The Foreign Service Journal, June 2005

Science, State, Justice, Commerce and Related Agencies asked the GAO to examine to what extent U.S. public diplomacy efforts have been coordi- nated, and whether the private sector has been significantly engaged in the efforts. The answer to both, it turns out, is not much. And the reason, the GAO concludes, is the administration’s failure to come up with its promised national communications strategy. The report offers two recommen- dations. First, the director of the Office of Global Communications should fully implement the role man- dated for it in the president’s execu- tive order, including facilitating the development of a national communi- cations strategy. Second, it calls on the Secretary of State to develop a strategy to guide department efforts to engage the private sector in public diplomacy work. Ironically, however, as Al Kamen pointed out in his April 6 column in the Washington Post , there is no longer an Office of Global Communications. First the director left for another job; then the office itself evaporated, its last “global message of the day” dated March 18. The White House told Kamen that the NSC would be taking up the OGC’s functions. Although the White House de- clined to comment on the GAO report, the appointment of Bush con- fidante Karen Hughes as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and the Egyptian-American Dina Powell as her deputy in March promised a big boost in firepower for public diplomacy. But the news that Hughes will not take office until the fall (in order to see her son off to college) underscores the administration’s paralysis on this critical front. Facing the Nuclear Challenge: NPT 2005 The monthlong 2005 Review Conference for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Wea- pons is under way at the United Nations as we go to press. Represen- tatives of more than 180 nations are reviewing implementation, compli- ance and steps to strengthen the non- proliferation regime at a time when the 1968 NPT is arguably facing its most serious challenges ever. “The Bush administration aims to use this review conference to turn up the heat on Iran and North Korea for their nuclear transgressions and make it tougher for potential cheaters to use civilian nuclear programs as cover to illegally acquire nuclear weapons,” explains Wade Boese, the Arms Control Association’s research direc- tor, in a Web review article on the conference’s opening day at American Prospect Online ( http://www.pros pect.org/web/page.ww?section= root&name=ViewWeb&articleId =9624 ). “ But the administration’s goals are likely to be frustrated by its dismissive and inflexible attitude toward many other countries’ con- cerns and its own treaty obligations. Specifically, other capitals complain that Washington is not doing enough to pursue the elimination of its nuclear arms.” Among other things, U.S. repudia- tion of some of the agreements reached at the last review conference in 2000, as well as the Bush adminis- tration’s pursuit of new and modified nuclear weapons, are at issue. Along with the U.S., China, France and Russia are also developing new nuclear-deliverysystems. These developments call into ques- tion the essential bargain underlying the NPT: namely, that states without nuclear weapons pledge not to acquire them, while nuclear-armed states com- mit to eventually give them up. The third plank of the treaty, allowing for the peaceful use of nuclear technology under strict and verifiable control, pre- sents its own challenges. J U N E 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 13 C YBERNOTES 50 Years Ago... The hard core, the backbone, the muscle and sinew and brain of any diplomatic mission is, and must be, the Foreign Service professionals — the men and women who have made diplomacy their life study, their life discipline, and their life work. … It is a pity, a very great pity, that the American people do not know more about their own Foreign Service — at least, say, half as much as they know about their Marine Corps, or their Air Force, or their Army or Navy. — Hon. Clare Boothe Luce, from “American Diplomacy at Work,” FSJ , June 1955.