The Foreign Service Journal, April 2018

58 APRIL 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL DEFINING DIPLOMACY for YEARS Above inSILVERFOILonCover 1980 ~ 1989 FSJ July-August 1980 Evacuation from N’Djamena Early on the morning of Friday, March 21, 1980, sometime before 4 a.m., a sharp burst of rifle fire in the street before the American ambassador’s resident in N’Djamena, Chad, woke the residents inside. At a distance, gunfire crackled in other sections of the sleeping town. The shots were more numerous than usual, and they persisted. –Patricia B. Norland, a Foreign Service wife and mother of three FSJ March 1981 Freedom The return of the hostages did something wonderful for our country, and perhaps for the world too. Americans of every background and political philosophy were brought together by the determination to reject Iran’s gross violation of inter- national law. We all shared the suffering of the hostages as Iran extended its crime day after day. …Honest people will differ on the complexities surrounding the seizure, deten- tion and eventual release of the hostages. –AFSA Editorial FSJ October 1981 Jesse Helms Battling Modern Diplomacy FSJ March 1982 America Overcommitted Today the United States runs the risk—as it did in the 1960s— of defining its vital interests so broadly that it may again be unable or unwilling to defend all of them if put to the test. Just as the Kennedy and Johnson administrations concluded that all of Asia might go communist if the United States did not prevent the collapse of South Vietnam, so the Carter and Rea- gan administrations seem to have concluded that the whole non-communist world could be brought to its knees if the Soviet Union gains strong political influence in the Persian Gulf. In neither case are dire consequences inevitable. –Donald E. Neuchterlein, professor of international affairs, Federal Executive Institute, Charlottesville, Va. FSJ January 1983 Restarting START The issue of nuclear weapons is at the center of the U.S.- Soviet relationship, and an agreement resulting in substan- tial reductions would have far reaching political effects. The Reagan administration should therefore introduce a new proposal on START. In designing a negotiable proposal, the Reagan administration may first need to reconsider some of the assumptions underlying current nuclear weapons policy. –David Linebaugh, former FSO and deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Alexander Peters FSJ September 1983 Accepting Nuclear Weapons NATO’s central military problem is that it has opted out of the Nuclear Age, while the Soviets have unhesitat- ingly accepted it. Neither Americans nor Europeans have been willing to contemplate nuclear weapons seriously as warfighting instruments. The Soviets always have. This fundamental doctrinal disparity has placed the alliance in an untenable position regarding realistically defending itself. The West’s dilemma is that it will have to change its views and accept nuclear weapons to survive, but it believes it cannot survive by accepting them. –Sam Cohen, weapons analyst and Pentagon consultant who invented the neutron bomb FSJ January 1984 USIA: Dynamo or Dinosaur USIA, as the centerpiece of the U.S. public diplomacy effort, must maintain its effectiveness in a world where advances in communications technology now allow immense quantities of information to reach many more millions of people throughout the world in less time than ever before. If the agency is to achieve this goal, the concept of its mission and the way it is pursued may well have to be re-evaluated. –Representative Dante B. Fascell (D-Fla.), chairman of the International Operations Subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and chairman of the HCFA from 1984 to 1993 FSJ March 1984 Coping with the Non-Aligned A new U.S. approach to the non-aligned should begin by accepting that the movement is here to stay and avoid creating any pretexts for preserving its current anti-Western character. The consistency and tone of any new U.S. approach will be as important as agendas and the contents of proposals. It should stress not the divisions, but instead points of convergence between the United States and the non-aligned. Both are committed to survival of independent states in a pluralistic environment, a perspective fundamen- tally inconsistent with the Soviet world view. –Richard Jackson, FSO