Commentary
Shifting Sands for Public Diplomacy in the USSR and Russia by Michael Hurley
The Destruction of USAID: How to Cause Innocent Deaths, Save Little Money, Betray Our Legacy and Help Our Adversaries by W. Robert Pearson
Differences with Hanoi about “Peace Talks”: Did One Side “Blink” and Why Did Each Go to Paris? by Thomas E. McNamara
Eyewitness
Political Humor in Communist Eastern Europe by Jonathan Rickert
My Ambassador was a Spy by Melissa Clegg-Tripp
Select Eyewitness Stories by Theme
Moments in Diplomacy
US diplomats often serve in unstable or even dangerous locations abroad. Deputy Chief of Mission Dennis Jett recounts the deteriorating situation in Liberia in 1990.
Links
Here is the second edition of the Foreign Service Journal’s collection of reports from members of the US Foreign Service about the damage being done to America’s professional diplomatic corps.
What We’ve Lost: Firsthand Accounts from the Field
For negotiations on a settlement of the war in Ukraine to begin, a negotiating agenda that both Russia and Ukraine can agree to will have to be created. Here are two efforts to do so.
The 17 Ukraine war peace terms the US must put before NATO
How to End the Russia-Ukraine War
In Memoriam
Ambassador William C. Harrop
A valued and active member of the American Diplomacy Board for many years, Ambassador “Bill” Harrop had a distinguished Foreign Service career and touched many lives both in his professional and volunteer endeavors.
Here is how American Diplomacy Board members Ted McNamara and Jim Bishop remember him.
Ted McNamara
I met Bill in 1970 on returning to Washington from my first overseas post. I was a very junior officer Involved in the “Young Turks” group led by Bill Harrop and other future Foreign Service luminaries. I was the junior officer rep on the Young Turk negotiating team, engaged, not in international negotiations, but good-old, home-made, labor management negotiations with the State Department over employee and labor union rights. Bill could have ignored this young newcomer, but he did not. We began a relationship that lasted over 50 years.
The Foreign Service is really a small town with no geographical boundaries. When Bill came to town in the 1960s, it had a population of about 6,000. When I came it had about 8,000. Today it has less than 15,000 and is still a town without borders.
We town folk owe Bill much for his contributions to the Foreign Service, while in service and in retirement. He was the town’s” Mayor” for half a century, leading it, developing it, caring for it, supporting its many projects – including this magazine — and making it better. For that and much else, he will be long remembered.
Jim Bishop
Bill and I were both Africanists while working decades at State and for the past three years friends and fellow residents at the retirement community of Fox Hill. In Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he dealt personally and successfully with two of Africa’s most prominent despots, Sekou Touré and Joseph Mobutu. Through patient calm diplomacy, he was able to achieve significant US goals with these turbulent leaders, decreasing Soviet influence in Guinea and eliciting Kinshasa’s support for then-Assistant Secretary Chet Crocker’s southern African peacemaking effort. Visiting Nairobi, I saw the impact of his wise leadership at a large post confronting many challenges. He was a leader too at Fox Hill, broadly respected for the breadth of his foreign policy experience and analysis of controversial issues, including successive US administrations’ support for what he and I both considered Israel’s excessive violence in Gaza.
From Our Archives
Below are links to articles that Bill Harrop wrote for American Diplomacy over the years and that we had the honor to publish. As these articles show, he not only served the Foreign Service with distinction, but also worked throughout his life to improve its structure and practice.
Doing More with Less or a Stunt
The Infrastructure of American Diplomacy
