The Foreign Service Journal, March 2012

Exchanges as Strategic Policy Of the eight fascinating articles in the December Journal pertaining to the breakup of the Soviet Union, I found the most instructive one to be Yale Richmond’s “Cultural Diplomacy in the ColdWar.” In it, Richmond con- cludes that the 30 preceding years of U.S.-Soviet academic and cultural ex- changes proved vital in bringing an end to the Soviet Union. Particularly noteworthy is his quote from Oleg Kalugin, former KGB offi- cer and head of Soviet counterintelli- gence, who said that “Exchanges … played a tremendous role in the erosion of the Soviet system.” As Richmond points out, Kalugin was among the first group of Soviet academic exchangees to the United States, arriving in 1958. Having served in Soviet-era Mos- cow, Kyiv and Warsaw, and in post-So- viet Minsk and Chisinau, I had ample opportunity to observe the effects of such exchanges. Richmond is com- pletely correct in his conclusions, but I would go one step further: academic and cultural exchanges demonstrated the superiority of strategic policies over tactical ones. A classic example of a tactical ap- proach backfiring was the one ad- vanced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who persuaded President Jimmy Carter to punish the Soviet Union after its De- cember 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Among other measures, the Carter ad- ministration reduced the official U.S. presence in the USSR, recalling the advance party that had been on the ground in Kyiv for two years preparing to open a consulate general there. If Washington had really wanted to pun- ish the Soviets, we would have ex- panded our diplomatic presence, especially outside Moscow and Lenin- grad. Another mindless tactic from the same period was the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. This led to retaliation by the Soviets and their East European clients (except Romania), who refused to attend the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games. These U.S.-initiated, reciprocal actions cut off vital people-to-people contacts, significantly harming the broader and more important strategic policy of fos- tering academic and cultural ex- changes. Sadly, as Jack Harrod — a retired USIA Senior Foreign Service Informa- tion Officer, Soviet and East European expert, and friend — puts it: “USIA was at times at least capable of thinking and acting strategically, whereas State always acts only tactically.” Fast-forwarding to current events, we find State continuing its tactical par- adigm in the post-Soviet region, this time with President Alexander Lukash- enko’s Belarus. With 17 years of costly tactical policies and programs under its belt and nothing to show for it, one might think that State would, at last, consider strategic approaches of the kind that Yale Richmond so eloquently describes in the Soviet context. If for no other reason, severe and continuing budgetary strictures demand the best possible use of scarce resources. David Swartz Ambassador to Belarus, 1992-1994 FSO, retired Nappanee, Ind. The Interagency Process I read Susan Johnson’s January Pres- ident’s View column (“Marine Corps Culture and Institutional Success: Les- sons for the FS?”) with great interest. I would like to be included in any dis- cussions that AFSA might organize to strengthen the voice of the Foreign Service in national security affairs. Since retiring at the end of 2009, I have served as a subject matter expert in courses relating to reconstruction, stabilization, conflict prevention and response at the National Foreign Af- fairs Training Center. I have also served as an adviser to the U.S. Marine Corps University Command and Staff L ETTERS M A R C H 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 5 AFSA President Susan Johnson’s President’s Views column appears in the Annual Report this month.