WASHINGTON
When I think of our American Foreign Service officers overseas this Christmas, I remember a dear friend of mine — Mike Kristula, who was a brilliant diplomat with the U.S. Information Agency in the 1960s.
This wonderful “only-in-America” scene took place in Bolivia, in a village on the Altiplano outside La Paz. Note, please, that it is not a given to be able to dance on that glorious high plain of the Andes; it is 14,000 feet high.
But Mike was swinging around with the inexpressive, square-faced Aymara Indians at their village dance as though he were at the Rainbow Room on his wife's birthday.
Years later, I was in Uganda in central eastern Africa, and I instructed my Ugandan taxi driver to please take me to the American Embassy. As we grew closer, I realized he was slowing down too far away from the building for me to walk to it. Then he stopped. “It scares me,” he said simply.
I looked at the embassy, which resembled a gray prison. “You know,” I said to him, “it scares me, too.” Then I got out and walked up the hill to my appointment.
When Mike Kristula was so humanly representing America in the '60s and '70s, our embassies in most countries were right on the streets. One could stand on the sidewalk and ring the bell and a Marine peeked out. I don't remember any major bombings or shootings in our embassies in those years.
Today there are no more street entrances to anything American. No more fun, really.
It is sad that we don't pay more attention to the Foreign Service. Luckily, a young political analyst, Nicholas Kralev, who emigrated from Bulgaria to the U.S., has accomplished the well-nigh impossible task of writing a highly readable book on the service, “America's Other Army: The U.S. Foreign Service and 21st-Century Diplomacy.”
Kralev's concerns are serious ones, as he outlined in an interview with me: There is too little training for the traditional Foreign Service today. (Successful applicants have only five weeks of training.) “Diversity” and “political correctness” have become the magic words in choosing future diplomats. (“Because of diversity, you now see nurses, parole officers, restaurant managers and bouncers as diplomats,” Kralev said. “The exams are now very general. You can pass them without studying international relations.”)
Because of certain American leaders' propensity to invade other countries, many in the White House believe that our diplomats are not good enough to face world problems (which they themselves have created), and so they depend more and more upon the military.
Accepting an award at the American Academy of Diplomacy Awards Luncheon in November, the popular and respected William J. Burns acknowledged the problems. He summed up: “After more than a decade dominated by two costly conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan ... America needs a core of professional diplomats with the skills and experience to pursue American interests abroad by measures short of war.”
Poll after poll and debate after debate show that this is what the American people want and that we can do it, if we release the will to do it. Let's get started!
Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for 40 years (gigi_geyer@juno.com).
