The Foreign Service Journal, June 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2018 15 [Bringing “swagger” back to the State Department] is a work in progress. But when the Foreign Service has its grip on a policy and is working with the Secretary of State and working for the president, and that policy is moving forward, then there’s a confidence—a tightness of drafting. The Foreign Service leans forward, and can help its political masters move ahead and press for the agreed goals. That’s the closest thing I can think of as swagger, and I’ve seen it work. —Ambassador (ret.) Daniel Fried, in aMay 2 interview withMary Louise Kelly onNPR’s “AllThings Considered.” Contemporary Quote Osius for more on the story. A State Department spokesperson said that Osius is “entitled to his personal views,” the Huffington Post reported on April 13, but then the official “doubled down on the Trump administration’s deportation policy.” A spokesperson for the State Depart- ment’s East Asia Bureau said that the U.S. and Vietnamese governments “continue to discuss their positions,” according to the Catholic News Agency . Several weeks after the April FSJ appeared, Amb. Osius reported to us that as a result of wide news coverage of the deportation of refugees who had supported the United States and South Vietnam during the VietnamWar he had been contacted by many people. “A Vietnam vet wrote to me about the administration’s policy—‘Odious in the whole, but especially so in the case of Amerasians,’” Osius told the FSJ . “Aman facing likely deportation sent me a photo of a Vietnamese-American woman and two children who will be left behind without their husband and father when he is kicked out,” Osius continued. “He wrote: ‘At the age of 5, I was forced to leave my family behind [in Vietnam]. Living in the United States at a young age without parents or true guidance, I’ve made mistakes. That was more than 18 years ago. Now, the Trump administra- tion wants to force me to separate from my wife and kids. This is even worse than being separated frommy original family 40 years ago. It really means so much to me and my family that there is someone as big as you to speak out. On behalf of my family, thank you very, very much,’” said Osius. On April 26, attorneys filed a class action suit in the U.S. District Court, Cen- tral District of California, on behalf of the deportees. The case will be heard June 4. Reauthorization Bill to Restore Cyber Diplomacy Office O n April 23 Nextgov reported that a State Department reauthorization bill from the House Foreign Affairs Com- mittee would restore an office for cyber diplomacy that was closed during former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s tenure. The reauthorization bill, which was released on April 20 by HFAC Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.), would mandate the creation of an office of cyberspace and digital economy, to be overseen by a presidentially appointed director con- firmed by the Senate. Last year Secretary Tillerson eliminated the coordinator position for the Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues and closed the office, which was first created in 2011. Tillerson reinstated the position in February, but moved the office under the Bureau for Economic and Business Affairs and limited the focus of the office, drawing criticism from lawmakers. The reauthorization bill would restore the office’s broad cyber mandate and move the director to a position just beneath the undersecretary for political affairs, increasing the importance of the position. The bill also suggests that “the cyber office should ultimately grow into a full bureau of the State Department,” and it would prohibit the department from buying telecommunications services from any company that the intelligence community believes has assisted another country with a cyber attack or digital spy- ing operations against a U.S. target. Chris Painter, former head of the Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, told Nextgov that the move would “allow the office to address numerous issues at the intersection of cybersecu- rity and national security.” (See p. 26 for Chris Painter’s survey of “Diplomacy in Cyberspace.”) During his confirmation hearing in April, Mike Pompeo vowed to bring resources back to cybersecurity at State. “I can only say that every element of government has a piece of its cyber duty,” Pompeo said. “One of the challenges is that it’s so deeply divided that we don’t have a central place to do cyber work. At the CIA, we spent a great deal of resources” Pompeo continued. “I hope we’ve deliv- ered value on our cyber efforts. I would hope to do the same thing at the State Department.”