WhirledView

A Canyon Road Christmas Eve

By Patricia H. Kushlis

There’s something special about the winter holidays in Santa Fe. The walk along Canyon Road is a unique treat especially for the hail and hardy.  It’s a family friendly annual tradition that begins at dusk.  The narrow street is closed to all but foot traffic.  Bonfires are lit and groups of carolers of all ages – often warming their hands around fires some burning in old metal storage drums - can be seen and heard along the way. (Photo right: farolitos and light displays, Canyon Rd. by PHKushlis 12-24-2010)

Shops and grounds are lighted - from the farolitos or traditional New Mexican candles placed in waxed paper bags and grounded in gravel to the pyrotechnic displays of Tibetan wind sculptures enveloped in strings of electric lights.  There was the Nutcracker too – only this one was aglow and affixed to the door of an art gallery.  Galleries are open, hot cider and chocolate sold along the street. (Photo left: Nutcracker and photo right: decorations on Santa Claus by PHKushlis 12-24-2010)

Santa Claus strolls along Canyon Road too, but this Santa does not look like the ones outside department stores or in malls clanging bells next to Salvation Army donation kettles. No one could miss his unique regalia – a walking, breathing ad for New Mexico and the City Different – but Canyon Road’s Santa Claus solicited funds from or for no one - just benignly wishing one and all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.  (Photo left: Bonfire on Canyon Rd. 12-24-2009 by PHKushlis)    

Last Christmas Eve was bitterly cold. Maybe that’s also a Santa Fe tradition.  It snowed a bit that evening, too. Or maybe I just imagined it. Just how the holidays should be celebrated in northern New Mexico:  with a light blanket of snow, that is, not the chill.

This year, it’s been warmer.  On Tuesday, a friend and I walked to the Basilica of St. Francis in a light mist for the Desert Chorale’s Christmas concert.  The cathedral was lit and decorated inside and out for Christmas but the grounds were dank – although with another storm here – that picture may change over the next couple of days. 

Last year, we had relatives visiting from the East.  Lots of holiday cheer, skiers off to the slopes, fire in fireplace, and a brother-in-law and nephews who love to cook.  That’s heaven!

Here's to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We’ll be back with more WV posts in 2011!   

 

 

The EURO Supplants Estonia’s Kroon – An Early Winter Solstace Story

By Patricia H. Kushlis

On New Year’s Day, the problematic Euro-zone will have upped its numbers by one.  Estonia, the northernmost Baltic country, will become the euro’s 17th member – having sprinted from Soviet Republic to full-fledged member in the most exclusive Western European club within the short space of twenty years.  

Given the tremendous uncertainty surrounding the euro’s viability and its’ all too obvious weaknesses, one has to wonder whether Estonia is making the right decision.  Yet, Estonian political and economic instincts and the steely ethnic Estonian resolve to reassert the country’s sovereignty against seemingly insurmountable odds more than proved itself during the run-up to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. (Graphic from Wikipedia)

In many respects the Estonians led the charge out that door.  The first anti-Soviet demonstrations took place in Estonia in August 1986 over the environmental degradation being inflicted on the country’s northeast by the development of phosphorite mines under the Soviets.  Within a year, the first overt anti-Soviet political demonstration – one protesting the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the secret protocol between Stalin and Hitler that illegally consigned the three small independent Baltic republics to the Soviets and a pact that the Soviets refused to admit existed until 1989 – took place in Tallinn, Estonia’s capital.

Between then and the abortive coup in Moscow in August in 1991, nothing had changed despite the promises of Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. The peaceful protests in Estonia and elsewhere grew increasingly political, frequent and more demanding.  On November 16, 1988 the Estonians declared national sovereignty - all the while working closely with other national front organizations that had sprung up throughout the western part of the Soviet Union in opposition to continued Soviet rule and domination from Moscow.

The Kroon Supplants the Ruble

In 1992 less than a year after the demise of the Soviet Union and ten months after the Estonians had declared independence for the second time – the first after World War I - and been admitted to the UN, the Estonians left the ruble zone despite warnings of currency apocalypse by international lending institutions at the time:  the kroon, Estonians were told, could never survive on its own.  But it did.

This isn’t to say that Estonia didn’t have help from friends. Finland and Sweden in particular cooperated to see that their small neighbor across the Baltic Sea didn’t fail. Furthermore, Estonian gold reserves that had been kept by western powers in their banks since the country’s illegal occupation in 1940 helped underpin the new/old kroon’s value.

Ten years after the Finns voted to join the EU in 1994, Estonia became a member too.  Estonia, although not Finland, also joined NATO that same year.   

What a Difference an Independent Estonia Makes

China and the US: A Multitextured, Technocolored Relationship

By Patricia H. Kushlis

In “Friend or foe?  A special report on China’s place in the world” published on December 4, 2010, The Economist assesses the multitextured technicolored relationship that has developed over the past 15 years between the US and China. As part of that assessment The Economist’s writers characterize America’s two-track China policy as engagement on the one hand and deterrence on the other. 

In essence, engagement “is designed to reward good behaviour and hedging to deter bad.” In practice, however, argues The Economist, “the hedge risks undermining the engagement” especially since the former is largely run by State Department China hands while the latter by the Pentagon and the two bureaucracies don’t necessarily see eye to eye - let alone talk to each other all that much.

Sadly, the fall-out from the Wikileaks fiasco likely increases the distance across the Potomac rather than lessens it.

To complicate the US-China situation further – although The Economist’s political economists do not so explicitly state – is the possibility that factions within the Chinese government and the ruling Communist Party are themselves not all on the same page regarding how best to pursue China’s interests abroad.

Civilian relationship better than the military one

Over the years, the US government’s relationship with China’s foreign policy civilian side has been far more durable than the military-to-military one which, let’s face it, is a sometime thing. The latter has been almost non-existent for over a year – at least until Secretary Gates’ appeared in Beijing last week – and there are a whole host of issues surrounding a heightened security climate from the South China Sea to North Korea and Japan that demand steady careful management, if, in fact, they can’t be resolved.    

The State Department cables thus far released by Wikileaks and a follow-up interview by Guardian reporter Simon Tisdal with an unnamed Chinese diplomat in Europe suggest that Chinese Foreign Ministry representatives and at least one high level Communist party official have decided that propping up the North Korean regime indefinitely is not in China’s long term interest.  As far as these civilian officials are concerned, a unified Korea under the South – as long as the transfer of power occurs peacefully and US troops stay below the DMZ would be an acceptable outcome to this six decade long, crisis-fraught dispute. 

KSFR: Santa Feans on WikiLeaks cables - WhirledView in the News

By Patricia H. Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe

Earlier today we were interviewed about Wikileaks by KSFR News Chief Bill Dupuy for broadcast on his program "News At Noon."  Here is the link to the interview  for those of you who may have missed this in-depth news show on Santa Fe's local public radio station and/or live outside KSFR's listening area.

Europe at a Glance

By Patricia H. Kushlis

(Here follows is the text of a talk I gave to the Kiwanis Club of Albuquerque on November 29, 2010. This text includes additional statistics and background that I did not include in the speech itself.)   

 Europe and the US in the Aftermath of the Financial Crisis

 Thank you for inviting me to speak to the Kiwanis Club of Albuquerque today.

When discussing possible topics, your program chair and I talked about my Foreign Service background. Much of that was spent on the fringes of Europe. I also said that I had been in London and Paris in August and September visiting family, friends and reacquainting myself with these two great cities that I had not visited in nearly twenty years. 

So if you’re planning a trip to either or both, let me assure you that the London stage and Parisian restaurants are as terrific as ever, public transportation – unless you need to lug suitcases – is excellent, and London’s New Millennium Bridge and Paris’ Musee d’Orsay are not to be missed.   Toss in for good measure, a rugby game at Wembley, the Eurostar experience through the Chunnel, the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square and the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum. 

When we talked, we agreed that I would talk about Europe and that I would attempt to put into context the demonstrations, the economic near-catastrophes and the terrorist threats that we hear, see and read about in our media.  I will conclude with a synopsis of the state of the US-European relationship as it stands today.  Then I’d be pleased to take your questions and comments.  All that in twenty minutes – so be prepared for a whirlwind tour.

Immigration, Islam, the Economy and the Euro-zone are the most difficult and complex issues that I think challenge Europe today.

 The I words:  Immigration and Islam

The most striking difference between what I saw in London and Paris just a couple of months ago and my memories of those cities from times past is that both are far more multi-ethnic and multi-racial than previously.

This has done wonders for British cooking. Every High Street or Main Street has restaurants, curry stalls and kebab shops run by immigrants from Asia and the Middle East.  One of the best Indian dinners I ever had was in a small restaurant in Bromley, now a suburb of London. In Jane Austen’s day, Bromley was the market town where Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice changed horses at the village inn. Pubs, not curry restaurants, were the order of that day.

The traditional English pub is reportedly in decline. 39, according to The Financial Times, close every week – but there’s still no lack of them.  In any event, they are being replaced by places serving different and more varied fare.

This transformation in British cuisine has been underway for some years. The "new" include the ubiquitous Costa Coffee shops that began in 1971 and now grace almost every London street corner. Costa was the brain child of two Italian immigrants and their coffee houses – now owned by the Whitbread Corporation - are far more numerous in London than Starbucks or McDonalds.

In both Paris and London – many immigrants have come from the former colonies but London, in particular, has been a magnet for immigrants from new EU countries as well as Russians and Chinese. In 2009, about 8% of the British working population came from outside the EU but of those only about 6 percent were not European.

Far more people moved to the UK to study than to work. Perhaps because of the economic downturn in 2008, immigration slowed.  During the 1990s, it is estimated that as many as 500,000 Poles moved to the UK but now that the Polish economy has improved, reports suggest that one-half have gone home.

The UK now has a 14% unemployment rate which may also contribute to out migration and the new Tory/Liberal government’s economic austerity measures bite hard - and university students whose tuition will triple are the angriest.

Some, but not all, of Europe’s immigrants are Muslims.  In the UK, most Muslims come from South Asia and Somalia – but some from the Middle East. Yemenis were the first – or among the first - Muslims to move to the UK beginning in the 1950s. They often took the lowest and dirtiest jobs.    When Yemini retired some, at least, moved back home where the living was easier, cheaper and the weather warmer.

I had the chance to see Tim Smith’s photography exhibition:  Coal, Frankincense and Myrrh: Yemen and British Yemenis at the Horniman Museum in London.  It’s on display in the Balcony Gallery until February 27, 2011. Smith’s photographs poignantly depict the lives and fates of Yemeni who made that journey, worked in the coal mines and then returned home to family, friends and a better climate near the end of their lives.

But many immigrants choose to stay in their adopted countries especially those who bring their families - contrary to what Europeans expected when they began importing guest workers for their factories in the 1960s. 

The Wikileaked Cables: So That’s What Diplomats do!

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Everyone who has represented the U.S. abroad knows what it’s like to be among fellow Americans  who haven’t the foggiest notion of what the State Department does or, for that matter, what on earth diplomacy is good for.  Julian Assange and Wikileaks may have lifted the veil.   That's not entirely to the bad.

I experienced a powerful aha! moment a few years ago when I was touring the southeast quadrant of Turkey with a group of Americans I’d never met before we gathered in Istanbul.  All members of the group were college grads.  All held professional positions.  But they knew nothing of how treaties are crafted, how win-win bargains are struck, how U.N. votes are solicited, how trade is facilitated, how—well, you name it.  To them the State Department was an entity so mysterious as to be non-existent, which may be an argument for changing the Department’s name into something more informative in modern English.  Anyone knows what a Ministry of Foreign Affairs does, but the U.S. has an oddly-named Department of State.  State?  How quaint.

My companions weren’t untraveled provincials with no foreign experience.  They were comfortable in Turkey, which isn’t the UK, although it is pretty well-developed and highly organized.  Even so, my new friends didn’t know that help would be available at a U.S. mission should they be mugged or robbed.  Contrary to the assumptions behind certain virulent spam campaigns now emanating from Nigeria, an Amcit in desperate financial straits can negotiate a ticket home by contacting a U.S. Embassy or Consulate.  As for an American who’s involved in a traffic accident, he or she won’t be road kill, if the American mission in that country can help it.  (I could tell you some tales, amusing as well as god-awful, from my own experience in Lagos and Santa Domingo and Jakarta.) 

The Wikileaks dump of diplomatic cables doesn’t deal with the State Department’s vital assistance to ordinary American citizens in trouble abroad.  Illuminated in vivid detail are the (sorry Amcits!) core diplomatic functions that don’t attract much attention in the mass media. We’ve been exposed to the film Restropo, which showcased a poorly sited outpost in Afghanistan through a story that offers the classic dramatic intersection of battling and boredom. But what’s to film of long conversations over a table?  The brand of bottled water offered?  The flower arrangements around which carefully calibrated words will make their way?  An eye brow that shoots up?  Lips that get pressed together?   Worse, while a firefight may be over in minutes, it takes weeks, months, years for diplomatic efforts to come to fruition, at which point the news may be buried under the latest murder or another crisis precipitated by Israeli intransigence.  Look at it this way: how many computer games are built around diplomacy in action?

So why should the unauthorized release of these classified cables, however embarrassing, be good for the State Department?  The scandal has drawn front page attention to diplomacy, and the cables themselves show that America’s foreign service officers are very busy indeed attending capably to matters of grave importance to every American. Although, in recent years, it’s often seemed as if the Pentagon were the sole instrument for securing American interests in a dangerous world, these cables prove otherwise.  The foreign service is the first line of defense (to put it crudely) in a complex world of cross-cutting interests and obligations, and our representatives abroad work wonders on a  starvation budget.  Consider what State could do if it were adequately funded.  The savings on  missiles and bomb-proof personnel carriers, etc., would be huge.  See the amazing shrinking deficit! 

Wonders did I say?  Yes.  Now that the quality of American diplomats’ work has been exposed for the world to see, kudos for State officers’ reporting are rolling in. Consider this:  “U.S. Diplomats Aren’t Stupid After All: How WikiLeaks restored one journalist’s faith in the State Department.” That’s the title of an article in the latest issue of Foreign Policy.  Author Joshua Kucera continues: “U.S. Foreign Service officers might not like their confidential correspondence aired in public, but overall, the [leaked] cables portray them as smart and perceptive, and with no illusions about the countries they are dealing with.” 

And Andrew Rettman reports in the EUObserver that “Some EU officials are envious over the quality of its [the State Department’s] reports,” which “set a benchmark for diplomacy.”  By contrast, one EU official complained,  “Our reports are incredibly long and written in a kind of administrative jargon.  We have no opinions.  We hide our opinions behind bureaucratic language because we are not allowed to have opinions in a highly hierarchical structure.”

Perhaps Americans, too, will learn that we are well represented by our diplomats, who, it must be said, here and now, are not spies, as some recent media reports have suggested.  American diplomats represent themselves openly as what they are.  They aren’t clandestine agents.  They are American officials unabashedly pursing American (or common) interests when they meet with citizens, leaders and counterpart officials in other counties.  It is fully expected that all diplomatic parties to such conversations, whether the dialog takes place during negotiating sessions or over quiet dinners or in someone’s office, will be reporting what they've gleaned  to their respective governments.  What's more, for every cable an American foreign service officer sends back to Washington it’s likely that another report will be turned in to another government. 

It’s this simple: you won't get anywhere if you don’t know the people you're dealing with.   Strengths and weaknesses. Tics. Hobbyhorses.  Biases.  Character.  Political culture.  Ad infinitum. If the cabled language is blunt sometimes, so much the better for clarity.  As for humor, well, humor beats pomposity, doesn't it?  None of this is gossip. It’s crucial information.  It helps in crafting arguments and answers an important question: can you trust the people you’ll be pitching to?

Which brings us to the core issue re the leaks: the risk to confidentiality.  I leave to another occasion any consideration of whether secrecy is essential to effective diplomatic relations.  What’s relevant here is that it has traditionally been assumed that conversations between diplomats will be handled discretely.  Hence classification.  Even a cable with a very low “confidential” stamp isn’t meant for global headlines.  These days, of course, there’s another complication: compromised computer systems.  The good guys are locked in constant struggle, trying to stay ahead of the hackers, crooks and leakers—and failure, unfortunately, is an excellent teacher.

By contrast, the degree of confidentiality is more formalized when diplomats  talk to journalists.  In such cases, the terms are set at the beginning of the conversation.  On background or quotable?  By name and title or from “diplomatic sources”?  Only then does the Q&A begin.  With amazingly few exceptions, so far as I have been able to tell, journalists honor such commitments.  However, whether a diplomat talks to a foreign counterpart or to a member of the press, a certain calculation is made: what are the consequence if I go beyond the boilerplate?  How far can I go?  In my time, I took a few risks and never got burnt, but others did, and there was always a tiny bit of anxiety.  Had I judged this person correctly?  Would I regret my candor?  Ditto in the case of the leaked cables.  How many foreign leaders and diplomats are gnashing their teeth these days and vowing, “Never again.”

The possible loss of openness and forthrightness is a legitimate concern.  But self-interest is a powerful stimulant.  If you want something you have to give something.  No one is going to stop talking to American envoys,  who, by and large, are highly skilled, very persistent and, often, charming.                       


   

WIKILEAKS and the Need to Know

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said yesterday at a briefing for reporters that he did not think a young officer at a forward post in Iraq needed to be kept up-to-date on the twists and turns of the negotiations over New START. He’s right. There’s a lot more these officers and enlisted personnel didn’t and don’t need to know either – at least from the cables I’ve seen released thus far by Wikileaks that have appeared in the media.

Yesterday, a once-bitten, twice-shy State Department announced it had restricted the flow of its cable traffic to the Department of Defense. It’s a little like closing the barn door after the horse has escaped, but I don’t blame State for clamping down on the flow of sensitive information outside the department just as I think neither State, DOD nor the US government as a whole should permit the copying of classified documents to personal CDs, DVDs or other mobile devices. That, according to Gates yesterday is no longer possible at DOD.

One dilemma is where “the need to know” doctrine should begin and end with government secrets and non-secrets. Another is the whole issue of classification.

Since when, for instance, are unclassified cables secret?

Bottom line: they aren’t.

But confidential assessments about other governments, negotiations, leaders and political and economic situations likely are – and it can be particularly damaging when the reporting gets into the gratuitous and names are named and names are called or when negotiating positions and bottom-lines are revealed in public.  That's a good way to turn an almost done deal into a dead one.

As far as I’m concerned, however, a PfC in Iraq does not need to be knowledgeable about the internal workings of US relations with much of the rest of the world or, for that matter, have access to someone in the State Department’s pet names for Russian or German or any other country’s leaders. I’m not sure pet names even belong in any department’s cable traffic – but that’s another story.  And I fail to see why any soldier at a forward base in Iraq should have had access to at least 8,000 State Department cables about our Embassy's dealings with - or its officers views of - the Turkish government.   What does that have to do with "the need to know?"