The record on face-to-face diplomacy by top U.S. leaders? Damnably disastrous
About every four or eight years about this time, we hear from one American politician or another that same old refrain: I am not afraid, I will talk not only to our friends, I will talk to our enemies; we need more personal diplomacy, I will go to [Germany, Korea, Iraq, Pakistan, China, Timbuktu, wherever] to guarantee peace…ad infinitum.
The truth is that personal diplomacy, whether practiced by Franklin D. Roosevelt with the cool disdain of a Hudson River patroon or Henry Kissinger with his accent “mit schlag”, has largely led to disaster. Roosevelt at Yalta did not have the measure of Good Old Uncle Joe as he imagined, but, perhaps, luckily for him, did not live long enough to learn it. Kissinger thought he had found a Meternichian realpolitische colleague in Le Duc Tho, only to reap millions of Vietnamese and Cambodian deaths and refugees and a decade of disgrace for America.