The United States is preparing one of the biggest shake-ups in the history of the state department, redeploying hundreds of diplomats from Europe and Washington to the Middle East and Asia in the name of ”transformational diplomacy”.
In a speech to Georgetown University, the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, gave notice that it was about to get much tougher and more dangerous to be an American diplomat. Not only would she be transferring large numbers of embassy staff from comfortable posts in western capitals to poorer and more troubled countries, she also wanted diplomats to move out of foreign capitals setting up small, even one-man, outposts in smaller cities to establish a US presence there, such as Alexandria in Egypt or Medan in Indonesia.
”There are nearly 200 cities worldwide with over one million people in which the United States has no formal diplomatic presence,” she said. ”This is where the action is today.
To gain promotion, foreign service officers would have to spend some time in such ”hardship posts”. She said that the US has the same number of diplomats in Germany, with a population of 82-million, as India, a country of one billion people.
”It is clear today that America must begin to reposition our diplomatic forces around the world, so over the next few years the United States will begin to shift several hundred of our diplomatic positions to new critical posts for the 21st century,” Rice said on Wednesday.
”We will begin this year with a down payment of moving 100 positions from Europe and, yes, from here in Washington DC to countries like China and India and Nigeria and Lebanon, where additional staffing will make an essential difference.”
The goal is to tackle what is perceived in Washington as the rise of global anti-Americanism with diplomats trained in Chinese, Urdu or Arabic, rather than in German or French. Rice said she wanted these diplomats to engage in ”transformational diplomacy” — not merely to observe, but to try to influence events and promote democracy. But she insisted this would not involve forcing American values on foreign populations.
”Let me be clear, transformational diplomacy is rooted in partnership; not in paternalism. In doing things with people, not for them,” she said.
Rice described her proposals as ”sweeping and difficult” but ”not unprecedented”, looking back on the diplomatic adjustments at the onset of the Cold War, and then at the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Looking back on the spread of democracy in Europe, Rice said: ”One day people are going to look back … and they’ll say ‘I’m really glad that America worked with its partners around the world to promote those values because there’s a peaceful and prosperous and democratic Middle East and the world is forever changed’.”
Ivo Daalder, a senior official on Bill Clinton’s national security council, described the redeployment as ”very sensible”, but suggested that the ”transformational diplomacy” phrase involved a great deal of hype.
”It’s a catchphrase,” Daalder, now an analyst at the Brookings Institution, said. ”I would strongly argue US diplomats have been doing this all along in places where transformation was in American interests. Clearly the role of diplomats in eastern Europe have not been to simply to observe events. – Guardian Unlimited Â