American Diplomacy leads off this issue with a photographic remembrance of President Jimmy Carter’s foreign affairs legacy and his positive interactions with professional American diplomats. Our colleagues Renee Earle and Sandy Johnson put it together.
Commentary. It has become something of a cottage industry for foreign affairs commentators to provide their advice every four years to incoming US presidents. I was unable to resist the temptation to do so in this issue. I should say that I had outlined the principal themes of the article prior to election day, and they were not dependent on which candidate won. I think that we need a clear set of fundamental objectives, that in pursuing them we need to prioritize our own interests, that we talk too much and do not listen enough, and that we need to lead more by example and less by coercion. Ambassador McKinley takes a careful look at the Biden foreign affairs legacy, finding an energetic effort to re-engage with international institutions and problems, but limited progress. Ambassador Ray describes the essential, but sometimes tricky, task of engaging with both a country’s leaders and its people, and how he navigated it in his ambassadorial assignments. Keith McCormick and Audrey Straw provide the highlights of the discussions at this year’s DACOR conference on how the US should deal with a rising India. The three panels discussed whether India can be a new strategic partner for the US in containing China; how the US. should respond to the Modi government’s increasing use of Hindu chauvinism to undermine democracy and tolerance; and what is ahead for India’s economy, including whether it will become the leader of the Global South in challenging the current, Western-dominated international trading order. Finally, Thomas Brodey points out that the Peace Corps has a problem with recruitment numbers and with recruiting candidates who lack college degrees but do have experience in some of the specialties the program needs. He suggests recruiting more broadly at community colleges and trade schools, and establishing an undergraduate fellowship for returning volunteers interested in pursuing a university education.
In the Eyewitness section of the journal, Ted McNamara describes how, as a junior diplomat, he was in the right place to recognize a signal from the government of North Vietnam of willingness to enter into peace negotiations, modestly refraining from pointing out that being there would not have been sufficient without language skills and some political astuteness. Jonathan Rickert recounts a somewhat forlorn tribute by the Russian embassy in Bucharest to the World War II Soviet soldiers who fell during the liberation of Romania. Our Student Corner features a very nice essay on the challenges and opportunities America’s foreign partners will face during the second Trump administration.
In other sections of the journal, we direct readers’ attention to the current issue of the Foreign Service Journal with its focus on presidential transitions, and to Winston Lord’s firsthand description of the Vietnam peace process, taken from the Oral History Project of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
