The Foreign Service Journal, June 2014

22 JUNE 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL employ TFM as the acronym for the Turkish Foreign Ministry for the rest of this article.) Even perceptions of the rivalry between each country’s capital and largest city (Washington versus New York, Ankara versus Istanbul) are similar. And yes, those of us in the TFM regard Ankara as one of the “least preferred” places to be assigned, due to long, stressful working hours and lower pay. Another thing American and Turkish public servants have in common: The vast majority of us are dedicated and hard- working. We are not primarily motivated by material satisfac- tion, but by the genuine pleasure that comes from contributing to the well-being of our respective nations, and promoting their national interests. However, I would observe that State has much more highly developed mechanisms than TFM for rewarding exceptional individual contributions. Opening Portals During my fellowship I was based in the Bureau of Inter- national Security and Nonproliferation, which is responsible for managing a broad range of U.S. nonproliferation policies, programs, agreements and initiatives. The spread of weapons of mass destruction, whether nuclear, biological, chemical or radiological, and of related materials, technologies and exper- tise, and delivery systems, is a pre-eminent challenge to Ameri- can national security. ISN leads the State Department’s efforts to combat this grave threat, and prevent terrorists from acquiring WMD, through bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. I had an extensive portfolio, but my main responsibility was to support Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins, the coordinator for threat reduction programs. She is also the U.S. chair of the Group of Eight’s Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, and the Department of State lead for planning the G-8’s annual Nuclear Security Summit. Because the United States was the host for the 2012 summit, the Department of State needed to set up a website and outreach tools. Among other tasks, I developed and managed the Internet portal that promoted the United States’ chairmanship, facilitated several Global Partnership conferences, hosted meetings and reached out to foreign diplomats to further GP collaboration. At the risk of immodesty, I am delighted to say that the web- page we designed to advance U.S. public diplomacy for the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit, which we kept current throughout the summit and its immediate aftermath, received rave reviews from the National Security Council staff and from across the U.S. government for being comprehensive and user-friendly. I also had the pleasure of addressing a group of students to discuss Ömer Murat at work in the Embassy of Turkey in Washington, D.C. Cemil Erdem