Red Carpets for Absolute Power Betray the Trust of Free Peoples

I read that the ruler of the United States has rolled out a literal red carpet, a lavish state dinner, and a tour of the nation’s constitutional relics for the head of a one‑party communist state, and I am told this is justified as mere reciprocity for hospitality received abroad. I see also that he met this guest behind closed doors for ninety minutes, speaking of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and of the Korean Peninsula, while the only detailed account so far comes from the visitor’s own government. All this occurs while the host’s own political language brands his domestic rivals as “communists.” One hardly needs much philosophy to see that something does not fit.

In my Second Treatise of Government, I defined political power as a right of making laws, with penalties of death and less, only for the public good; power that ranges beyond that end must justify itself or be counted usurpation. When the magistrate receives a foreign prince, he spends not his own personal stock of civility, but the common credit of the people whose name he bears. That people, by nature free and equal, can give no rightful commission to glorify rule that rests, not on the consent of the governed, but on party command and the silencing of dissent. Courtesy among statesmen may be necessary; courtly theatre for absolute power is another thing.

The advocates of this display say that China and the United States must act as “responsible major countries,” and that this rich entertainment is but the outward sign of a serious effort to avert conflict and enlist influence over Russia’s long invasion of Ukraine. I do not dismiss that claim lightly. In a world where miscalculation may bring vast destruction, there is good sense in maintaining channels of communication, even, and perhaps especially, with those whose internal government is harsh. The question is not whether there may be diplomacy with such powers, but whether a free people must decorate despots as honored exemplars in order to talk with them. That point is not yet proven.

When I wrote that all men are naturally in a state of perfect freedom and equality, under a law of nature that forbids harming another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions, I meant it as a measure both of what government may do at home and what it ought to countenance abroad. A republic cannot police the whole earth; but it can refrain from confusing its citizens by praising, with pageant and flattery, a regime whose claim to rule plainly does not rest on the inward assent of free and equal persons. To call domestic opponents “communists” while setting a real communist ruler at the place of highest honor is to play deceitfully with words, and thus with the people’s understanding.

I observe further that much of the substance here lies, as yet, in secrecy. The two leaders spoke behind closed doors for an hour and a half; the visitor earlier warned that mishandling questions such as Taiwan could cause the countries to “collide or even enter into conflict”; the host delayed a large arms package to that island, calling it a “very good negotiating chip” with Beijing. This is prerogative in its strictest sense: power exercised by the executive beyond the ordinary line of settled law, claiming to serve the public by swift discretion. As I argued in the Second Treatise, such prerogative may be tolerated while it visibly tends to the safety of the people and while those people retain a real power to revoke their trust. Invisible bargains about the lives and liberties of others, struck in private and wrapped in finery, do not commend themselves to that standard.

Some will object that ceremony costs little, that a few toasts with merchants and inventors and magnates—these modern grandees of commerce and of new engines of thought—are small coins to pay if the result is even a chance of restraining war, of coordinating over dangerous technologies, of creating what one official likened to a “red zone” of emergency communication. I acknowledge the force of this argument; the avoiding of bloodshed is a weighty good. Yet even there I must ask: why must the lesson taught to the world, and to the American people, be that the surest path to influence is to concentrate power at home until one sits as an equal at this gilded table? When liberty supplicates to tyranny in order to manage danger, liberty has already conceded too much.

I do not say that this one state dinner, this one delayed arms sale, this one “very productive” set of talks, amounts to that long train of abuses that justifies dissolving the government, or even to certain proof that trust has been fatally betrayed. Men living under law ought not fly to upheaval upon every suspicion. But I do say that when a government that claims to rest on the consent of free and equal persons expends its symbolic capital to exalt rulers who deny that equality at home, and does so without clear, publicly demonstrated benefit, it edges from governance by law toward governance by discretion and spectacle. That path, if persisted in, ends where it always does: with the people discovering that the power they thought they lent on trust has been spent in their name, but not for their sake.