Senate
A dispute over the State Department budget has pitted the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, against a fellow Democrat and head of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, and the Obama administration.
Mr. Conrad led an effort to slash President Obama’s $58 billion international affairs request for 2011 by $4 billion, a cut his committee approved last week. Despite protests from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and all her living predecessors, the senator stood his ground on Wednesday.
“The fact is that international funding has grown significantly in recent years,” he said. “Budgets are about setting priorities. Our budget provides a responsible and balanced approach”…
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The State Department plans to create seven new senior positions to ensure that a public-diplomacy perspective is always “incorporated” in policy-making around the world, as well as to respond quickly to negative coverage of the United States in foreign media.
In an ambitious strategy that goes beyond any previous efforts to reach out to other countries, the Obama administration “seeks to become woven into the fabric of the daily lives of people” there, its top public-diplomacy official said Wednesday.
“We must do a better job of listening, learn how people in other countries and cultures listen to us, understand their desires and aspirations, and provide them with information and services of value to them,” said Judith A. McHale, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs…
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Nicholas Kralev talks about the Senate confirmation hearing of Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush’s nominee for secretary of state, on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program, on January 18, 2005.
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It was well past the official close of business at NATO headquarters in Brussels on September 11, 2001, but the chamber of the North Atlantic Council, the alliance’s political decision-making body, was anything but dark and quiet.
Hours after the terrorist attacks in New York and suburban Washington, Secretary-General George Robertson had gathered the ambassadors from all 19 member states to discuss how the events that were still unfolding live on television affected the organization and what NATO might do in the immediate aftermath.
“After the meeting, the Canadian ambassador, David Wright, took me aside to ask if Article 5 should be considered,” Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador, recalled last week, referring to a clause in the 1949 Washington Treaty that created the alliance that says an attack on one member is an attack on all…
