The other day I spent an evening at a rodeo in the shadow of the Colorado mountains. I was in the company of a delegation from Beijing’s elite Central Party School, a substantial slice of the US foreign policy establishment and a fair smattering of geopolitical thinkers from Europe. We were all wearing cowboy hats.
As the sun set over a spectacular ridge line, I hesitated to imagine the reaction of the rodeo’s riders and roughnecks had they known they were being cheered on by a group of Chinese communists. Even worse, the cadres were in cahoots with a bunch of soggy European liberals. Colorado is a swing state in the presidential election but I saw few likely Democrats. The rodeo was in what an American friend called “gun country”. Mitt Romney won the T-shirt vote hands down.
Our host was the Aspen Strategy Group, which a few years ago teamed up with Aspen Italia and the party school to create an informal trialogue of Americans, Europeans and Chinese. Watching the bronc riding and steer roping was a break from two days of discussions about everything from the euro crisis and the role of the dollar to US-China rivalry in east Asia and the rupture in the UN Security Council about Syria. Formality somehow dissolves when you are wearing a Stetson hat.