Prime Minister Harold Wilson recast the alliance as a "close relationship", but neither he nor President Lyndon B. Johnson had any direct experience of foreign policy, and Wilson's attempt to mediate in Vietnam, where the United Kingdom was co-chairman with the Soviet Union of the Geneva Conference, was unwelcome to the president. "I won't tell you how to run Malaysia and you don't tell us how to run Vietnam", Johnson snapped in 1965. However, relations were sustained by U.S. recognition that Wilson was being criticised at home by his neutralist Labour left for not condemning American involvement in the war.