U.S. Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, the foul-mouthed enforcer of Barack Obama’s presidency, might just be every Republican’s favorite diplomat appointed by President Joe Biden.
“I think he does a good job. I like it,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told the Washington Examiner. “The main thing about him is that Chicago fight-back spirit. I’m glad to see it, really. I don’t want us to get so diplomatic we can’t realize that China’s off-the-rails.”
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Of course, Graham had a good relationship with Emanuel even at the height of his lightning-rod years in the White House in 2009 and 2010, when his rule that politicians should “never allow a crisis to go to waste” seemed to encapsulate and vindicate conservative fear and loathing of Obama’s first-term agenda. Nowadays, Emanuel seems determined to apply that principle in foreign policy, as he uses his perch as the top U.S. diplomat in Japan to put a spotlight on domestic economic crises and intra-party tensions that might enfeeble Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping’s communist regime.
“As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,’” Emanuel wrote last week on social media, stoking speculation that China’s defense chief is the latest casualty of the Chinese Communist Party’s opaque internal competitions. “Now: He’s absent from his scheduled meeting with the Singaporean Chief of Navy because he was placed on house arrest???…Might be getting crowded in there.”
That post ended with a final remark that the missing Chinese defense minister has “paid off his mortgage with the Country Garden real estate developers,” thereby combining Beijing’s palace intrigue with China’s housing crisis in a single line. That zinger came one week after another jab in which he likened Xi’s leadership team to “Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None.”
His scornful tone has drawn criticism from some corporate analysts who see it as an unhelpful “kind of ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy from the U.S. side,” but Republicans like it.
As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” 1st: Defense Minister Li Shangfu hasn’t been seen or heard from in 3 weeks. 2nd: He was a no-show for his trip to Vietnam. Now: He’s absent from his scheduled meeting with the Singaporean Chief of Navy…
— ラーム・エマニュエル駐日米国大使 (@USAmbJapan) September 15, 2023
“Ambassador Emanuel is employing his biting sense of humor to great effect,” former Ambassador Joseph Cella, a conservative Roman Catholic activist who led the U.S. Embassy in Fiji for half of Donald Trump’s presidency, told the Washington Examiner. “He’s speaking the truth, using humor, whereas [Chinese officials] muddy the waters and always, by their nature, operate without transparency.”
Emanuel offered a similar defense of his posture. “Criticizing me is actually a deflection from the real problem,” he told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Saturday. “Why isn’t China transparent with anyone? … Deceit and deception are traits that run through everything China does. That’s unacceptable for a world leader.”
His censorious commentary adds some gilding to a diplomatic record that includes some major policy successes, culminating in the recent summit of U.S., Japanese, and South Korean leaders at Camp David.
“Anyone who has spent any time around Ambassador Emanuel [knows] he is probably one of the best examples of someone serving this current administration who gets the China challenge and will certainly say the right things, and, more often than not, is doing the right things,” a former State Department official told the Washington Examiner. “If we had more Rahms, we’d probably have a stronger Indo-Pacific policy.”
Criticism of Xi is at the core of Emanuel’s rhetoric, even as other senior U.S. officials strike a more collegial tone in their meetings with Chinese officials in a bid to establish “a floor” for the high-stakes U.S.-China relationship.
“I’m for a dialogue, but I’m also not for being, as my father would say, a schmuck,” Emanuel said in a Wall Street Journal podcast last month.
He went on to air a series of grievances with Beijing — from Xi’s apparent duplicity during a 2015 press conference in the Rose Garden, when he claimed that “China does not intend to pursue militarization” of artificial islands in the South China Sea, to China’s reputation for intellectual property theft.
“If they’re going to — the Communist Party, and specifically under XI — use lying and cheating as a modus operandi of the state and its legitimacy, then you would be a fool to go into that discussion, negotiation, not cognizant of what they’re doing,” he said.
The former Chicago mayor then pivoted to a brassy recitation of China’s internal problems, especially their housing crisis and sky-high youth employment rate, which surged above 21% before Beijing stopped publishing the data.
“And my view is keep doing what you’re doing,” he said, referring to China. “You got municipalities in China that make Chicago look like a AAA-rated bond. Keep at it. There is nothing the United States is doing to you that measures what you’ve done to yourself. … I’m ready to have a conversation. I’m also ready not to get in the way of you to doing to yourself what we could never [even] hope on our best day could get done to you.”
That kind of frank criticism from “such a high-profile individual” based in Tokyo, another conservative analyst allowed, could resonate in a region accustomed to hearing Beijing argue that the United States is in decline.
“China spreads whatever narratives it wants to, as it pleases, and we should not be afraid to just push back and say, ‘Look, you know, you can say what you want, but you know, the fact is …’ and then just tell it like it is,” the Heritage Foundation’s Michael Cunningham told the Washington Examiner. “China can talk about … being on the ascendancy and the West declining. And, frankly, they sincerely believe that, but the facts on the ground right now do not indicate that is true.”
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And if other diplomats want to join Emanuel in making that case — the more the merrier, in Cella’s view.
“This is effective and complements the other engagements that we’re having,” the former ambassador said. “Ambassador Emanuel should do a seminar at the Foreign Service Institute on communications and humor to be employed by diplomats.”
