I ALWAYS tend to go macro, and so when Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was invited for a visit to the country by Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr., I take it not in the context of the courtesy customarily extended to friendly neighbors but in respect to why top-ranking foreign officials are invited for visits by their counterparts in other countries.

It is one thing for a foreign minister to go for a visit to another country, it is another for him to be invited to come. I distinctly recall, for instance, that the Japanese ambassador was invited for talks by the US foreign secretary on the very eve of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

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