The Foreign Service Journal, March 2014

58 MARCH 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL dealing with Latin American and Western European affairs. He is the author of The United States in Honduras , 1980-1981 : An Ambassador’s Memoir (McFarland & Company, 2000). A Flourishing Relationship Mongolia and the United States: A Diplomatic History Jonathan S. Addleton, Hong Kong Univer- sity Press, 2013, Kindle Edition/ $20.99, 186 pages. Reviewed by RuthM. Hall Jonathan S. Addleton, a career USAID FSO, was the agency’s mission director in Ulaanbaatar from 2001 to 2004, and served as U.S. ambassador there from 2009 to 2012. He devotes the bulk of this fascinating book to recounting the roughly 150 years of interaction between the two countries preceding the establishment of formal diplomatic ties in 1987. Perhaps the most prominent American visitor to Mongolia in the early 20th cen- tury was Herbert Hoover, who frequently ventured into the country to prospect for mineral wealth while working as an engineer in China. But many other Ameri- cans also made the arduous trek, such as WilliamWoodville Rockhill, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia, China and the Ottoman Empire, among other assign- ments. Rockhill spoke Mongolian (among many other languages) and spent a good deal of time in the country. He eventu- ally acquired more than 6,000 books about Mongolia, which he donated to the Library of Congress. That extensive collection included books by Owen Lattimore (one of the many China experts later smeared by Senator Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., as a Soviet spy) and Roy Chapman Andrews, who used the fossils he collected in the Gobi Desert during the 1920s to prove that dinosaurs hatched from eggs. At the same time, American universities were becoming more and more interested in Mongolia, sponsoring research and language studies. Despite this network of connections, as Ambassador Addleton explains, the establishment of formal bilateral relations was a slow process. After Mongolia gained its independence fromChina in 1911, U.S. commercial attaché Julean Arnold recognized the potential for trade with the new nation, but Washington still took a decade to open a consulate in Kalgan. Sadly, growing Soviet influence led to its closure in 1927. In the early 1970s the State Department sent two young FSOs, Curtis Kamman and J. Stapleton Roy, to study Mongolian at the University of Seattle, but plans to establish diplomatic ties went nowhere. Finally, in the mid-1980s, Vernon Walters, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, worked with his Mongolian counterpart, Nyamdoo, to make those plans a reality. Nyamdoo (who, like many Mongolians, had just one name) would become his country’s first ambassador in Washing- ton, and the U.S. embassy in Ulaanbaatar opened on April 17, 1988. (Addleton comments that the first residence for U.S. diplomats there was quickly dubbed “Faulty Towers.”) The past 26 years have seen a surge of official, business and civil society activities binding the two nations ever closer together, ranging from Fulbright exchanges, sports and other cultural diplomacy and sister-city partnerships to military cooperation and corporate invest- ment. Amb. Addleton makes good use of his own front-row seat in the country for most of the past decade to describe this process and highlight its many successes. For instance, since 2001 the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Pres- ervation has helped to maintain many Mongolian cultural sites, including Buddhist monasteries and their troves of books, manuscripts, religious objects and traditional dance costumes and masks. It has also supported the Mongolian Mon- asteries Documentation Project (begun in 2006), which collects information about the many sites destroyed during the 1930s. Hundreds of Peace Corps Volunteers have served in Mongolia since 1990, assisting in health education, English- language training, community projects, libraries and computer labs. The Ameri- can Center for Mongolian Studies, hosted by the University of Wisconsin, opened in 2004 in Ulaanbaatar. And private donors funded the Genghis Khan exhibit that toured the United States in 2012. Throughout the book, Addleton’s well- chosen anecdotes enrich our understand- ing of Mongolia’s distinctive culture and heritage—and its importance as a new democracy. Even if you have never served in Asia, Mongolia and the United States will more than hold your interest. Ruth M. Hall, a member of the Foreign Service Journal Editorial Board, joined the Foreign Service as an economic officer in 1992. She has served in Baghdad, Jakarta, Frankfurt Addleton’s well-chosen anecdotes enrich our understanding of Mongolia’s distinctive culture and heritage—and its importance as a new democracy.