Everyone is shocked — shocked — that President Trump tweeted that he might be prepared to accept information from foreign governments in an election. Fair enough. No less a sage than Judge Napolitano says it would be a felony. How, though, are all these foreign countries supposed to get heard when the world’s only remaining superpower holds an election that will affect everyone on the planet?

It happens that I have been wrestling with this problem for years, starting when I was a young foreign correspondent in Asia. Those were the days when the world caught a cold if America sneezed. So it seemed only fair to try to come up with a system in which foreigners could get a word in edgewise as Americans went to the polls. I wrote three pieces on this head for the Wall Street Journal’s Asian edition.

The first, issued in September 1979, argued that anyone anywhere ought to be able to vote in the American presidential election. At first blush, I conceded, the idea might seem preposterous. “After all,” I wrote, “in this age of raging nationalism, what nation in its right mind would surrender some of its sovereignty to someone else’s citizens?” It would, I warned, be “representation without taxation.”

Yet, the column suggested, the world was ripe for a second American Revolution. The fortunes of the world had become “inextricably linked with the decisions made by the American president and his cabinet.” So “giving outsiders a voice in the elections would go a long way toward placating the resentment of American power.” Alas, the idea went exactly nowhere.

So I oiled the manual typewriter on which newspapermen worked in those days and cranked out another column. That argued that any head of government anywhere ought to be able to run for president of America. That way, foreigners complaining about how, say, Jimmy Carter was handling things could take their cases directly to the American people.

Why, say, should American voters trust the Soviet party boss, Leonid Brezhnev, if they’ve never even seen him? If Brezhnev wanted the American Senate to ratify a strategic arms limitation treaty (a big communist goal of the era), he ought to have to campaign for it like any other schlepper. The column offered a slogan: “SALT for every chicken in the melting pot.”

The Boston Globe carried the column with a brilliant cartoon by Samuel Whitehead. It showed Brezhnev, Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin, Yasser Arafat, Deng Xiaoping, and King Khalid lined up at a factory gate, trying to shake hands with a passing worker, who looked out at the reader with a decidedly dour demeanor. I appreciated the play, but that idea also went nowhere.

So I made one last stab at it. This was a column proposing that we establish a third house of Congress. The idea was that we could keep the House, representing the American people, and the Senate, representing the American states. We’d simply add a camera consisting of delegates elected from foreign countries. A law could be passed on a vote of any two of the three cameras.

No one bought it. No newspapers followed up. No activists started a movement. No foreigners glommed onto the idea. And so here we are today, when foreign governments are sneaking around, trying to collude with the American president. He’s putting out tweets saying he might even listen to them. And everyone is in a swivet. They can say a lot of things except that I failed to warn them.

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Image: The drawing, by Samuel B. Whitehead, appeared originally in the October 17, 1979, number of the Boston Globe.