Eyeing the White House After Service in China
The United States defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, did not expect to be greeted with open arms when he arrived in Beijing last January on a mission to defrost relations with the People’s Liberation Army. But neither did he expect the welcome he got: the maiden flight of China’s first stealth fighter, to all appearances a carefully timed and public thumb in the Pentagon’s eye. Blindsided, Pentagon officials considered whether the best response would be to pack up and leave before the mission had even begun. The American ambassador, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., advised forcefully against it. Too much was at stake, he said. Better to make clear Mr. Gates’s displeasure, then move on to more serious business.
Which is what Mr. Gates did, raising the issue with President Hu Jintao and relaying Mr. Hu’s embarrassed response to reporters shortly afterward. “Jon came in and gave sensible advice,” said a person who was privy to the discussion and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the debate had been both private and official. “It was classic and proper handling of a difficult situation with the Chinese.” It was also classic Huntsman. The ambassador, who was to leave his post on Saturday, has proved deft with the carrot and stick, mixing measured criticism of China’s government with a relentless effort to cement its fractious relations with the United States. It has not always worked: in recent months, as China’s growing crackdown on domestic dissidents drew Mr. Huntsman’s pointed objections, the efforts of the ambassador and other American diplomats have been angrily rejected by Beijing.
When President Obama selected Mr. Huntsman, then the popular Republican governor of Utah, as ambassador in 2009, pundits speculated that the president was working to edge him out of the race for the 2012 Republican nomination. Mr. Huntsman has implied otherwise in speeches, expressing respect for Mr. Obama’s skills and saying that they share a common cause in improving relations. Now that Mr. Huntsman is publicly pondering a run for the nomination anyway — an unstated but clear reason behind his departure — the question may not be whether his China stint hurt his chances, but whether it improved them. Clearly, he did not achieve the goals he set. In a valedictory speech last month in Shanghai, he put his frustrations with China’s prickly and suspicious diplomacy on full display.
Ambassador Jon Huntsman is an inspiration to all American men and a class act! He is one person who I would love to interview and invite to a dinner party if I had the chance to invite anyone in the world!
Polished by years in American politics and fluent in Mandarin, Mr. Huntsman was nothing if not charming in his courtship of the Chinese. He regularly reminded Chinese audiences of his adopted Chinese daughter and his years in Asia as a youth. He flummoxed Chinese security guards — but perhaps left a distinctively American impression on Chinese diplomats — by forgoing the requisite limousine and suit and instead bicycling in casual clothes to several meetings at the Chinese Foreign Ministry.