Michelle Obama snubs Peng Liyuan, is First Lady diplomacy dead?

The man who turns up stag at a couple’s party is a bit of an unwelcome oddball for violating the protocol that governs such social interactions. Later today, Barack Obama will find himself in unlikely breach of that protocol when he turns up for a high-power double date without his wife Michelle Obama by his side. In fact, a diplomatic storm in a tea cup has already erupted over Michelle Obama’s absence when her husband hosts Chinese President Xi Jinping and his charismatic wife Peng Liyuan in the laid-back surroundings of California later today. There had been build-up of Chinese expectations that Peng, a Chinese opera star who has been an unlikely instrument of Chinese Soft Power diplomacy on her overseas tours alongside her husband, would advance her own brand of First Lady Diplomacy at her meeting with Michelle Obama on the sidelines of the meeting of their respective husbands. [caption id=“attachment_848349” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  US First Lady Michelle Obama. AP[/caption] Barely a day before Xi and Peng were to arrive in California, this commentary had claimed that the planned interaction between Michelle Obama and Peng, “the wildly popular first ladies in the US and China, would in fact serve to thaw the emerging “cool war” between the two countries. A“partnership” between Michelle Obama and Peng, who “have a lot in common”, would be good for both the US and China, it added. But it turns out now that Michelle has opted to stay back in Washington and be with her daughters, who are completing their academic year. This has disappointed analysts in China, some of whom perceive this as a “snub” from Michelle Obama. Zhang Ming, a political scientist at China’s Renmin University, told The Telegraph that this “strange” violation of “normal diplomatic etiquette” would “not go down very well” in Beijing. Perhaps Michelle Obama “doesn’t like Xi Jinping - or maybe she is just really busy,” Zhang wondered. “But being busy shouldn’t be an excuse for missing an event like this.” Over in the US too some commentators see Michelle Obama’s absence as a diplomatic mis-step that chips away at recent US exercise of “smart diplomacy”. And particularly since the Xi-Obama meeting has been billed by the US administration as an effort to forge a personal rapport in order to advance the bilateral relationship, Michelle Obama’s absence is a “diplomatic own-goal,” according to Daniel W Drezener, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. “For the Chinese, this relationship is a lot about prestige. Even small gestures that acknowledge the importance of China in the eyes of the United States can matter,” he writes. The exercise of First Lady diplomacy between countries has been known frequently to run into rough weather, as Indian bureaucrats themselves will acknowledge. In 2008, when the then divorced French President Nicholas Sarkozy was to have travelled to India along with his glamorous singer-girlfriend Carla Bruni, it threw Indian protocol officers into something of a tizzy. Media reports abounded with speculation about whether Bruni, a former model, would be allowed to attend official banquets in Sarkozy’s honour – since there was no account in the protocol manuals about precisely where a “girlfriend” of a visiting head of state should be seated – or whether it would be proper for her to even share his five-star hotel suite. In the end, Bruni sidestepped the diplomatic issue by not travelling to India, claiming she had to record a new album. Indian protocol officers were better prepared earlier this year when Sarkozy’s successor Francois Hollande travelled to India with his girlfriend Valerie Trierweiler. The diplomatic rules were relaxed to treat her as his “honorary wife” – and she was accorded a full-fledged “red carpet treatment.” India’s treatment of Trierweiler was rather more tactful than her experience at a G8 summit in Washington DC last year when, she recalled, American journalists repeatedly questioned her about her status at the summit. “They kept asking if I was actually allowed to be there. What kind of era are we living in?” she wondered. First Lady diplomacy, of course, counts for a lot more in Presidential systems of government, but even Indian “first ladies’ have been known to push the frontiers on this score. The sight of a Gursharan Kaur, dressed in a stately silk sari and flashing diamonds during her appearances at the White House and other world capitals, lends rather more colour and liveliness to the proceedings than her husband and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh can summon up. That’s one department in which the two men who are widely considered the front-runners to be the next Prime Minister will have no marital help. Both Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi are bachelors, and will inevitably turn up stag wherever they go, perhaps requiring a reworking of the diplomatic manuals by their hosts and a reworking of the schedules of the First Ladies of the host countries. Even given India’s record of having bachelor Prime Ministers (AB Vajpayee) and Presidents (APJ Abdul Kalam), and widowed Prime Ministers (Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi), it will likely mean that India’s next Prime Minister will likely have to forego the chance to harness the powers of First Lady diplomacy.