So, at first glance, the fact that Obama won’t be meeting with the Dalai Lama when the latter is in Washington this month seems like a betrayal. The question, as it often is with Obama, is whether the president is playing a very subtle, long game to achieve his ideals, or abandoning those ideals altogether out of weak-kneed realism. ~Michelle Goldberg

Those can’t be the only options, and that can’t be the real question here. If every Obama decision has to be classified as either idealism by other means or “weak-kneed realism,” there will be a great deal of confusion, because there is good reason to think that neither description applies in most of these cases. When Obama refrained from speaking out on behalf of Iranian protesters this summer, I don’t think it was a long-term cunning plan to help the Iranian opposition by not overtly helping them. It was nonetheless the right decision for the U.S. and the one that better serves the interests of the Iranian opposition. Had Obama met with the Dalai Lama, what aspect of Chinese policy in Tibet would have changed? Nothing would have changed, because repeated meetings between our Presidents and the Dalai Lama have made no significant difference in how Beijing treats Tibet. Domination and control of Tibet are part and parcel of the new Chinese nationalist narrative, and it is hard to imagine what our government would really be able to do to change that. These meetings and the postponement of this meeting are occasions for moral posturing that accomplishes little or nothing.

Many people object that Obama does not meet with enough dissidents and exiles and he does not say enough on their behalf, but other than making himself feel and look better what do such meetings and speeches achieve? Goldberg floats the idea that Obama may be able to do more for Tibet by not antagonizing Beijing by meeting with the Dalai Lama first, but this holds out the hope that another state is going to be willing to budge on something that it regards as non-negotiable. As a matter of diplomatic protocol, it seems appropriate to meet with Chinese government leaders before meeting with the de facto leader of Tibetan resistance, but when Obama finally does meet him what will he have proved by doing so?

I don’t entirely agree with David Lindsay at PostRight when he says that Obama was “right to snub” the Dalai Lama, because it doesn’t matter to me whether Tibet was a feudal theocracy or a democratic paradise in 1959. No one needs to endorse the Han supremacism embodied in Chinese policy towards Tibet (and Xinjiang) to recognize that these are China’s internal affairs and nothing is going to be gained for Tibetans and Uighurs by publicly meddling or complaining about things that Beijing believes are none of our concern. Tibetan autonomy or independence would most likely be better for ethnic Tibetans, but we cannot successfully conduct relations with other major powers by continually encouraging the fragmentation and dissolution of their nation-states.