I’ve criticized former US Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman in the past for his appearance- intentional or otherwise- at a political demonstration in Beijing in February. Basically, I felt it was inappropriate at best for a representative of the American government to insert himself in such an incident.
Yet look at what’s just happened in Syria:
Tens of thousands of Syrians on Friday poured into a square that has emerged as a focus of defiance in Hama, Syria’s fourth-largest city, as the French and American ambassadors stayed there for a second day in what their countries called a gesture of support for demonstrators and Syrian officials lambasted as interference.
The comparison raises troubling questions. If it was wrong for Huntsman to appear at an anti-government rally in Beijing, is it similarly wrong for Robert Ford to travel to Hama, Syria in a show of solidarity with anti-government protesters there? To raise the stakes further, what if Huntsman had flown to, say, Chongqing to lend his explicit support to an anti-government uprising there? Such a brazen act would have almost surely resulted in his immediate termination as well as the end of any 2012 electoral aspirations.
Or, perhaps, the two cases are different and should be treated differently. Syria may be an important country in its neighborhood, but it’s no burgeoning power like China. Whether Assad stays or goes likely means little to US interests in the Middle East, while Washington would be very, very, very careful before endorsing any sort of regime change in China. So while the American heart might be with the demonstrators in both instances, the American brain knows that what’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily good for the gander, or in this case the Peking duck.…
