Talking to you means you're awesome

A 2-Yglesias-post day. Responding to McCain's idiotic notion that merely talking to someone enhances their prestige, Matthew Yglesias asks:

Our guys talk to their guys, the meeting happens, and this gives Khatami enhanced prestige in the eyes of whom? And what does this enhanced prestige allow him to do? What, in other words, are we afraid of?

The answer is that this isn't foreign policy, it's imperialism. When you believe yourself to be the center of all that is right and good in the world, you believe that legitimacy is something that you have a monopoly on, and distracting people who speak different languages are best ignored, lest we rub some of our awesomeness on them.

Or, as Winston Churchill said of another insurgent back in the day:

"It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor."

Unfortunately for Churchill, the King-Emperor, and the Empire itself, (but fortunately for the rest of us) legitimacy didn't flow downhill from Buckingham Palace, it also flowed uphill from those pesky Indians themselves. And whether we like it or not, we don't get to pick and choose who runs which countries in the world.