President Obama reintroduces diplomacy to American international politics.

Presidents Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's socialist leader, met Friday and shook hands on the sidelines of a summit of their hemisphere's democracies.

Obama walked across a hotel meeting room to meet Chavez for the first time, said a senior U.S. administration official who witnessed it and spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the details of the event. The official said Obama initiated the encounter.

"We shook each other's hands like gentlemen, and it was predictable this would happen," Chavez said.

"We don't have any complexes that would prevent us from extending our hands to each other. I'm grateful for his gesture."

This may seem like a small gesture, but it will have very powerful repercussions around the world, and show other nations that we now have a leader who reaches out to those he may not see eye to eye with rather than to vilify them and call them names like a petulant child.

And with Hillary making nice with Cuba it looks like we may finally have an opportunity to bring countries to the negotiation table that have long been left in the shadows, allowing their resentment to grow and grow.

I know full well that Obama will come under attack by the right wing fringe groups, but I for one have a great deal of hope that with Obama in office we can increase our sphere of influence in a non-adversarial way. Isn't it time we stopped flexing our muscles and demonstrated our compassion and intelligence instead?