A 1999 report in the Ottawa Citizen recalled that Joachim von Ribbentrop, a onetime resident of that Canadian city who later became Hitler's foreign minister, was "urbane, polished" and "always superbly tailored."
A 1984 Washington Post profile said Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, an acolyte of Joseph Stalin, was "invariably urbane and sophisticated."
The New York Times ran this subhead on a 1986 obituary for Maoist Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai: "Urbane, Infinitely Patient."
Even Yasser Arafat had a mannerly lieutenant. A 1983 piece in the Washington Post referenced "Arafat's normally cool and urbane deputy Rahman."
Cuba's dictator, the most famous cigar lover on Earth, needed no whiskey swigging substitute when, in 1979, he wanted to deliver his message to the world. He became his own courteous spokesman. "It was a far more polished and urbane Fidel Castro who addressed the U.N. General Assembly," noted U.S. News and World Report.
Obviously, the word urbane as used in a news reports and commentaries is rarely without irony -- intended or unintended. When intended, the word is cautionary: Beware, this bloody dictatorship has a smooth-talking public relations man. When unintended, it reeks of appeasement: Don't believe it when they call that man a threat to peace -- his deputy prime minister is as nice as Miss Manners.
So steeped in irony is the customary use of "urbane" you almost never see it used in a straight-forward sense, as in: The ever-urbane Ronald Reagan, whose smooth manners made him a Hollywood leading man, insisted the Soviet Union was an Evil Empire -- even though its foreign minister was the courteous Stalinist, Andrei Gromyko.