The Foreign Service Journal, January 2012

J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 2 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 15 adherents of a faith. Our Constitution forbids the establishment of any state church, and so we ignore religion in the workplace. Some of the predominantly Muslim countries may in time become secular states — or they may not. We can continue to focus on the Middle East as an area and Arabic as a language, and we needmore specialists in both. But I would like to see the Na- tional Foreign Affairs Training Center create a course in Islamic studies that every officer would be required to take —even Latin Americanists like myself. (The population at my last Western Hemisphere Affairs Bureau post was 9- percent Muslim, and my wife and I were the guests of honor at a Muslim wedding.) Security Threats The major security threat to the United States, and specifically to our embassies and diplomats abroad, is ter- rorism that is not state-sponsored, and I think that will remain true as far as I can see into the future. (No, I do not think China is going to attack its best customer and largest debtor, although there are certainly some challenging times ahead as it becomes a democracy and our major economic competitor.) Although last summer’s slaughter in Norway proved that Muslim-haters can also be terrorists, for the time being most terrorist threats are related to the U.S. military presence inMuslim coun- tries, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to the number and influence of ex- treme fundamentalists in Islam. All of these factors may diminish over time. The first certainly will; the others I make no predictions about. But in the meantime, we will have to deal with terrorism, and not just as a se- curity threat. If that reality undermines our ability S P E A K I N G O U T