Diplomacy

In my piece Wednesday about the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq, I quoted a senior State Department official about diplomatic culture. He was reacting to a kind-of-obnoxious question I asked about the department being somewhat hidebound and embassy-centric, too reluctant and resistant to get out into the far-flung areas of a country where important political [...]

I swear: this is the full and complete text of an email alert that the State Department just sent me.

As kind of a coda to the non-ambassador-to-Iraq-Tony-Zinni episode, I speculated at first about the optics of placing two generals — Zinni and Karl Eikenberry — in the all-important ambassadorships of Iraq and Afghanistan. Laura Rozen got at that in her Zinni post as well, and now a friend, stationed abroad in the Foreign Service, [...]

“Perception becomes reality so appearance is everything,” says Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), reminding everyone of the Clinton Foundation controversy. That wasn’t passive-aggressive at all, no.
Back to the campaign controversy of last year: should the United States negotiate with its adversaries without preconditions, as President-elect Barack Obama stated last year?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke out Monday on Sen. Barack Obama’s diplomatic approach to hostile countries, during an exchange with Lukman Ahmed of BBC Arabic Television.
Rice stressed that the Bush administration’s tough stand on Iran was backed by multilateral agreements and prior U.N. resolutions, while sounding a positive note on high-level meetings. Once Iran [...]

COMMENTARY
Washington again placed bets on the wrong foreign leaders. Is personal diplomacy a farce?