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.

Auto Industry Disaster: The Harper Government's Betrayal of Ontario

From its first day in office in February 2006, the Harper government's top priority has been to promote the rapid expansion of the export of Alberta oil to the United States.

The negative consequences of this thoughtless policy have been myriad. Vast quantities of clean natural gas and precious water have been used to produce synthetic crude oil at the cost of reducing a huge stretch of northern Alberta to a fetid dump, unfit for wildlife or human habitation. The Harperites have enriched their pals in Calgary's oil patch with record profits and they have poured huge sums into the pockets of the owners of the foreign owned oil giants.

The prime minister likes to brag that under his watch Canada has become a global energy power. So what if one consequence has been to render Canada incapable of halting the increase in its greenhouse gas emissions.

Another consequence has been to cut Ontario's manufacturing sector to the bone. The rapid rise in the value of the Canadian dollar in relation to the U.S. dollar has delivered a blow to manufacturing from which it may never recover. And the rise of the Canadian dollar has been directly tied to petroleum exports.

The Harper government has received repeated warnings over the past two years to moderate the pace of petroleum exports so that other sectors of the economy from tourism to book publishing to manufacturing can have the time they need to adapt to a rising dollar.

Today, the disaster came home to us with the announcement by General Motors that it will close its Oshawa truck plant next year throwing 2600 workers out of a job. GM CEO Rick Wagoner said it was unlikely the plant would ever reopen.

Appropriately CAW President Buzz Hargrove took aim at the General Motors management for signing a deal with the union a couple of weeks ago whose essence was to keep jobs in Canadian plants in return for huge monetary concessions from the workers. The CAW will fight the battle against the pusillanimous bad faith bargaining of the company.

The rest of us need to focus on the calamity the Harper government has created in our most important manufacturing industry. If the dollar had not been so high against the U.S. greenback, it is highly likely that GM would have planned for much more future investment and economic activity in its Canadian plants to produce the new hybrid vehicles, electric cars, smaller cars and crossover vehicles on which its future depends.

Instead, we've been shafted by the Harper government and by the GM management.

Not least to blame is Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, the MP for Whitby-Oshawa, who has been openly saying he can see little reason why companies should invest in Ontario. Thanks Jim. I'm sure a lot of families in your constituency are singing your praises over dinner tonight.

Flaherty has been bone headed in his insistence that only corporate tax cuts can save jobs in Ontario. You would have thought that a minister from Oshawa would have seen the growing menace of the rising dollar and would have pushed for a shift in economic policy to slow the pace of petroleum exports, protect the environment, and give the manufacturing sector some much needed breathing room.

Given the economic restructuring that is now going on, Canadians cannot afford to have a federal government that is fixated on profits in the oil patch as the source of a rising TSX, no matter what that means for working Canadians and the well being of most of the regions of Canada.

There’s Much More to the Bernier Affair than Meets the Eye

Not since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned a Sherlock Holmes story titled “The Second Stain”, in which the wife of a cabinet minister sells a top secret document to a foreign spy has there been a drama to equal the Maxime Bernier affair.

Just what documents did the hapless foreign minister leave in Julie Couillard’s apartment? Exactly who was bugging the former model’s quarters, including her mattress? Was it a unit of the Harper government itself or even a rogue outfit in Stephane Dion’s party? Can we exclude the possibility that a sting operation has been mounted by the Barack Obama campaign to get back at Harper for NAFTAgate?

Perhaps more probable, and even more unnerving, is the very real possibility that the biker gangs in Quebec have their own foreign policy and have been pursuing it assiduously. At first glance this may seem unlikely but in light of the botched flight of French daredevil Michel Fournier’s balloon in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, to which I will return, this sinister affair snaps into focus.

Is it credible that Bernier and Couillard just happened to meet by chance? Isn’t it much more probable that their meeting was carefully crafted to enmesh the minister in a web of intrigue? There are just too many supposed coincidences here for my liking. Anyone who has seen The Day of the Jackal will know that they always dispatch the beautiful and wily woman to seduce the dumbest member of the government, precisely as a way to obtain government secrets. And it didn’t take long for Couillard to parlay her relationship with Bernier into a face to face meeting with George W. Bush. Coincidence? What did she say to the President and what did he reveal to her?

How often do you tune in the BBC News, the news on France 2, and CNN’s Situation Room to see two Canadian stories reported in one day? Story number one was the revelation that Bernier had left top secret documents chez Couillard and that he was out of the cabinet. Story number two showed a red faced Michel Fournier storming out of his capsule as his balloon wisked away from him into space. And it was a Russian made balloon!

What we have been watching is no less than an elaborate ploy to make Canada appear ridiculous on the international stage. And it didn’t happen any old week. This was the week the Harper government had to decide whether to put Canada up for a seat on the UN Security Council.

Who benefits from all this? Cui bono? Clearly, those who don’t want the Harper government to have a seat on the Security Council are the major winners. We are already aware from the analysis above that the “who” includes Quebec’s biker gangs. Taking this one step further, who else is involved? It is well known that the country that will get the vacant seat at the UN if Canada doesn’t is Portugal.

Portugal? At first glance, a rather harmless country not much marred by organized crime, Portugal has a long and exposed coastline. Could the Algarve be the next target for criminal gangs? And will Fournier’s next, and perhaps successful, leap from a balloon be mounted over the Algarve?

All of this is much too important to be left in the hands of a parliamentary committee, or an aging judge at the head of a Royal Commission. The Harper government needs to fight fire with fire by sending one of its own into a liaison with the bikers to ferret out the truth, the way Ingrid Bergman did in Alfred Hitchcock's film Notorious.