58 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL the New York leg (and future Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the Washington leg). In the aftermath of that visit, Wendy, who had become the head of the newly formed Charter 77 Foundation–U.S., organized a group of top constitutional experts to assist the new government in revising Czechoslovakia’s Soviet-era constitution. Lessons in Diplomacy Today, Bill Luers’ experience as ambassador to Czechoslovakia is rich with lessons. He demonstrated that the pursuit of the U.S. national interest and of human rights need not conflict. It requires a delicate dance, but Luers showed how, with a little finesse, it is possible to engage both with authoritarian governments and their citizens in ways that win friends to America’s side, and thereby advance its interests, while creating political openings for internal forces of change. Years later, Luers explained that his aim was not to subvert the Czechoslovak state but to elevate the standing of the dissidents. “We were not trying to promote rebellion. … They were [a] human rights group. They were promoting theater, the arts, and access to literature and thinking.” He calculated that by “shining the international light on them, they would have increased protection from being thrown into jail.” In the case of Czechoslovakia, that additional space proved to be all that the Chartists required—along with Gorbachev’s repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which had stipulated that the Soviet Union would intervene militarily whenever its satellite states deviated politically from Moscow’s line—to help eventually usher in democratic change to the country. In the intervening years, despite many setbacks and shortcomings in their democratic development, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Czechoslovakia peaceably split in two in 1993) have proved far better partners to the United States than their communist predecessors. For the foreseeable future, this should be the kind of work in which U.S. diplomats are engaged. They will be most effective if they remain true to their own values while doing so—as Bill and Wendy Luers so ably did. n
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