President Donald Trump has no business inviting Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to the White House, but not necessarily because Duterte has been running a counternarcotics operation that has resulted in thousands of vigilante deaths, or because he himself has boasted about killing purported drug dealers in cold blood. As a leader, Duterte is apparently criminal, certainly foulmouthed, and hardly principled.
Yet U.S. presidents and their Cabinet or subcabinet officials have met with worse — think Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader who pursued the “ethnic cleansing” murder of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, or even Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, with whom Trump met recently despite U.S. human rights concerns. The paramount reason the United States government and people should not host the Philippine president is because he is advancing policies in Asia that run counter to U.S. national security interests.