Once upon a time, king Antiochus of Syria, being a warlike sort of fellow, decided that he would conquer Egypt. At that time, Egypt was not in a position to defend itself, and Antiochus and his army were happily marching toward Alexandria, the capital, when with an unpleasant bump they ran right into a Roman ambassador called Caius Popillius Laenas. Laenas did not have an army, although since he was on a foreign mission we can guess that his ceremonial guard (lictors) were with him and were even allowed to put axes in their symbolic bundles of fasces. But there were only eleven or twelve of them and King Antiochus was not unduly concerned.

Laenas was, however, armed with a letter from the Senate, which was addressed to Antiochus and told him that he had better quit his shenanigans and take himself and his army right back home to sit in the corner and think about what they did. Antiochus was a bit puzzled by this, because the Romans had just gotten done with the Third Macedonian war, and he thought they might be a little tired. He told Laenas that he would consult with his advisors and respond to the message, but gigachad Laenas was not interested in waiting around. He happened to be carrying a stick, and he took his stick and drew a circle all the way around King Antiochus, who therefore found himself standing inside the circle drawn by Laenas. And Laenas told the King that before the King left the circle, he ought to think very carefully about his life choices. So the King did, and when he stepped out of the circle, he stepped eastward and marched off back to Antioch, muttering unkind things under his breath.

You might think that after a success like this Laenas would put his feet up and have a snack or something, but he was not done yet. Instead he sailed to Cyprus, an Egyptian possession, where he found it occupied by a Syrian army and fleet. We do not know if he drew any circles around anybody, but it does seem that he told the Syrian army and fleet to take themselves off, and they did.

And that is the story of how a senator with a stick defeated two Syrian armies and one Syrian fleet over two thousand years before the invention of the circle tool.

Are shameless self-plugs allowed? If they are, I'll just say that I have a journal article (my first real publication that isn't an undergrad journal!) coming out that repeats this anecdote, albeit in more brief detail.

Among the many things that one could say were the forte of the U.S. military after WWII and during the Korean War, I daresay that East Asian language skills were NOT among them. Sure, you could fight a global war and transport hundreds of thousands of men and all the food to feed them across the ocean, but someone fluent in Korean? Get out of here.

The individuals that the U.S. military would have to resort to using during the armistice negotiations at the end of the Korean War in 1953 are thus interesting to explore, and expose how language, diplomacy, and interpreters are crucial features of how power is expressed and contested.

There were a good number of U.S. military personnel who spoke Chinese, especially officers who served in China during WWII or the Chinese Civil War. Some U.S. personnel, who were certainly the exception, had also learned Korean either during the military occupation 1945 to 1949 or during the Korean War. But armistice negotiations, which included the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and the DPRK, required an extremely high level of language mastery. More than just fluency, but mastery. Further, the U.S. military wanted one of their "own" as an interpreter. A Chinese language professor or an ROK Army interpreter would not do, the American-led UN Command wanted someone within their hierarchy to hold such an important position.

When the negotiations began in July 1951, the U.S. selected Lt. Kenneth Wu to be their Chinese-language interpreter, and Richard and Horace Underwood III to be their Korean interpreters. Wu is an interesting person which we know little about. An Asian-American officer of Chinese descent who was supposedly born originally in Burma, we know nothing about how he became a U.S. Army officer and what he did after serving in such a high-level capacity during the armistice negotiations. It was later recorded that Wu was good enough at his job that during negotiations, he understood a Chinese general who whispered in his compatriot's ear via an obscure dialect that was not Mandarin that a certain strategic hill would be "ours anyways" by the following morning. What dialect it was is not recorded, but I imagine that it could have been Cantonese or Hokkien. The UN subsequently reinforced that hill ahead of the attack, but failed to hold it nonetheless.

The Underwoods are also interesting. Their grandfather, Horace Underwood the First, was an incredibly important missionary in Korea who pushed the expansion of Presbyterianism in Korea, translated the bible into Korean, and even taught an English class that at one point had a young Syngman Rhee in attendance. There's a statue of him in the campus of the prestigious Yonsei University. Their father, Horace the Second, continued missionary work and eventually worked with the US Army Military Government in Korea. According to one source that I haven't substantiated yet, Horace II's wife was "lost" during the June 25th invasion. (Source: records at the US Army War College in Carlisle, PA).

Richard and Horace III were Army and Navy reserve personnel respectively, the former of whom had only learned Korean as a child growing up and was not a professional interpreter, whereas the latter had been an English teacher at a Christian college in Korea before the war. Richard, perhaps unsurprisingly, quit after about a year of negotiations. He had immense trouble at more formal meetings where more technical language was involved. Horace III and Lt. Wu both stayed on until the armistice was signed in 1953.

Language capability, after the Korean War, became of immense concern for the U.S. Army. They authorized numerous studies and explored changes that could be made to its language school programs. By the time U.S. advisors were being sent to Korea in the late 1960s, some were taking language classes in Korean for almost a year before their deployment.

To me, the role of language and interpreters as exemplified in the odd characters the U.S. had to rely on for the armistice negotiations reflect the changing tides as the U.S. military began to consciously realize that the Pacific, and Asia, were a major region of concern. It wasn't just a frontier anymore or a place to send Navy officers on a year long cruise down the Yangtze. You needed linguists and cultural specialists, schools and curricula, and an exerted effort to increase the military's capabilities in an Asia focus.

The U.S., which had long been a power in the Asia Pacific, suddenly realized that long-standing truth. That moment, when the U.S. military is busy hunting down possible Korean language interpreters for the armistice, and could only come up with two brothers, one of whom only knew Korean from childhood immersion, I imagine was an "oh sh*t" moment.

Of related interest: An interview featuring Horace Underwood III talking about the armistice negotiations, the nature of the Korean people and Korea, after the war. https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.95874

Posting to say that I am entirely here for anyone willing to provide a history of the boardgame Diplomacy.

The role of queens in diplomacy is extremely overlooked in pop culture! While they're often portrayed as pawns in international diplomatic efforts who were "played" in the creation of the alliance, as though they were essentially one-off gifts of artwork or livestock, in reality they would often go on to act as diplomats following their marriage: working contacts in the country where they were stationed, writing letters home to inform family members of what was going on, and trying to persuade the king and important members of the government to act in favor of their country.

Catherine of Aragon represents the rare case of the unofficial becoming official, due to her troubling lack of status between her marriage to Arthur Tudor and her remarriage to his younger brother Henry in the early sixteenth century. From a previous answer:

Finally, in 1503 Isabel sent a fleet to cross the Channel from Flanders to bring back Catherine regardless of the dowry situation. This was a frightening prospect to Henry - Spanish might was succeeding on the continent and he didn't really want to get involved in a military conflict over this - and so he relented, agreeing to have Catherine marry young Henry in June 1506. Unfortunately, Isabel died in late 1504. Catherine's sister Juana then inherited the Castilian crown, which came with the significant baggage of a grasping husband and father who both wanted to rule through her and successfully did so. There was little attention to spare for Catherine's problems, and indeed nothing happened on the day designated for their wedding. Finally, after much justified complaint from Catherine to her father asking for either enough money to clothe and feed herself or else to end all of this, Fernando made her an official ambassador to England in 1507, which would have given her a more solid position and made good use of the friendships and connections she'd made in her years living there. Henry would eventually die in 1509, and one of the first things the new Henry VIII did was to marry Catherine.

In their first meeting in April of 1959, Fidel Castro told Richard Nixon:

"Yours is a great country – the richest, the greatest, the most powerful in the world. But every place I go you seem to be afraid– afraid of Communism…You in America should not be talking so much about your fear of what the Communists may do in Cuba, or in some other country in Latin America, Asia, or Africa. You should be talking more about your own strength and the reasons why your system is superior to Communism or any other kind of dictatorship."

Nixon claimed to have been shocked by Castro's frankness, and may well have been writing truthfully. In his own words, Nixon fumbled into pointing out that Canada was a great customer for U.S. goods, thinking this was an appropriate response to Castro's very clear point about America's anti-communist policies in Latin America.

Nixon was, however, both aware and envious of what he described as an "indefinable qualit[y]" which made Castro a "leader of men."

That is, despite Nixon generally thinking Castro had no idea how to lead a state (he described him having less of a real idea of how a nation operated than any leader Nixon had met in over 50 countries as Vice President), he was nonetheless charmed by Castro.

Memcon, April 19, 1-4, Conversation with Castro, Box 10, Pre-Presidential Series 325, Richard Nixon Pre Presidential Materials, Richard Nixon Library.