The Foreign Service Journal, January 2003

positions, felt that his or her con- cerns had received short shrift — however irrelevant or impractical it might be in the SCO’s market — then it could be woe unto the latter. Shared experience almost cer- tainly played a role in dealings between overseas posts and their desks at State. Most desk officers had field experience, many of them in the same country they were tracking. In that sense, I regarded State as dominated by the Foreign Service. This was cer- tainly not the case at Commerce where, as I mentioned at the outset, FCS was not even the major player in ITA in terms of numbers. At DOC, overseas experience was a rarity, embodied primarily in those specialists who had worked at U.S. trade centers or in other overseas exhibi- tion activities, few of whom were assigned to FCS head- quarters. In practical terms, this meant that SCOs spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to Washington how in-country conditions might require the nuancing of a core promotion program to make it effective, and sometimes why implementation wasn’t even a good idea. A case in point was the low-budget trade mis- sion program much in vogue at FCS headquarters inWashington in 1988- 1989. It was without question a good way to get small companies into markets that did not get a lot of focus, but in a country like Germany, where I was posted at the time, it made little sense. Germany boasted an annual array of trade fairs that touched practically every field of business endeavor. Some of these events drew as many as 6,000 exhibitors, with 2,500 the norm, and atten- dance reached as high as 700,000. Attempts to line up meetings in the FRG for trade mission participants were F O C U S J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 47 Despite its small size within the Washington landscape, ITA attracted an unusually high number of Commerce’s allotted political appointees.