12 SEPTEMBER 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Critical Shortage of FCS Officers in Africa I am responding to the excellent article in the June FSJ, “The Business of Diplomacy: Prioritizing the U.S.-Africa Commercial Agenda,” by Scott Eisner. I am a retired Senior Foreign Commercial Service officer who served as Commerce Department regional director for Africa, Near East, and South Asia from 1991 to 1994 at the end of apartheid in South Africa. I was also FCS AFSA VP from 1997 to 1999. The critical shortage of commercial officers at U.S. embassies across Africa has been a constant since the FCS was created in 1980. This is primarily the result of institutional shortages of officers, inadequate budgets, and systemic priorities for other parts of the world markets, especially Asia and Europe. To have one regional American officer located in Kenya, Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, and South Africa is simply inadequate for the size and value of the African market—especially with China overwhelming the African minerals and metals industries essential to future global battery production. The tragedy is that U.S. global trade policies still undervalue African markets both as sources of supply and as consumers. Unless and until we change that view, the opportunities will not be fulfilled, and U.S. manufacturing and trade will not reach full potential. Charles Kestenbaum Senior FCS FSO, retired Vienna, Virginia Advancing with Africa Requires More Ag Officers Set apart by its list of specific recommendations on how to strengthen U.S.- Africa commercial relations, Scott Eisner’s article “The Business of Diplomacy: The Wrong Direction on Taiwan At the highest strategic public policy level, our country has a choice to make between confronting the rise of China and wrestling down CO2-based climate change. Robert S. Wang in his June 2023 FSJ Speaking Out article is sending us in the wrong direction. He encourages the Biden administration to stand by democratic Taiwan and to be ready to deter and fight military or “coercive” pressures on Taiwan from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). He downplays the costs and dangers of heightened conflict between the U.S. and the PRC, which could become lethal and tragic on the largest scale. The Taiwan point of friction needs to be made less military. Mr. Wang’s argument is well presented, but it is bad advice. Taiwan’s thirst for autonomy is not unanimously supported on the island, and Taiwan is certainly not eager to have war for it. Taiwan’s separatist drive is significantly our own creation, driven for more than 70 years by the American anti- communist right wing. This was revived by President Donald Trump, and a negative view of China remains preponderant in the U.S. Congress, and now even among the general public. It’s striking how much talk about saving Taiwan is not really about Taiwan but about American uneasiness with the rise of the PRC. We should be listening hard and reflectively when the PRC says that it sees us as trying to “contain, encircle, and suppress” modern China and using the Taiwan issue for that purpose. Mr. Wang posits, in effect, a moral obligation on us to continue to protect the small democracy, Taiwan, from the large authoritarian PRC. But such an Prioritizing the U.S.-Africa Commercial Agenda” in the June 2023 FSJ is must-reading, and hopefully he and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will disseminate it throughout Capitol Hill and the federal bureaucracy. I would only add that not only do we need more Foreign Commercial Service officers on the scene promoting U.S. products and services but also many more Foreign Agricultural Service officers in the field because agriculture remains the primary engine for growth and employment in most African countries. As the FCS and FAS backup in Morocco and Kenya, I witnessed firsthand the terrific networking and matchmaking these foreign affairs colleagues and their local staff members do in promoting mutually beneficial trade or, in Eisner’s words, “equitable growth for Americans and Africans alike.” What I learned from them was extremely useful to my econ teammates and me in Sudan where, in spite of our broad sanctions regime, we were able to facilitate sales of more than 2,000 dairy cattle from Missouri, pivot and linear irrigation equipment and other agricultural machinery, pharmaceuticals, and imagery technology for the Khartoum Breast Care Centre established by radiologist Dr. Hania Morsi Fadl—one of the most inspiring women I have ever met. We even tried to establish business links between farmers, herders, and entrepreneurs in Darfur with American suppliers. As Mr. Eisner advocates so adroitly, we want to “Advance with Africa.” George Aldridge FSO, retired Arlington, Texas
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