We started with junk food. Then we had junk sport.

Now we have Junk Diplomacy.

This takes numerous exotic forms. But in its mainstream version it consists of high-level expensive and expansive Dialogue, the more vacuous the better.

Thus European Voice reports poor prospects for this week’s EU/Latin America Summit in Lima. Some 50 heads of state and government are gathering, leaving behind them a wide trampled path of carbon footprints.

Likely useful operational outcomes?

Nil.

Gordon Brown and President Sarkozy sensibly have decided not to go. The UK apparently will be represented instead by Baroness Ashton. She will not be popular. Her presence will send all the other heads of state/government a (for them) patronising message that HMG think they are wasting their time. A message all the more vexing because it is true.

The European Voice article also contains explicitly anti-American propaganda:

Latin America now has the biggest gap between rich and poor in the world, a gap whose widening can be traced back to the neo-liberal business policies pursued in the 1970s and 1980s by US-backed military dictators. 

Really? The corruption and maladministration by all those home-grown etatist-populists have had nothing to do with it?

One problem with EU junk diplomacy is that it dumbs down the prospects of action in areas where the EU actually could make a useful difference.

Thus those EU member states which romanticise the Cuban communist system block action by those (such as Poland) which thinks that Europe should be doing far more to promote democracy there.

This is stupid in principle, but also operationally unwise in the EU’s own terms. When Cuban communism collapses the EU will not be as well positioned as it might have been to influence the turbulent transition, and nasty American values will pour in instead.

Another problem is the fact that because such gatherings need to be regular and frequent to show how just much we value Dialogue, any strategic content is leeched out of them.

Thus the best quote European Voice can find to justify the Summit in Lima is summit as “an excellent opportunity for both regions to get to know each other’s priorities and discover on what there could be bilateral agreement and on what agreement might be more difficult”.

Utter twaddle.

One able civil servant in Europe could knock out the key points here on a few sides of paper, run it past an oppo somewhere in Latin America, and everyone could read it at home. Huge savings to the EU and Latin America taxpayer. Leaders get on with leading.

The answer to junk diplomacy is the same as the answer to junk food.

Go on a diet.