Rice Shifts US Diplomats to Improve “Transformational Diplomacy”

Condoleeza Rice, as this journal has said before, is a brilliant and talented woman whose judgment is just plain awful. She has proved her inability to understand the world community yet again with her decision to shift US diplomats out of Europe and into places like India, Nigeria and China. Her purpose is to boost America’s presence in these areas. Her purpose is founded on an incorrect analysis of both the value of diplomacy and the current global situation.

Secretary of State Rice recently stated in a speech at Georgetown University, “The greatest threats now emerge more within states than between them. The fundamental character of regimes now matters more than the international distribution of power.” The University of Denver should rescind her PhD on the grounds of those two sentences.

The five biggest problems in the world today are: Iraq, North Korea, Iran, African plagues (AIDS and malaria) and global warming. The first four hinge entirely on the international distribution of power. Were Africans more powerful, more able to influence the world community, they wouldn’t die in the millions each year from diseases for which there is effective treatment. Were North Korea a democracy like South Korea, it would still want its Bomb – the Chinese are next door and have had territorial ambitions across the Yalu for millennia, regardless of regime type. Iran is awfully close to nuclear Russia, China, India and Pakistan. As for global warming, her boss says it isn’t happening. With regard to Iraq, 2,200 dead Americans attest to her wisdom on the matter.

As bad as her misunderstanding of global power politics (which itself contributed to the mess in both Iraq and Iran) may be, her decision to put American diplomats in places where they can engage the local population shows a decisive ignorance of what diplomats actually do. Consulates exist to help businesses, travelers and immigrants. Embassies carry out government-to-government communications in addition to consular duties. Most of America’s trade and travel is with other developed countries. Most of the world’s power resides, not surprisingly, in nations that have developed economies, and thus developed military structures. She intends to take personnel out of places where they can do the most and put them in places where there is less to do. What does she intend? More visas for Guatemalans and Bolivians? Enhanced trade with Madagascar (a major producer of vanilla)?

An unpleasant fact is that the bigger the US embassy staff the more mucking around in local politics the Americans do. Britain during and after World War II, Vietnam in the 1960, Iraq today all prove this. The neo-con agenda is still in place, it seems. A bit of history seems in order.

On May 19, 1966, former Commandant of the US Marine Corps and recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor General David Monroe Shoup told an audience at Pierce College in California, “I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own -- one that they design and want, one that they fight and work for. And if, unfortunately, their revolution must be of the violent type because the ‘haves’ refused to share with the ‘have nots’ by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don’t want and above all don’t want crammed down their throats by Americans.” No doubt Vice President “Five Deferments” Cheney would question that man’s patriotism.


© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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