Our political/diplomatic Quote of the Day comes via Professor John Brown’s must-read Public Diplomacy and Press Blog — where he points us to a post by Steven W. Lewis on the Baker Institute Blog dealing with President Barack Obama’s bow to the Japanese Emperor.
This bow became the target of (what else?) a political controversy in the United States where Obama’s critics accused him of displaying weakness, deferring too much to an Emperor, displaying incompetent diplomacy. Etc. Lewis adds this:
Obama’s bow to the Japanese emperor, his handshake with Myanmar’s prime minister at the APEC conclave in Singapore, and his town hall meeting with university students in Shanghai are exhibits A, B and C, according to this analysis.
A bow and a handshake are unlikely to inspire either the Japanese or Myanmar military to invade the U.S. anytime in the foreseeable future. But by focusing on President Obama’s town hall in Shanghai, American hawks may have, inadvertently, stumbled upon what is in truth a serious concern: Chinese students. They may sport trendy eyeglasses, wear day-glo sweaters and carry Hello Kitty notebooks, but in fact they constitute one of the most destructive political forces in recent history. … Nobody today can say exactly how the American and the Chinese people may come to trust each other such that they both cut back on the ways they waste energy and foul the environment. But it is clear that such trust will require a sustained conversation between Americans and Chinese, something a 48-year-old American president is both capable of initiating and maintaining: The young Chinese in the room must have known this intuitively. And it is also clear that such a conversation should begin with a smile, and that smile should not be met with derisive laughter. So far, so good. “
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.