The Foreign Service Journal, April 2019

18 APRIL 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL the deteriorating situation in #Venezuela, as well as the conclusion that the presence of U.S. diplomatic staff at the embassy has become a constraint on U.S. policy.” Fewer than two dozen Americans remained in the embassy after the partial drawdown in January. First Screening of “A Diplomat of Consequence” A s a first-tour officer in the Domini- can Republic in 1999, Chris Teal happened across a photo of Ebenezer Bassett, an African-American and one of the first U.S. envoys to the island of His- paniola. Intrigued, he began to research Bassett and ultimately wrote a biography, Hero of Hispaniola: America’s First Black Diplomat (Praeger, 2008). This year marks 150 years since Bassett’s appointment. Teal was convinced that the sig- nificance of Bassett’s story—he was appointed ambassador to Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 1869—went far beyond his breaking the color barrier and that his work and accomplishments deserved a wider audience today. So he set out to make a documentary film about Bassett while on a sabbatical fellowship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Commu- nication. In February Teal, now on a faculty assignment at the Inter-American Defense College at Fort McNair, held the first screenings of his film, “A Diplomat of Consequence,” at the DACOR-Bacon House and at George Washington Univer- sity’s Elliott School of International Affairs in Washington, D.C. Upcoming screenings of the film will be announced on Facebook at www.facebook.com/EbenezerDBassett and on Instagram at www.instagram.com/ ebenezer.bassett. Economic Diplomacy Works: FCS Featured on Podcast F oreign Commercial Service Officer and AFSA FCS Vice President Dan Crocker was the featured guest on a Feb. 4 episode of the “American Diplo- mat” podcast. Mr. Crocker explained the role of the Foreign Commercial Service both overseas and domestically, helping the audience understand its work assisting small businesses and building American prosperity at home. In 1980, Crocker said, the president signed into law “the authority to help U.S. companies export more overseas, and defend U.S. companies’ interest, and also to promote inward investment—foreign investment.” “It’s about creating jobs,” he con- tinued, explaining that FCS has trade specialists in 76 countries that together represent 90 percent of U.S. exports. FCS “helps about 30,000 U.S. companies every year,” and more than 80 percent of those there are no African-American women among them. Out of 51 individuals appointed by the Trump administration to senior posi- tions at the foreign affairs agencies (State, USAID, FCS, FAS and the U.S. Agency for Global Media) only six are non-Cauca- sian. Of those, 46 are political appointees, two are recalled Foreign Service retirees and three are active-duty members of the Foreign Service. Only one currently encumbers an assistant secretary–level position: Ambas- sador Carol Perez, the newly confirmed Director General of the Foreign Service. The other two active-duty FSOs in senior positions are Ambassador David Hale, who serves as under secretary of State for political affairs and Michael Harvey, who is USAID’s assistant administrator for the Middle East. By historical standards, this number is quite low. At the same point in the Obama administration, for instance, there were 12 active-duty Foreign Service officers in under secretary and assistant secretary positions. Last U.S. Diplomats Leave Venezuela O n March 12, facing deteriorating conditions in Caracas, the State Department pulled its remaining diplo- mats out of Venezuela. A nationwide power outage plagued the country for a week in mid-March. The embattled President Nicolás Maduro blamed the outages on the United States, a claimWashington denies. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed the power outage and Venezuela’s other internal problems on Maduro, accusing both Cuba and Russia of propping up the Maduro government. Pompeo tweeted on March 11 that the decision to close the embassy “reflects Ebenezer Bassett, from the February 2009 FSJ .