The Foreign Service Journal, June 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2022 15 I t is this over-vaulting confidence in its own ultimate wisdom that is the essential weakness of the For- eign Service and which, incidentally, has made power shifts to theWhite House staff, the Treasury, and others, all the more difficult to bear. Not only profes- sional pride has been hurt, but the hubristic basis of the Foreign Service mentality has also been stung to the quick. …The Foreign Service routine is, when stripped of its glamorous illusions, just that—a routine, little more. … In psychological terms, what is needed is a form of collective catharsis that will force each officer to place his individual contribu- tion and that of the Foreign Service as a whole in the proper perspective. If the State Department is ever to be a viable contributor to foreign policy formulation, the hubristic bases of the Foreign Service illusion must, ultimately, be shattered. —Foreign Service Officer James G. Huff, from his article by the same title in the June 1972 FSJ . 50 Years Ago The Foreign Service Illusion Russia Booted from UNHRC T he United Nations General Assembly voted on April 7 to remove Russia from its Human Rights Council. The move marks the first time a coun- try has been kicked off the council since 2011, when the government of Libyan authoritarian Muammar al-Qaddafi lost its seat. U.S. Ambassador LindaThomas- Greenfield launched the effort to suspend Russia, a permanent member of the Secu- rity Council, from the 47-member council. In introducing the resolution, Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s U.N. ambassador, said Russia has committed “horrific human rights violations and abuses that would be equated to war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The resolution was adopted by a vote of 93 to 24, with 58 abstentions. Among those voting against the resolution were China, Iran, North Korea, Kazakhstan and Cuba, as well as Belarus, Syria and Russia. Mission Havana Resumes Visa Services I n May, after a four-and-a-half-year hia- tus, the U.S. embassy in Cuba resumed immigrant visa (IV) services on a limited basis for applicants in the IR-5 category, or “Parent of a U.S. Citizen.” At a news conference in February, Chargé d’Affaires Timothy Zúñiga-Brown announced that additional consular offi- cers would be deployed to Havana to assist with limited immigrant visa processing for the parents of American citizens. Accord- ing to the embassy’s website, this decision recognizes “the priority of immediate rela- tives as well as the unique age, health and mobility challenges faced by this category of applicants.” Zúñiga-Brown stressed that IVs for Cubans will still be primarily processed in Guyana, as they have been since 2017 when the Trump administration slashed personnel and suspended consular services at the Havana facility following a series of “anomalous health incidents” that came to be known as Havana syndrome. There have been no recent reports of health incidents in Havana. The consular suspension and the COVID-19 pandemic together created a massive visa backlog that has prompted the Biden administration to expand consular services at Embassy Havana. The resumption of processing IR-5 applicants locally, the embassy said, is the first step in that expansion. No timeline has been provided for the full range of immigrant and non-immigrant visa services. Diplomatic Void in the Horn of Africa D avid Satterfield, U.S. Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa and a career Foreign Service officer, resigned his post in April after just three months on the job. The exit follows that of his predeces- sor, Jeffrey Feltman, who left the position in January 2022 after nine months as the special envoy. Though no official reason was given for Satterfield’s departure, The National cited unnamed sources who suggested that it stems fromdivisions within State’s Bureau of African Affairs and disagree- ments between the envoy desk and bureau leadership. The rapid succession of these short tenures raises questions about how the State Department plans to keep the region a priority as Washington is consumed by the crisis in Ukraine. At the time of writing, U.S. ambassadorships in Addis Ababa, Khartoum and Juba remained vacant. Satterfield’s departure, first reported by Foreign Policy , widens the diplomatic void in an increasingly critical region at an important moment and hampers U.S. efforts to help negotiate a truce to the civil war in the Tigray region, support the pro-democracy movement in Sudan’s