The remarkable face to face meeting of the leaders of North and South Korea is being watched with hope by many observers, given the long decades of enmity between the two and the recent nuclear sabre-rattling of President Trump.

At least in my circles, I see virtually no one condemning the meeting, though many are skeptical that it will lead to any practical result.

Winston Churchill said, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” Harold Macmillan later misquoted it as ‘it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war,’ which is the quote that has stuck in the popular imagination. The meaning is much the same in either case, and the maxim is little attended to in either of its forms.

The administration of George W. Bush was notorious for trying to pretend that those states it viewed as enemies did not exist. Bush’s officials and diplomats tried not even to be in the same room with an Iranian diplomat, and Syria was likewise thoroughly scrubbed from existence. Of course, Iran and Syria were still there, and arguably handily defeated Bush’s Iraq boondoggle. Ignoring them did not equal defeating them. Moreover, both ignoring and boycotting them in some ways backfired. The US sanctions on Syria may have played a role in tipping it into insecurity. They were intended to do so, but it is difficult to see how the US benefited, whereas Iran came out on top.

In contrast, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia on several occasions hosted Iranian government figures in Riyadh.

Now, the new Saudi regime of King Salman and his son, crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, have adopted the old Bush policy. They are all about denigrating rival states that don’t toe their party line, and about shunning them.

So here’s an idea.

Bin Salman should meet Iranian President Hassan Rouhani for a wideranging discussion of their regional conflicts and Cold War. Even the quirky populist, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had been brought over for consultations by the previous king. In contrast, Rouhani is an experienced negotiator and a man of wide culture, and meeting him would be a hundred times more productive than meeting his predecessor.