Tag: East Asia Pacific

“Otto von Bismarck, the German Chancellor, said those who like sausage and the law should never watch them being made. We might add the conduct of foreign policy in a decentralized democracy to that list.”  Alliance in Doubt American Reaction … Read more

By Minxin Pei The author is a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace. In assessing the likelihood of instability in China, he focuses for short-term purposes more on economic than political factors.His conclusions point up the need … Read more

– E X T R A C T – by David G. Brown Through the courtesy of the Asia Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Amb. Ron Palmer, we present in this issue excerpts from the … Read more

It may be that any man’s death diminishes each of us, as John Donne held in the seventeenth century. Certainly the recent passing after a brief illness of Frank Underhill lessens all who knew him or knew of him. We at American Diplomacy feel a special sense of this loss.

GLOBALISM vs.ECONOMIC NATIONALISM THE SOUTHEAST ASIAN CASE By Ronald D. Palmer Ambassador Ronald D. Palmer contributes the following political and economic assessment of Southeast Asia, which may be read usefully in conjunction with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s special report, also … Read more

  The author, who had a distinguished thirty-five-year career in the Foreign Service, is a member of the board of directors of this journal’s parent organization, American Diplomacy Publishers. This article appeared on Christmas Day 1994 in the Hendersonville (N.C.) … Read more

  by James L. Huskey “I counted and identified bodies in a strange déjà vu of the Tiananmen body count. It was surrealistic as colleagues came running to tell me this colleague was alive . . . or that colleague was dead. . . . “We … Read more

The author served as U.S. ambassador to Guinea-Bissau and as deputy representative to ECOSOC at the UN in New York during his more than thirty years in the U.S. Foreign Service. See his “Vietnam Reconsidered” in Vol. III, No. 1 … Read more

SOUTHEAST ASIA CRISIS: Background and Current Assessment By Ronald D. Palmer Southeast Asia encompasses ten nations, from Burma on the mainland in the west, to the 17,500-island nation of Indonesia to the southeast. Need more be said to stress the … Read more

Comment on Indonesia We present here (in wide page format) two parallel comments on the current state of play between the United States and Indonesia: on the left, one by a foreign affairs scholar, Theodore Friend, and on the right … Read more

“Remembering Vietnam” Ambassador Marks entered the U.S. Foreign Service in 1956 and promptly was drafted into the army. Upon return two years later, he embarked on a career that took him to eight posts abroad (including Guinea-Bissau, where he was … Read more

Dr. McIntyre, retired from the Foreign Service after more than twenty-three years abroad, lives with his wife Jessie in Chapel Hill, NC. During the Second World War, he was awarded a Bronze Star for his service as an infantry battalion … Read more

Remembering VietnamFollowing is the first in a series of personal reminiscences by U.S. Foreign Service personnel who served in Vietnam, primarily during the United States’ heavy involvement in the war. The series, developed by Editorial Advisory Board member Bart Moon, … Read more

By Francis Underhill “Indonesians live in ‘rubber time.’“ I first became aware that time has a cultural dimension when I was assigned to our consulate in the city of Medan on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, my first non-European post … Read more

As our readers will note elsewhere in this issue of American Diplomacy, Roy M. Melbourne led an event-filled life as a U.S. Foreign Service officer from 1936 to 1971. Not least of those experiences, which he recounts in his autobiography, … Read more

Mr. Kennedy, director of the Foreign Affairs Oral History Program based at the Foreign Service Institute outside Washington, DC, and a retired Foreign Service officer, has provided American Diplomacy the following description of the Program and its offerings, along with … Read more

by Ronald D. F. Palmer I. History of Recent TimesTHIS IS WRITTEN IN 1996, one year after the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II was widely celebrated in the United States and Europe. The Asians marked the … Read more

by Francis Underhill