Jon Huntsman’s stroll through an anti-government protest in Beijing last Sunday has caused a minor sensation. In China, searches for his name have been blocked on certain sites, and an actual video of him at the protest has now surfaced. Interestingly, the clip, which is reportedly not blocked in China, is in the form of an anti-Huntsman Chinese propaganda video posted on YouTube. The embassy, meanwhile, said he was in the area by chance. (Evan Osnos noted, in a post about last weekend’s protests, that the organizers invited people to “to stroll, watch, or even just pretend to pass by.”)
For those not following the Huntsman subplot, he recently resigned as President Obama’s Ambassador to China, and is now planning to run for President. In fact, today, the all-knowing Mike Allen placed Huntsman, a former governor of Utah, at number four on his list of “the likely GOP field, in order of relevance.” Huntsman’s great political dilemma is that he can’t possibly sell his last two years of worthy, uncontroversial service in the Obama Administration as a credential to a party defined by its anti-Obamaism. As Obama, who may have appointed Huntsman Ambassador to scuttle his Presidential plans, gleefully noted last month, “I’m sure that him having worked so well with me will be a great asset in a Republican primary.”
But the fallout from Huntsman’s adventure in a Beijing market clotted with protesters raises an interesting question: What if, in his last two months before he leaves his Beijing post, Huntsman provoked some sort of diplomatic row that emphasized an ideological split with the President? What if he demanded that Obama give more aid and support to the pro-democracy movement? That could certainly make some waves in Iowa.
I can’t think of a recent Presidential candidate who used his or her diplomatic confrontations as a campaign platform, but my editor, Nick Thompson, the author of “The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War,” reminds me that Kennan’s very public spat with a Communist regime served him well politically later in life. In 1952, when Kennan was President Truman’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union, he off-handedly told the press that his life as a diplomat in Moscow was akin to his life as an internee in Berlin at the start of the Second World War. The remark did not go over well in Moscow. Stalin didn’t appreciate being implicitly compared to Hitler, and he banned Kennan from the Soviet Union.
Years later, when Kennan testified in opposition to the Vietnam War, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon headed off any criticism that Kennan was some sort of peacenik by reminding his colleagues that Kennan, in Thompson’s words, “was the only man in the room to have been thrown out of Moscow by Joseph Stalin.”
There is little in Huntsman’s sober, responsible, and ideologically moderate career in government to suggest he would deliberately cause an incident to get himself booted from China—and at this late date in his tenure there it would likely be seen as a stunt—but then again, Presidential aspirations do funny things to people.
