Editorial: Rahm Emanuel, America’s undiplomatic diplomat, makes more trouble. What is his agenda?

The last time we wrote about this former Chicago mayor, current U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, he had made a magnanimous little video offering support for incoming Mayor Brandon Johnson and done some schmoozing at the G7 summit in Tokyo. Oh, and he’d also made a few headlines encouraging Japan to do a better job supporting LGBTQ rights and same-sex marriage, cheerily blowing past the long-established protocol wherein foreign diplomats do not meddle in domestic affairs.

There have been a few months of quiet. But now America’s famously undiplomatic diplomat is back poking at the bear and blowing the dust of such long-cherished weapons as sarcasm and biting humor, qualities that the U.S. State Department generally puts at the bottom of its very long list of ambassadorial attributes.

We suspected it would be thus when Democratic progressives managed to get President Joe Biden, a longtime Emanuel fan, to turn him down for his desired gig as secretary of transportation (a position for which he was eminently qualified) and assign him to shake hands in a metaphorical Siberia, of function if not of location. Progressives were fine with that, they said at the time, thinking Emanuel would quietly disappear into the salad courses of fancy dinners.

Wrong. (We told you it wouldn’t work out that way.)

And good for him.

Emanuel has been going after Chinese Communist Party chief Xi Jinping. Perhaps our former mayor was watching Fox News on Thursday when Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, referred to Xi as a “dictator.” That accurate choice of word was enough to get the German ambassador to China summoned on Sunday to hear China’s outrage at the remark, which it extremely, absurdly dubbed “extremely absurd.”

But Emanuel focused on the disappearance of Defense Minister Li Shangfu. And in an epic tweet (or an X, or whatever it now is called), he wrote, drawing on everything from the TV show “Only Murders in the Building” to his long-standing affection for Chicago Shakespeare Theater:

“As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’ 1st: Defense Minister Li Shangfu hasn’t been seen or heard from in 3 weeks. 2nd: He was a no-show for his trip to Vietnam. Now: He’s absent from his scheduled meeting with the Singaporean Chief of Navy because he was placed on house arrest???...Might be getting crowded in there. Good news is I heard he’s paid off his mortgage with the Country Garden real estate developers. #MysteryInBeijingBuilding.”

If any other ambassador in the history of ambassadoring has written such a tweet, we hope you will write us and let us know.

This Rahm-style intervention is not as easily dismissed as his needling of Japan: That time, he was able to credibly say that he merely was supporting stated U.S. policy supporting individual rights. This time, he’s not only dealing with a different country, but he’s also gone much further in his criticism of China than Biden’s own Cabinet members, who’ve been using more soothing rhetoric as China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, and U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met in Malta over the weekend. The talks on that island are an advance preview of a possible meeting between Xi and Biden at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders meeting in November; the agendas reportedly did not include discussion of “disappearances.”

Emanuel, it appears, did not get that “softly, softly” memo.

We’re intrigued by the question of what was on our former mayor’s agenda.

Was he replaying his old Washington role of tacitly approved attack dog? Was he going rogue out of a sense of personal moral outrage at China’s lack of transparency? Was he separating himself just a tad from the Biden administration in an attempt to better position himself in the event of a Biden withdrawal from a bid for a second term?

Was he setting himself up for another run for office? And what office might that be? National? Local?

Most likely, in our view, Emanuel was reminding the Biden inner circle of his political skills and his willingness to take the heat for being a caustic back channel, thus allowing Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to take the high road.

Whatever the reason, and several may have been in play at once, you have to hand it to Emanuel for the verve with which he did what he did, drawing attention to these shameful Chinese “disappearances” from public view, just as too many political figures also are “disappearing” In Russia.

Compare that to Donald Trump, a presidential candidate preening odiously at the self-serving flattery coming his way from Vladimir Putin, a poster child for vanishing opposing persons (suicides, plane crashes) while saying absolutely nothing about his doings.

Emanuel is right to force authoritarian world leaders who would prefer not to draw attention to their actions to squirm a little in the sunlight.

We’ll end with this.

Here in Chicago, we’re now worried about whether our mayor will find the courage to strike a path separate from the Chicago Teachers Union.

We miss the days when we had a mayor ready to take on China.

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