next stage in the war against Nazi Germany. Needless to say, no Iranians were invited to the sessions of the Big Three.

After Teheran, American presidents continued meeting with Soviet leaders, although there was a long hiatus during the worst years of the Cold War. Both Eisenhower and Kennedy met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, even though the latter had notoriously poor manners, as revealed when he declared to the West “We will bury you” and on another occasion took his shoe off during a debate at the United Nations in New York and banged it on the table.

Similarly, after Nixon’s journey to China in 1972, U.S. Presidents continued to meet with China’s top leaders, using the closer ties between Washington and Beijing as a way to challenge the global power of the Soviet Union.

It has been another matter entirely when it comes to meetings with the leaders of smaller nations that are foes of the United States, the nations that are now known contemptuously as “rogue states”, or even more contemptuously as members of the “axis of evil”.

In April 1959, only three months after the triumph of his revolution in Cuba, Fidel Castro traveled to the United States where he was accorded a hero’s welcome. Although Castro had not yet become an open Communist foe of the United States, President Eisenhower refused to meet with the new leader, shunting the task off to his Vice President, Richard Nixon.

The unwritten rule is that U.S. Presidents do not bestow on their small fry foes the honour of a meeting with the top man. After the West welcomed Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi back into the fold of respectable nations, it was left to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and later to French President Nicolas Sarkozy to shake hands with the former outcast. Colonel Gaddafi did not get face time with President George W. Bush.

During his presidency, President Richard Nixon visited Rumania and Yugoslavia, but that was to tweak the noses of the Soviets about their lack of complete control in their own backyard.

It’s alright for the President to meet with Palestinian leaders who have eschewed terrorism, for the moment at least, in an effort to broker a peace deal in the Middle East. And prior to the presidency of George W. Bush, it was regarded as acceptable for U.S. presidents to meet with the leader of Syria in the pursuit of peace in the region, as Nixon, Carter and Clinton all did.

Barack Obama’s real error is that he has violated the etiquette of empire. It’s bad form for the President of the United States to meet face to face with the leaders of small nations that are involved in deadly squabbles with the Americans. But Obama is young and he learns quickly.