diplomacy

Jimmy Carter's talks with Hamas trigger a feud with the State Department.

Is there any living ex-president you'd less want to be trapped with on a desert island than Jimmy Carter? Judged by that yardstick, his possible prosecution under the Logan Act for his latest act of freelance diplomacy in the Middle East -- as some have come close to suggesting -- seems like a great idea. But let's be serious: the best thing you could do with this 209-year-old statute is junk it.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice deepens a diplomatic rift by skipping Argentina on her trip to Latin America.

The "carnal relations" that former Argentine foreign minister Guido di Tella helped to inaugurate between his country and the United States in the 1990s have long since cooled. Condi can't be bothered to give new President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner a peck on the cheek, much less do the tango -- just as President Bush didn't drop by to see outgoing President Nestor Kirchner on his trip to the region last year. It's easy to blame the break-up on the Kirchners' anti-American rhetoric and their embrace of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. But that ignores the ripple effect of the Bush administration's decision seven years ago to pull the plug on an International Monetary Fund rescue package for Argentina, prompting the country to default on its debts and paving the path to power for the Kirchners. MORE

Defense Secretary Robert Gates returned mostly empty-handed from India, with India's ruling coalition still sitting on a landmark bilateral deal on civilian nuclear cooperation.

Gates's setback says more about the frailties of Indian coalition politics than about a cooling of bilateral ties. The U.S. and India are much cuddlier strategically than during my days as a foreign service officer in Bombay in the late 1980s, when the CIA station chief had to use a rickety sailboat from the Royal Bombay Yacht Club to snoop on India's western fleet (or maybe that was just his excuse to go sailing on Uncle Sam's dime). From 2006 to 2007, U.S. military assistance to India more than quadrupled to more than $1 billion (up from near zero in my day), the Indians recently agreed to buy six C-130 cargo planes, and the U.S. may win a $10 billion deal to supply fighter jets. (Last year, India was -- after China -- the world's second biggest buyer of military hardware, mostly from Russia and Israel.) And Indians feel a lot warmer toward the United States than your average Pakistani, despite billions in assistance over the years to that putative "ally." MORE