The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2007

CORDS, held a 40-year reunion just as the May Journal was published. (For those unaware of our diplomatic history, CORDS was the PRT equiva- lent during the Vietnam War.) We invited participants to display any memorabilia that they had from their experiences in that war. There was enough to mount an entire display of that era in a museum of diplomatic his- tory. But it won’t be there 20 years from now. The same is probably true for every area of the world, for every post. The longer we delay, the more will be lost. If the department can- not fund completion of the museum, at the very least it should arrange for a small staff of archivists and conser- vators who can collect and safeguard donations of materials relevant to the museum until it can be built and staffed. Retirees are dying every day and many families would welcome a place where these pieces of history could be preserved. Let’s get this done. Douglas R. Keene FE-MC, retired McLean, Va. Floating Exchange Rates Are Key I’m sure most of us are sympathet- ic to the arguments for free trade and open economies put forth by Eric Trachtenberg in “Saving Globali- zation from Itself” (April FSJ ). How- ever, while the theory of free trade presupposes neutral exchange rates, in today’s world two major trading countries, China and Japan, and a number of lesser ones maintain undervalued exchange rates by accu- mulating foreign exchange reserves. Their private sectors generate an excess of foreign exchange earnings; if these governments stopped taking this foreign exchange off the market, their currencies would quickly rise to a non-undervalued level. J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 7 L E T T E R S