The Foreign Service Journal, April 2023

14 APRIL 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL express professional views (including dis- senting views) candidly, free of bureau- cratic constraints, and under safeguards against pressures or penalties,” as stated in 1 FAM 022.6. LeslieThompson, a member of the policy planning staff and the new chair of the Open Forum, said the relaunched Open Forumwill include a series of conversations on topics such as economic statecraft, space and diplomacy, innova- tion, and specialist issues. Ideas for series topics are welcome. Write to openforum@ state.gov. China Balloon Delays SecState Beijing Visit D iplomatic work usually takes place behind the scenes, but when a Chi- nese balloon floated into view over the United States in early February, strained diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China turned into edge-of- the-seat news stories. An F-22 fighter jet shot the balloon down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4, but not before Secretary of State Antony Blinken had canceled a planned trip to Beijing. On Feb. 9, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman briefed Congress on the diplomatic fallout from the downing of the balloon: “The PRC has become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad.” The Chinese government insists the balloon was merely a weather bal- loon gone off course; the U.S. govern- ment is analyzing the pieces that were recovered from the Atlantic Ocean to learn more about the balloon’s capabili- ties, assuming that it was engaged in surveillance. Sherman also briefed nearly 150 for- eign diplomats from 40 countries about the balloon saga, as well as sending infor- mation to U.S. embassies to be shared with their local counterparts. The State Department has promised to reschedule the planned meeting with the PRC; but as we go to press, no such meetings have been announced. State Launches Welcome Corps O n Jan. 19, the State Department, in collaboration with the Depart- ment of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced the creation of Welcome Corps, a new program that enables American citizens to assist refugees as they resettle in the United States. The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) at HHS has supported refugees since 1980; the Welcome Corps creates volunteer opportunities for Americans wishing to support this work and fulfills President Joe Biden’s February 2021 Executive Order 14301, which called for rebuilding and enhancing programs to resettle refugees. In the first phase of the program, pri- vate sponsors will be matched with refu- gees who have already been approved for resettlement. The second phase, beginning in mid- to late 2023, will allow private sponsors to identify refugees for resettlement and to then support those specific refugees. Called by the department “the bold- est innovation in refugee resettlement in four decades,” the program seeks to mobilize 10,000 Americans to sponsor 5,000 refugees in 2023. Groups of at least five individual Americans can apply to the Welcome Corps to privately sponsor the resettle- ment of refugees in the United States. Private sponsors will be responsible for raising funds and providing direct assis- tance to refugees for their first 90 days in their new community, including help finding housing and employment and enrolling children in school. Diya Abdo, founder and director of Every Campus a Refuge, welcomes the news. Her organization has spent the last eight years mobilizing colleges and This is an inflection point. The post–Cold War era is over and there is now a competition underway to shape what comes next. We believe strongly that the future for peace, for stability, for opportunity, requires that there be some general understandings about what the rules of the road are. We had those rules, we had those understandings. … The whole purpose of the international order that grew up after WWII was to make sure we wouldn’t have WWIII. That this couldn’t be repeated. And we often hear from Chinese colleagues or Russian colleagues in different ways, that this is somehow invented in the West and they’re not a part of it. That’s absolutely wrong. … This order was founded on the United Nations Charter and the basic principles in that charter. It was founded on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I’m emphasizing ’universal.’ They all signed on to it. This system, for all its imperfections, worked. But now it’s being challenged. —Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NPR, Feb. 23, 2023. Contemporary Quote