Street fighting, man!

Politicians are a petty lot. If good old-fashioned diplomacy (or war) doesn’t work, one tactic pretty much guaranteed to annoy a rival country is to rename the street on which their embassy sits in honor of someone they don’t like — then sit back and watch them send out official correspondence on letterheads bearing the offending name.

Such a spat is happening right now in the U.S.

Senior Chinese politicians are seemingly terrified that the street in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington could be renamed “Liu Xiaobo Plaza,” in honor of the activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in July.

Beijing takes the threat so seriously that, according to the Washington Post, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi raised the issue with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. The former was even said to have called for a presidential veto if Congress approves the name change (because if you’re looking for diplomatic tact, Donald Trump’s clearly the go-to guy).

The bill that could lead to the name change was put forward by failed Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz, who said: “I’m glad to hear it’s got their attention. I’ll be even more glad when they change their conduct and stop being gross human-rights abusers.”

The response from Chinese citizens, according to the broadcaster Phoenix News, is to change the name of the street on which the U.S. Embassy in Beijing sits to “Snowden Street” after NSA whistleblower Edward, according to translation from Chinese by Quartz Media.

The U.S. embassy in Beijing | Ed Jones/AFP via GettyImages

The issue of renaming streets isn’t confined to Embassy Row. Throughout Eastern Europe, street signs have been changed to rid them of connections to communism.

In Madrid, Plaza Margaret Thatcher has been controversial since the name was adopted in 2014. The decision to honor the former British prime minister was taken while Ana Botella was mayor of the Spanish capital. Botella is married to José María Aznar, former prime minister, and Plaza Margaret Thatcher is a short stroll from the headquarters of his conservative People’s Party.

The signs were vandalized repeatedly in the few first months, and when leftist Manuela Carmena took over from Botella as mayor in 2015, she promised to change the name.

That hasn’t happened. Carmena is instead focusing her attention on streets with connections to former dictator Francisco Franco.

A brief history of being petty

Proposing to rechristen diplomatic addresses isn’t just a joke (well, not always), and it dates back at least to the Cold War. In 1984, a bill was put forward to change the address of the then-Soviet Embassy on 16th Street in Washington to “1 Andrei Sakharov Plaza,” in honor of the Russian dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was then in internal exile.

The Americans are still at it. In 2015, legislation was introduced that would have changed the name of the stretch of Wisconsin Avenue in front of the Russian Embassy in Washington to “Boris Nemtsov Plaza” and change the embassy’s address to “1 Boris Nemtsov Plaza.”

“The creation of ‘Boris Nemtsov Plaza’ would permanently remind Putin’s regime and the Russian people that these dissidents’ voices live on, and that defenders of liberty will not be silenced,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio said at the time in a statement, according to the Washington Post. “Whether it is looking at a street sign or thousands of pieces of correspondence addressed ‘1 Boris Nemtsov Plaza,’ it will be abundantly clear to the Kremlin that the intimidation and murder of opposition figures does not go unnoticed.”

It cuts both ways, of course. In the late 1990s, a Manhattan street corner opposite Nigeria’s Mission to the United Nations was renamed as “Kudirat Abiola Corner” after the wife of Moshood Abiola, who appeared to have won the 1993 presidential election before being arrested by the dictator Sani Abacha. Two weeks later, the street in front of the U.S. Embassy in Lagos was renamed after Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

The Iranians are also fans of the tactic. They want to rename the Tehran thoroughfare on which the Saudi Arabian Embassy stands as “Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr Street,” after a Shia cleric executed by the Saudis.

And they’ve done it before: In 1981, Tehran changed the name of the street where its U.K. Embassy is based from Churchill Street to Bobby Sands Street, after the Irish Republican Army member who died while on hunger strike.

In a move straight out of the James Bond playbook, the British Embassy — to avoid the embarrassment of having an IRA figurehead on its letterhead — sealed off the old entrance and knocked down a wall to create an entrance on nearby Ferdowsi Avenue. Official documents could then list Ferdowsi Avenue as the embassy’s address, safe in the knowledge that the Iranians were highly unlikely to drop Ferdowsi (a poet who’s a national hero).

Road rage

As relations between the EU and U.K get frostier thanks to Brexit, perhaps a street name change could be the way forward (to boost diplomats’ morale if nothing else).

The British Embassy sits on Avenue d’Auderghem in Brussels’ EU quarter, a stone’s throw (and they’ve doubtless tested that theory) from the European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters and the European Council’s shiny new Europa building.

In the spirit of the Brexit talks so far (i.e., mean-spirited and farcical), imagine the hilarity if Avenue d’Auderghem were renamed “€100 Billion Brexit Bill Boulevard”

In the spirit of the Brexit talks so far (i.e., mean-spirited and farcical), imagine the hilarity if Avenue d’Auderghem were renamed “€100 Billion Brexit Bill Boulevard,” “The French Only Work 35 Hours A Week Road” or, perhaps most hurtful of all, “Germans Always Win on Penalties Platz.”

Of course, if the EU were to pull a stunt like that, they could expect some British reaction.

The European Commission has its London base at 32 Smith Square in Westminster, a five-minute walk from the Houses of Parliament. Would anyone, aside from perhaps the Smith family, mind if local authorities changed its name to “Up Yours Delors Terrace,” or maybe even the Brexiteers’ choice, “Freedom Square — June 23 2016”?

The tactic doesn’t have to be confined to Brexit talks. As relations sour between Germany and Turkey, Berlin could rename the street containing the Turkish Embassy “Goat F–ker Straße,” to commemorate comedian Jan Böhmermann’s poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The Germans are of course known for their sense of humor, so how about renaming the street housing the Greek Embassy “Wolfgang Schäuble Allee”? And while Franco-German relations are on a high since Emmanuel Macron’s election, if the fresh-faced president steps out of line — too much hanging about with that nasty Mr. Trump, say — Berlin could always strike a low blow by renaming the street outside the French Embassy “Marshall Pétain Street.”

The EU could also have some fun at the expense of Poland’s troublesome right-wing government. Forget threatening to activate Article 7. Instead why not change the name of the street of the Polish Embassy to “Donald Tusk Way.”

Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot news editor.