Munich As Propaganda Fest
I love Wang Yi’s response when The New York Times’s Michael Crowley caught him in a hallway at the Munich Security Conference Saturday and asked the Chinese foreign minister if he planned to meet Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines.
“He simply chuckled,” Crowley wrote of Wang at the conclusion of his report.
Chuckled. I am reminded of that moment last year when Blinken, after formal talks in Moscow, pulled Sergei Lavrov into a private room at the Kremlin and asked Russia’s foreign minister if it was true Moscow’s plan was to reconstruct the Russian Empire. Lavrov stared, turned, and left the room—no reply, no handshake, no farewell, just an abrupt exit, a leaving behind.