Democrats Questioned Over Shadow Diplomacy
April 8, 2007 — -- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson arrived in North Korea today in a bout of freelance diplomacy aimed at engendering something the Bush administration finds hard to come by -- goodwill.
Richardson's official mission is to claim the remains of American troops killed in the Korean War. But the visit to Pyongyang comes just days before a critical deadline for North Korea to shut down its nuclear plant. He has also asked for a tour of one of North Korea's reactors.
The trip has the blessing of President Bush, but it marks the latest of several high-profile foreign policy missions being conducted outside the Bush administration.
Last week, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a controversial visit to Syria, against the express wishes of the president. And House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., is visiting parliamentarians in Egypt.
For Richardson, the visit is about more than diplomacy. The governor is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, and as a former ambassador to the United Nations, he's hoping the trip will showcase his foreign policy credentials on the campaign trail.
The president has given Richardson's trip his imprimatur. But the White House and its allies say Pelosi encouraged a state sponsor of terror.
Bush's former United Nations ambassador, John Bolton, told ABC News that Pelosi's visit was "naïve" and "foolish."
Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state under President Clinton, said the alternative diplomacy is making up for a paucity of dialogue between the Bush administration and key governments.
"I think the reason for this is that there is a vacuum in diplomacy," Albright said in an interview with ABC News. "This administration is primarily reliant on military force and not enough on diplomacy. … Because the administration has no policy they have decided to demonize Nancy Pelosi and that is just crazy."
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., has been highly critical of the current speaker.
"I think it's very important not to have two foreign policies. And I think it's very dangerous for America to do what Speaker Pelosi did," Gingrich said on Fox News.
Prominent politicians have a long tradition of engaging in alternative diplomacy -- including Gingrich, who as the Republican speaker of the House made a visit to China during the Democratic Clinton administration in 1997.
Former President Jimmy Carter riled the Bush administration when he traveled to Cuba in 2002 and called for an end to the U.S. trade embargo against the regime of Cuba's Fidel Castro.
It's not merely politicians who pursue back-channel communications. Hollywood celebrities have made forays into international diplomacy -- garnering headlines and criticism, as when Jane Fonda visited Hanoi during the Vietnam War, or when Sean Penn visited Baghdad ahead of the 2003 Iraq war.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson has frequently acted as an informal liaison between the United States and so-called rogue regimes, meeting with Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat in 1979 and negotiating for the freedom of hostages on more than one occasion.
Jackson said he and other freelance diplomats have succeeded precisely because they operate outside government rules.
"First I tried and I communicated. The administration had a no-talk policy," Jackson told ABC News of negotiations with Iraq during the Reagan administration. "Well, no-talk policy seldom gets the desired results."