'Red Carpets, Red Flags: Xi’s Visit and the Price of Political Theatre'

When a ruler rolls out a literal red carpet for a visiting leader who governs an unfree regime, furnishes him with a grand state dinner, parades him past a gallery of national heroes and a fresh-hewn helicopter pad, and then escorts him to the archives to contemplate the founding charters of a free republic, we have not merely etiquette to consider. We witness an experiment in moral philosophy conducted on live subjects. For, in the same season, that ruler has been busily denouncing his domestic opponents as communists, even as he toasts the world’s most powerful communist leader as a “truly great friend.” When language and ceremony pull in opposite directions, it is usually the public that is quietly torn in two.

The impartial spectator, whose judgment I explored in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, does not sit at the head table of the banquet; he stands in the doorway and watches the whole scene. He hears the warm words exchanged at the state dinner, the talk of “responsible major countries” exploring “a new approach” to get along. He also hears, from the same voice, the effort to demonize domestic rivals as adherents of that very doctrine. He asks not whether the performance secures an evening’s applause, but whether it is praise-worthy, whether a disinterested observer could reconcile the denunciation of a creed at home with the embrace of its chief champion abroad.

To be sure, there are weighty matters beneath the gilt. The leaders have spoken, behind closed doors, of the Middle East, Ukraine, the Korean Peninsula, of arms for Taiwan and the risk of “collision or even conflict” if that question is mishandled. They have also, more curiously, discussed new techniques of calculation and remote command, and how rival powers might establish something like the old “red line” of cold-war memory, a channel to avert catastrophe when their own contrivances exceed expectation. Here is the division of labour in its most modern form; and, as I argued in The Wealth of Nations, whatever extends the market and secures peace can deepen specialization and enrich both nations. To talk is cheaper than to fight; to coordinate is better than to collide.

Yet we must always distinguish the invisible hand of mutual advantage from the very visible hands arranging the guest list. At this dinner sat not only statesmen but the great merchants of your age’s digital and mechanical marvels, those whose fortunes turn upon trade, technology, and the regulatory pen. People of the same trade, when they meet even for merriment and diversion, do not forget their interests when the dessert is served. They are entitled to dine; they are not entitled to write foreign policy while the public looks on enchanted. When commerce, diplomacy, and domestic campaigning are all packed into one ballroom, a wise people regards every glittering place card with the most suspicious attention.

Some defenders of the spectacle appeal to reciprocity. The visiting ruler, they say, once offered his own historic summit; the present hospitality merely returns the favour. Courtesy between nations is no small thing; the slightest affront can dear-bought be resented. Yet courtesy is not extravagance, and reciprocity is not mimicry. A free republic does not merely echo the pageantry of an unfree regime; it interprets it, trims it, and subordinates it to its own principles. When a senator observes that, given “all of the troubling issues” with the visiting power, a lavish welcome was ill advised, he gives clumsy voice to a sound instinct: that honours conferred by a democracy must be intelligible to its citizens, or they cease to be honours and become riddles.

The deepest riddle here is not diplomatic but domestic. The same ruler delays an arms package for Taiwan and describes it as a “very good negotiating chip,” even as he assures an ally that he will press the visiting power to restrain another invader in Ukraine. The same ruler raises the spectre of communism in his elections, while hosting the communist chief as an honoured guest, complete with pandas for a national zoo. These are not the careful steps of the prudent statesman who knows that every piece on the great chess-board of human society has a motion of its own; they are the flourishes of the man of system in miniature, imagining that peoples, parties, and partners abroad can be pushed and pulled as easily as chairs around his new ballroom.

Meanwhile, the labouring poor, for whom the wealth of a nation ought always to be measured, receive little from such pageants beyond confusion. If the visit truly advances peace, stabilizes trade, and tames the new dangers that arise when human ambition arms itself with powerful engines of calculation, its benefits will be real though unseen, and the show will be forgiven. But if it serves chiefly the status-seeking of leaders who delight to be photographed among archives and magnates, while their rhetoric at home inflames old suspicions they set aside at table, then the cost falls on those who were not invited. They will discover, as the poor man’s son discovers in his ceaseless toil, that the glittering scene promised more happiness than it was ever designed to bestow.