The Foreign Service Journal, May 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2015 15 Ramos-Horta wrote in The Guardian . The United States, the United King- dom, India, the European Union and the United Nations have all spoken out on the trial. As U.N. Special Rapporteur Gabriela Knaul put it: “Nasheed’s trial was not only a clear violation of the Maldives’ international human rights obligations…but also made a mockery of the State’s own Constitution.” Maldives Foreign Minister Dunya Maumoon has dismissed the interna- tional criticism as “ignorant and biase d” and warned that Nasheed’s fate is an internal matter. Elected in 2008 in the first democratic New Horizons, 1965 D uring the last few years new political horizons have been opening up in surprising ways and places, and it is no longer sufficient to do the same things in order to achieve the same results. Some well-tested and unexceptionable American doctrines no longer seem so universally persuasive or prag- matic as they were a short time ago. All this is naturally frustrating to the American people who thought that they had, in the course of 20 years, won both the greatest hot war and the greatest cold war in history, and now find some of their victories apparently called in question, and even, in some cases, a less clear assurance as to just who is on whose side. In moments of discouragement, it sometimes seems that Vietnam is insoluble, the Congo is unviable, de Gaulle is incomprehensible, Afro-Asians are ungrateful, Arabs are intractable, Europeans are unpredictable, Russians are irreconcilable and Chinese unregenerate. What is required of us in foreign affairs, as in any other kind of affairs, is (a) a sober, persistent reassessment of the realities we face; (b) a recognition that while we are intelligent we are not omniscient, and while we are strong we are not omnipotent; and (c) a sense of poise, of proportion, of confidence undiminished but adjusted to our capabilities on the changing scene… It may prove that one of the most effective things we can do abroad at this time will be to create at home a Great Society which will serve as a reminder everywhere of what America physically can do and politically and morally intends to do—in other words a reminder to us and everyone else of what we stand for. With this might go a somewhat more selective approach to the prob- lems of the world as a whole and our responsibility toward them. …We may not have as much responsibility as we supposed, or as much capability as we had, to ensure that nothing unpleasant happens anywhere or that the natural turbulence of new states and new societies is always and everywhere restrained. —By Charles Yost, from “New Horizons in Foreign Affairs,” FSJ , May 1965. 50 Years Ago