Just hours before President Xi Jinping’s arrival in Prague on Monday for the first state visit by China’s head of state to the Czech Republic, his host, President Miloš Zeman, gave a curious interview to Beijing’s state broadcaster, CCTV. He called the impending visit “a restart” for Czech-Chinese relations, marking a break with a period when Czech governments were “very submissive to the pressure from the United States and from the European Union.”

When he is in Washington this week, the social democratic Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Bohuslav Sobotka, will be downplaying Mr. Zeman’s quite unambiguous snarl at the closest allies of the Czech Republic. Under the Czech constitutional system, after all, the president plays a ceremonial role and his foreign policy views are largely irrelevant.