United Nations
The silver lining for U.S. diplomats of this week’s WikiLeaks release of secret State Department cables is that there is more buzz about their work than there has been in years. Even though it’s for the wrong reasons, it provides a chance to use the public attention for a serious debate on modern diplomacy.
The general public usually hears about diplomats when there is a spy scandal, or when a diplomat is arrested for selling U.S. entry visas to foreigners — for money or sex.
Members of the U.S. Foreign Service often complain that it’s an unknown entity to the very people diplomats represent abroad. My extensive research in the last seven years confirms that concern. Most Americans have no idea what their representatives do every day — and many have no interest in learning about it, either.
How can that change? Although individual diplomats sometimes give talks at universities and other venues, there is much more the State Department can do in a concerted effort to educate Americans. For decades, the department was banned from interacting with domestic audiences — not to be seen as engaging in propaganda — but times have changed, and the substance of the outreach I have in mind would be very different.
My press colleagues and I have witnessed many excellent town-hall meetings Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has done around the world. It’s easy to see the tremendous impact those exchanges have on the people in those rooms. Why not hold such events in the United States? The interest in Clinton’s persona could translate in more curiosity about diplomacy and the Foreign Service.
In fact, this is a good time for a public discussion of the future of diplomacy and the Foreign Service.
The duties of Foreign Service officers have changed so much in the last two decades that they no longer truly reflect the traditional job description of a diplomat — helping to defeat an insurgency is certainly not what most people expect when they join the service.
The Oxford English dictionary provides two definitions of diplomacy. The first is “the (skill of) management of a country’s affairs by ambassadors and ministers living overseas,” and the second is “(the skill of) dealing with people so that business is done smoothly.”
During my visits to more than 50 U.S. embassies and in interviews with hundreds of Foreign Service officers, I got the sense that many of them were confused about what exactly they were supposed to be doing and why. The problem was not that they were sitting around with nothing to do, but that there was a lot to be done, and to prioritize well, they needed to know what exactly was expected of them.
In recent years, diplomats have been asked to prevent conflicts, broker peace, drum up support for war, sell unpopular policies, help build nations and improve America’s image abroad. They have stretched the definition of a diplomat to include everything from a diligent bureaucrat with good analytical and writing skills who knows the workings of Washington, to a charming and persuasive socialite, to a fearless mover and shaker venturing into war zones.
But should all Foreign Service officers be doing all those things? If the answer is yes, the State Department should make significant changes in the way it recruits, trains and promotes American diplomats.
More broadly, what kind of Foreign Service should the United States have in the 21st century?
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Continue reading about Diplomats in the news for wrong reasons
Thomas R. Pickering was a fresh college graduate in 1953 when he braved the notoriously lengthy entrance process at the State Department, prolonged even further by an ongoing investigation of suspected communists in the agency’s ranks.
Although he was offered a job earlier than he expected, Mr. Pickering by then had enrolled in the graduate program of Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass. He later left for Australia on a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Melbourne, which was followed by three years in the Navy.
So it was 1959 when the 28-year-old finally became a Foreign Service officer — or, to use the better-known term, a diplomat…
Richard Holbrooke is about to make yet another exit from the US foreign policy stage — the fourth in his 38-year career. Many of the people who know him well, though, are already predicting a stormy comeback.
This is the second time he has come within a whisker of the job that many in Washington say he’s been pursuing for years: secretary of state. In 1996, a year after he brokered the Dayton agreements that ended the war in Bosnia, he lost out to Madeleine Albright — the first woman to hold the top diplomatic post.
This time it was the slimmest of election wins by Republican George W. Bush that decided Holbrooke’s fate. Although the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, was careful during the campaign not to reveal his potential cabinet choices, foreign policy insiders were betting that Holbrooke, at present US ambassador to the United Nations, would most likely have been his choice to succeed Albright…
Continue reading about So busy at diplomacy, he ‘ignored’ the US election
Kevin Costner has never given up on his search for the people who he reckons are the most “difficult to find”: the ones “who think outside the box”. He looked for them — futilely yet persistently — when he first called himself an actor and hoped that someone would hire an ambitious college graduate without a single acting credit on his CV.
He broke just about every Hollywood rule when he produced, directed and starred in “Dances with Wolves”, the more than three hour-long western epic he had been repeatedly warned against, and it won him an Academy Award for best director, the respect of the film-making community and tens of millions of dollars.
He then defied all modern trends in his business, choosing non-commercial — and often unattractive by many standards — roles, some of which provoked harsh criticism and doubts about his talent. He has invested more than $20m in businesses that haven’t made him a dime, and has been trying for years to build a luxurious resort in the Black Hills of South Dakota, against the will of the Sioux Indians…
Madeleine Albright is almost shouting. She can’t hear me any more, she says. The noise on her aircraft has, indeed, become more deafening; but she also seems to be deliberately avoiding my question, and with good reason. This very moment is probably her happiest as secretary of state because of “the most important thing that has happened” during her nearly four-year tenure.
She has just received news about the Belgrade revolution and the ousting of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, and here I am, asking how she feels about having to leave office in three months. We’ve just spent a 30-hour day, having saved six hours by flying east-west from Egypt to Washington, and she says that’s exactly what she intends to continue doing for the rest of her term — “working every minute and extending the days”…
