Castro-Obama: The Handshake
The media and politicians have gone into a tizzy over The Handshake. At Nelson Mandela's memorial on Dec. 10, as he was working his way through a line of foreign dignitaries, shaking hands, President Obama briefly clasped hands with Cuban president Raul Castro. Twenty seconds tops. No substantive words were exchanged.
It didn't take long, however, for the encounter to be likened by those on the right to that between former British Prime Minister (and great appeaser), Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler just as the UK and friends had thrown Czechoslovakia under the geostrategic bus in 1938. News commentators speculated as to whether The Handshake was a harbinger of a thaw in Cuban-American relations, which have been in the deep freeze since Raul and his brother, Fidel, took power over half a century ago.
Here's my take: politics doesn't necessarily trump simple courtesy. When I served in the Foreign Service, the State Department periodically sent out "contact policy guidance" to all posts instructing how U.S. diplomats should comport themselves when rubbing shoulders at receptions or international meetings with official representatives of governments and movements with which we had no diplomatic relations or whose relations with the U.S. were hostile. The instructions for dealing with Cubans, North Koreans, Libyans and the like were not to be impolite, but also not to engage in any substantive discussions. A simple handshake was okay. In my various overseas postings, I shook hands and often exchanged a few banal words with diplomats from North Korea, Cuba, the PLO (before we recognized it), Vietnam (before diplomatic relations were established) and a number of other officials from pariah states and loathsome political movements. I searched cyberspace to see if such guidance was public, but couldn't find it. Perhaps someone in the State Department might wish to release a copy to help clarify things.
U.S. ambassadors, chiefs of mission and consulate heads are considered to be representing the president of the United States. I shook some Axis of Evil hands while serving as charge d'affaires. In other words, I was representing my president as well as my government. And it was okay. I violated no policies or regs. Interestingly, little current attention is given to Pres. Obama's handshakes with Hugo Chavez and Moammar Ghaddafi at international conferences, or Pres. Clinton's handshake with Fidel Castro in 2000, or Ronald Reagan's handshake with Nicaragua's leader Daniel Ortega at the same time he was supporting an armed rebellion against the regime in Managua.
The upshot: no big deal. There's nothing wrong with showing common human courtesy, even to the bad guys.