WhirledView

A Normal So-so Christmas Coming Up

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

There’d been highly hyped hopes for a couple of really cool gifts for Christmas this year, and I don’t include the snowstorm that roared up the East coast a couple of days ago. 

The global warming conclave in Copenhagen was supposed to feature a chorus of angels promising salvation for everyone, salvation in the form of strict agreed-upon goals—goals that would be enforceable.  Well, at the very least the goals would be measurable, so that failures to deliver on schedule would be as obvious as an airport ETA sign announcing “on time,” “delayed” or canceled.   I couldn’t buy either expectation.  So far as that unrealistic transparency goal was concerned, who’d be able to ferret out the inevitable fudging?  Worse, how would the international community manage to punish China or the US or any other country for not performing as promised? All in all, the belief that the species would be inspired to act harmoniously and altruistically seemed pretty unrealistic from the get go.

The other great gift for Americans was to be bipartisan health care reform, meaning broadly-backed coverage for every American at a cost the country can bear.  Well, it looks as if the Senate Democrats will actually pass a bill on Christmas eve (talk about Christmas presents!), but can you say sausage factory?  Who knows what’s in the package—and as for the process, it’s hardly what we want to promote as democracy abroad. 

Waiting for a Savior

In both cases, there was always the rather pathetic hope for a messiah, a mahdi, a deus ex machina, a superman, whose charisma or moral force or sheer power would deliver the goods–unanimity on the route to salvation, transparency, enforceability.  Barack Obama, it was hoped, would amply fill that role in Copenhagen as in Washington.  But alas!  Obama hasn’t transformed American politics, and no one human being could have created the extraordinary unity that the prospect of retarding global warming seems to require.  Never in the evolution of the murderous human species has there been the sweetly cooperative “we” that’s needed now. 

Nor has commonality been the theme du jour over these past decades.  It’s been multi-culturalism.  We must respect and preserve, unaltered, all human cultures in all aspects of their contrary contradictory glory.  Yet now, suddenly, we’re expected to shed our sacrosanct cultural ego complexes in this great global push for the common good.  We’re not so distinct, it seems.  We’re all the same.  Well, we all breathe oxygen and exhale CO2; we can’t drink salt water; we need food and a certain temperature range.  So we've gotta save the planet—meaning, of course, those planetary conditions that support human life.

A Matter of Competency

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Last  July Nick Kralev, The Washington Times  State Department correspondent reported on the status of Ambassadorial appointments since the beginning of the Obama administration.  He described the American Foreign Service Association’s (AFSA) unhappiness with the ratio of political appointees to career officers and AFSA’s fears that the percentages – then 26% political appointees with 11% yet to be named – would tip even further in favor of the non-career officers.  AFSA keeps a tally – so just check out its website for the most recent figures.  They’re not exactly pretty.

 This is not a new problem and not much has changed since the summer.  Unfortunately, administration after administration regardless of political party seems to think that “cushy” Ambassadorial positions complete with free house, staff, car and driver are fit payment for campaign fundraising support – often as paybacks for “bundling money.”

Cushy Paybacks Should Also Rest on Skills Appropriate for the Position

 What they conveniently forget is that most campaign fundraisers do not have the skills or the background to manage embassies or represent US foreign policies abroad.   This may not be a problem in certain countries like Canada where – if the appointee really does have the ear of the White House – that kind of access is, I’m told, the single most important qualification.  But from what I saw when I was working abroad, too many political Ambassadors did not have the appropriate White House numbers on their Blackberries or Rolodexes and as likely as not they also had no requisite diplomatic skills that neared those of a trained professional.

A Few Qualifications Please

Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: How the West Won (Part II)

By Yale Richmond, Guest Contributor

Yale Richmond, a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer and author of 11 books on intercultural communication, worked on U.S.-Soviet cultural and other exchanges for more than 20 years.  He delivered the following speech at the Aleksanteri Institute’s 9th Annual Conference “Cold War Interactions Reconsidered” 29-31 October 2009, University of Helsinki, Finland.

This is the second of a two part series.  The first part appeared on Thursday, December 3.

Exhibits:  Better to See Once . . .

And now to exhibitions. As an old Russian proverb tells us, it is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.  The Cultural Agreement also provided for month-long showings of exhibitions in the two countries to show the latest developments in various fields. Prepared by the U.S. Information Agency, the American exhibitions were on such subjects as medicine, architecture, hand tools, education, outdoor recreation, technology for the home, and agriculture. Each exhibition had some 20 Russian-speaking American guides who responded to questions from the Soviet visitors. For most Russians who saw the exhibitions, it was their first and only opportunity to talk with an American. 

Despite harassment by the KGB, the exhibitions drew huge crowds with long lines awaiting admittance, and they were seen, on average, by some 250,000 visitors in each city. All together, more than 20 million Soviet citizens saw the 23 U.S. exhibitions over a 32-year period.

Those exhibits brought a whole generation of Soviets into contact with the West. They were one of the best investments we made. And the Soviet authorities would probably agree with that. In every renegotiation of the Cultural Agreement, the Soviets sought to eliminate the exhibitions, or failing in that, to reduce the number of cities in which the exhibitions were shown. In one renegotiation of the cultural agreement in the early 1970s, when the Soviet negotiators held firm on completely deleting the exhibitions, our Ambassador in Moscow, acting on instructions from Washington, informed Foreign Minister Gromyko that without the exhibitions there would be no Cultural Agreement. The Soviets understood that, and the exhibitions continued. 

The Very Visible Performing Arts

The performing arts were one of the most visible of U.S.-Soviet exchanges. In the United States, few of the cognoscenti (those who know) failed to see the Soviet dance groups, symphony orchestras, operas, ice shows, circuses, as well as the many outstanding individual artists who visited the United States each year, often on extensive coast-to-coast tours. American ensembles and soloists that went to the Soviet Union in exchange invariably played to full houses and were likewise appreciated by both the intelligentsia and the general public. For Duke Ellington’s Moscow performances in 1971, tickets were sold on the black market for as much as 80 rubles, when the usual price for a theater ticket was seldom higher than four.

Pianist Emil Gilels was the first Soviet artist to appear in the United States in decades when he performed to rave reviews on a month-long tour in 1955. Violinist David Oistrakh followed with a similarly successful tour that same year, as did renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in 1956.
Under the US-Soviet cultural agreement, performing-arts exchanges became a recurring feature in U.S.-Soviet relations. Soviet favorites in the United States included the Moiseyev Folk Dance Ensemble and the Bolshoi and Kirov Ballets whose repeated tours received glowing press reviews as well as handsome fees. Tours across the United States were also an eye opener for Soviet artists. As described by Galina Ulanova, star of the Bolshoi Ballet and one of the greatest Russian ballerinas of modern times, after her first visit to the United States in 1959:

The US and the World: as Americans See It - 2009

By Patricia H. Kushlis

The Pew Charitable Trusts has been releasing its most recent public opinion polls on how the world sees the United States and, conversely, how Americans see the world and the US role in it over the past few weeks.

I’ll be giving a talk here in Albuquerque next week entitled “From ‘The War on Terror’ to 'Global Engagement.'" Pew's latest polling results and the analyses that accompany them appeared just in the nick of time to substantiate what I had planned to say anyway based on my reading of earlier spot polls of foreign perceptions of the US as well as personal observations and conversations that I had when I was in Asia.  My upcoming talk, however, will focus more on how the world sees us and whether the Obama administration’s change in rhetoric has made a difference rather than the other way around which is the focus in this post today. 

It seems to me that “US Seen as Less Important, China as More Powerful: Isolationist Sentiment Surges to Four-Decade High” is one of the most interesting of the recent press release cum survey analyses issued by Pew.  The seven page media release is intriguing, but it fails to do justice to the report "America's Place in the World 2009" upon which it is based.  So let me make a suggestion – at a minimum read the report’s opening chapter and scan the data yourself.

Read the Report - Or at least the First Chapter

A warning: The analysis includes two different data sets – one a survey of the American public’s attitudes – based on 1,500 telephone and 500 cell phone interviews in English and Spanish of people - plus a second: 642 telephone and on-line surveys of members of the Council on Foreign Relations, a middle of the road, non-partisan organization and foreign affairs think tank with offices in New York and Washington, DC.  CFR was founded in 1921 and the Pew Charitable Trusts considers it to contain America’s foreign policy opinion makers. Yet the discrepancies I found between the two groups surveyed makes me wonder exactly how influential CFR members really are on the US public’s views of international affairs in today’s America.

The surveys on which Pew’s “America’s Place in the World 2009” is based were published December 3, 2009 just five days before President Obama spoke to the nation – and the world - to announce his new Afghanistan policies. The surveys were conducted during October and early November and the information on how they were conducted is found on Pew’s People and the Press website.  Because of the timing, none of the polling data, therefore, took into account the public’s reaction to Obama’s December 8 speech with his controversial decision to send 30, 000 more US troops to Afghanistan in a surge type endeavor to stem the Taliban's resurgence.  

With that caveat, let me plunge ahead.

Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: How the West Won

By Yale Richmond, Guest Contributor

Yale Richmond, a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer and author of 11 books on intercultural communication, worked on U.S.-Soviet cultural and other exchanges for more than 20 years.  He delivered the following speech at the Aleksanteri Institute’s 9^th Annual Conference “Cold War Interactions Reconsidered” 29-31 October 2009, University of Helsinki, Finland.

This is the first of a two part series.  The second part will appear on Thursday, December 10.

I want to thank the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki for this opportunity to speak to you. It is an honor to be asked to address such a well-informed audience.                              

First a disclaimer. Although I worked for the US Government for more than 35 years, and many of those years on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, I do not speak for the State Department today. The views I present here today are my own.

There are many theories of why communism collapsed and the Cold War ended, as you will likely be hearing in this conference.   

There are a few grains of truth in some of those explanations, and more than a few in others, but I will provide today many grains of another explanation—that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism were consequences of Soviet contacts and cultural exchanges with the West, and with the United States in particular, over the years that followed the death of Stalin in 1953.

When cultural exchange with the Soviets is mentioned, most people think of Soviet dancers, symphony orchestras, ice shows, and circuses that came to the West and filled our halls with admiring spectators. But cultural exchange consisted of much more--exhibitions, motion pictures, and most important, exchanges of people.

The Iron Curtain was almost impenetrable. Information about the West was closely controlled. There was no free press and no internet. Foreign travel for Russians was very limited, and few visitors came to the Soviet Union. Moreover, most of Soviet territory was closed to travel by foreigners, except for a few large cities. Most Russians thought they were better off than people in the capitalist West.

However, over a 30-year period (1958-1988), more than 50,000 Soviet citizens came to the United States under various exchanges of the US-Soviet Cultural Agreement, and tens of thousands more came to countries in Western Europe. And those are conservative estimates. They came as scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers and journalists, government and party leaders, musicians and athletes, and they were all cleared by the KGB for foreign travel. But they came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same. Those exchanges changed the Soviet Union and prepared the way for Gorbachev’s glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War.

I will speak here about United States exchanges with the Soviet Union because we had the largest exchanges with the Soviets, but much of what I say can also apply to exchanges other countries had with the Soviet Union.

What were our objectives?

A System in Need of a Large Broom: Buyer Beware

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Every so often I write a post on the internal workings or non-workings of the State Department. I haven’t done so for awhile – but I guess it’s that time again – especially since the Department is set to expand the number of Foreign Service Officers by 1,000 over the coming year. Let’s face it, State, the executive branch’s oldest department, has often attracted top talent – but its personnel system and the way it treats too many of its officers has been its weakest link. It remains so.

This, in a nut shell, means State continues to fail to make use of the talent it has so assiduously recruited nearly as well as it could. Or should. A Human Resources Bureau that has been allowed to run amok with little or no outside oversight over the past decade remains a major obstacle. This is most visible at the senior levels where financial and assignments stakes are highest, but the problems have also trickled down the ranks in deleterious and mysterious ways.

Here are a few of the most recent examples:

The bonus pay fiasco

Over the past several years, lists of senior officers eligible for bonus pay were secretly winnowed in size by employees in Human Resources. When a group of eligible FSOs stumbled upon this, the Director General  wrote them a letter giving an explanation that was either deliberately false or the product of gross incompetence by HR staff. As a consequence, the Department has been ordered by the Foreign Service Grievance Board to reconvene several years of those boards to rectify what are at best irregularities -- if not cronyism or worse.

Indian Embassy Publishes Well-Vetted Text, not Juicy Transcript of PM Manmohan Singh’s CFR Address

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

What a powerful address! I thought. The whole agenda is here.  Boom!  Boom! Boom!  I was watching Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s address to the Council on Foreign Relations via C-Span on Monday night. 

But the question-and-answer period was even more interesting. Perhaps that’s why it was missing from the version I printed out from the Indian Embassy’s website, although the U.S. State Department scrupulously includes such exchanges as well as any prepared presentation when American leaders speak to foreign audiences.  These missing passages were so arresting, in fact, that both American and Indian newspapers quoted them in subsequent new stories.

Fortunately the Council on Foreign Relations provides a full transcript of speaker’s interactions with its audiences on its website.  Here the salient passage:

HAASS: Last question about China. There has been a lot of talk in the literature about the comparison of the Indian and the Chinese approaches to development. A question I had is, why do you believe that India's is preferable, assuming you do, given that China has grown at a higher rate for more years?

SINGH: Well, there is no doubt that the Chinese growth performance is superior to Indian performance. But I've always believed that there are other values which are important than the growth of the gross domestic product. I think the respect for fundamental human rights, the respect for the rule of law, the respect for multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious rights, I think those have values also.

There are several dimensions of human freedom, which are not always (caught ?) by the numbers with regard to the gross domestic product. So I do believe that even though the Indian performance with regard to GDP might not be as good as the Chinese, certainly I would not like to choose the Chinese, but I would prefer to stick to the India part.

Also, I believe India may appear as indecisive democracy at times. And it does, because many democracies are short-term maximizers. They're not able to take a long-term view.

But I have also believed that once a democracy decides on the basis of a wide-ranging consensus, any reforms that are undertaken will be far more durable, will be far more effective than reforms introduced by the writ of a ruling group in a non-democratic setup.

HAASS: Ladies and gentlemen, you've just been treated to an economist saying there's more to life than GDP. (Laughter and applause.) This is an important moment. (Laughs.)

Based on his administration's record of retaining all too many Bush administration anti-terrorism measures, I’ve come to doubt the strength of President Obama’s commitment to civil liberties, but at least he was willing to sign on to some “shared values” in the Joint Statement issued by the two leaders, who  

noted that the shared values cherished by their peoples and espoused by their founders – democracy, pluralism, tolerance, openness, and respect for fundamental freedoms and human rights – are acquiring an increasingly greater prominence in building a more peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, secure and sustainable world. These values are exemplified by the vibrant linkages between their peoples, which are a unique asset for both countries, and are reflected in the role played by the Indian-American community.

Otherwise, during this five day state visit, it was Manmohun Singh who kept hammering away at the democratic principles that should make for a close and enduring relationship between the U.S. and India.  During the Welcome Ceremony, he said:

India and American are separated by distance, but bound together by the values of democracy, pluralism, rule of law and respect for fundamental human freedoms.

Toasting at the State Dinner, he said:

Mr. President, your journey to the White House has captured the imagination of millions and millions of people in India.  You are an inspiration to all those who cherish the values of democracy, diversity and equal opportunity.

No doubt these bits are digs at China as well as a way of reminding the American president that India really is a more compatible partner. Either way, keep it up, Mr. Prime Minister. American leaders these days tend to forget what America is/was/should be about.

100,000 American Students to China?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Why is it that the US media focused almost exclusively and sometimes even rather "creatively" on the atmospherics surrounding President Obama’s recent trip to Asia but ignored much of the substance? Didn’t the White House reporters who accompanied the president understand that foreign affairs and substance are related? Don’t they realize that parsing the sentences of a joint communiqué or even reading the text of or listening to a Town Hall meeting (as opposed to being frustrated because they couldn’t use instant messaging to contact their editors – or Twitter their fans due to over-zealous Chinese censors) can bear not only fruit but a few surprises? And maybe even a news article at that? Or don’t they care? Or perhaps future educational opportunities for young Americans just don't rate.

One US media ignored surprise

One of those media ignored surprises was President Obama’s commitment first announced at the Town Hall meeting in Shanghai to expand the number of American students studying in China from 20,000 to 100,000. This commitment was reiterated in more detail later in a joint communiqué issued in Beijing. The number 100,000 was likely selected to match the approximate number of Chinese currently studying in the US. Regardless, it would also represent a huge jump in American students studying abroad. Furthermore, it would be an about-face from the Bush administration’s policies that emphasized one way “exchanges” – namely foreigners coming here – while specializing in sending Americans abroad on troop ships or planes.

I had decided ever since I lived in the Philippines in the early 1990s that it was as important for Americans to travel, live and work abroad as it is for the US to play host to foreigners. Unfortunately, the successive administrations all too often saw it differently. The US government related programs that did involve two way exchanges – with the exception of Fulbright and the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange – were defunded, eliminated or devalued. But in reality, several of them were by far the most cost effective. They also had the greatest chance of furthering long term people-to-people connections - which is what I thought student and youth exchanges were all about anyway.

An Agreement "in principle"

According to the US-Chinese communiqué, the two governments agreed “in principle to establish a new bilateral mechanism to facilitate these (student) exchanges.” The communiqué also states that the US “seeks to encourage more Americans to study in China by launching a new initiative to send 100,000 students to China over the coming four years.” Presumably this would occur under the rubric of the US-Chinese Cultural Agreement to be renegotiated in 2010 - although the communiqué itself does not so state.