I Wanna Be A Diplomat….

Great book on the foreign service for budding diplomats.  Juicy anecdote:

Q: Do you have a favorite anecdote from your time as a diplomat?Kopp: I once spent ten hours in a sealed railway car in the People’s Republic of Poland playing penny-ante poker with Senator Hubert Humphrey and three Minnesota journalists. I didn’t get to commit much diplomacy during the train ride, but I learned a lot of politics. Ten hours with Hubert Humphrey is a powerful antidote to cynicism.

Vasily Aksyonov, Exiled Soviet Writer, Is Dead at 76 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com

Chatter abounds on the merits of Obama’s Russia trip, an intriguing Russian writer, Vasily Aksyonov,  passes on–another reason I must be getting older as I enjoy these obits more and more.  Over at Volokh Consipiracy, the observation that “unlike such Russian nationalist dissidents as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Aksyonov advocated liberal democracy, opposed anti-Semitism, and deplored the recent revival of authoritarian Russian nationalism under Vladimir Putin.”  Why he matters:

“Solzhenitsyn is all about the imprisonment and trying to get out, and Aksyonov is the young person whose mother got out and he actually can live his life now,” said Nina L. Khrushcheva, who is a great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev and a friend of the Aksyonov family and who teaches international affairs at the New School in New York. “It was important to have the Aksyonov light, that light of personal freedom and personal self-expression.”

via Vasily Aksyonov, Exiled Soviet Writer, Is Dead at 76 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com.

And what to read:

• “The Burn” is a surreal, jazz-inspired riff on the plight of intellectuals under Communism, and “Island of Crimea” imagines what life would have been like on the Black Sea peninsula if the White Army had staved off the Bolsheviks there during the Russian Civil War and their descendants had flourished.
• ”Island of Crimea,” an eerily prescient, tragicomic deconstruction of Russia’s split personality, was written two decades before Vladimir V. Putin started mixing the Bolshevik and pre-revolutionary strains in Russian culture in the search for a new Russian identity.

A Tale of Two Countries and both are Honduras

Interesting human side to the Honduran question in friendly diplos who chose different sides of the fence, with long-lasting implications.  Aside from the initial issue of “Is it a coup or not,” and not even delving into the question of whether they are a good thing or who it helps/hurts–this is a moving story of the complexities here:

Which of the two diplomats is the renegade remains in some dispute. According to Mr. Micheletti’s government, Mr. Reina is a rogue ambassador who is using the government’s offices in New York without authorization. Mr. Flores Bermúdez, by contrast, was stripped of his diplomatic credentials by the State Department on Tuesday afternoon, a move that seemed to be in keeping with the Obama administration’s condemnation of the Honduran president’s ouster.

“Since that moment,” Mr. Flores Bermúdez said, “I have been presenting myself as the former ambassador from Honduras.”

Both are major figures back home. Mr. Reina, 74, is the brother of Carlos Roberto Reina, who was president from 1994 to 1998. A former law professor, university dean and member of Congress, Mr. Reina has sought the presidency himself, representing a leftist faction of the Liberal Party.

Mr. Flores Bermúdez, 59, who remembers Mr. Reina’s teaching him law years ago, served as ambassador to the United Nations from 1990 to 1994 and foreign minister from 1999 to 2002.

via Diplomats and Friends, Two Hondurans Part Ways – NYTimes.com.

A Conversation With Henry Kissinger

The global “tableau” that Sec State Clinton inherits hasn’t changed much since this 2007 interview with Dr. Kissinger(on the challenges confronting Sec Rice, at the time.)  But it still provides a nice summary–and some additional details on the US for policy-making machine:

Now, a number of things are going on simultaneously today that are not necessarily concurrent. In the North Atlantic, in Europe, the nation-state is disintegrating, but the new political unit, the European Union, has emerged here as a political non-factor. So in effect, Europe has no mechanisms for conducting strategic policy the way it used to be conducted by nation-states. Maybe that’s not possible for a transnational unit. That’s what we have to find out.In the relations between states, war is no longer possible. That’s a new factor. How do you conduct foreign policy when you can’t have war, and you have populations that are not willing to make any sacrifice for anything, including domestic changes? On the other hand, America is still a nation, and that greatly affects our relation with Europe.And we have Asia, which is more like Europe was in the 19th century, with the notion of equilibrium and balance of power, and so forth. Then you have the Middle East, which is like Europe was in the 17th century, torn by religious and sectarian conflicts. And on top of that, you have a new set of problems that have never existed before and can only be solved on a global basis—climate, energy, terror, for which there is no national mechanism really to deal with it.

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality – The New York Review of Books

Thanks to Simon Schama for this important rethinking of the Holocaust in NYR of Books:

Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden —were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today’s Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol.

A much-reoccuring argument for multilateral orgs and the role diplomacy plays in stemming conflict derives at least some of its moral authority from the Holocaust and other holocausts/genocides.  It is important to keep remembering, especially as Americans reflect on the expansive freedoms we enjoy in this incredible country.

Anti-Public Diplomacy Campaign | “Tweaking” the Zimbabwean Dictator

The “Trillion Dollar Campaign”–by TBWA/Hunt/Lascaris’s South African office for The Zimbabwean newspaper–was aimed at wrongs committed by Robert Mugabe’s regime. So they plastered billboards with a potent artifact of Mugabe’s corruption and incompetence: The Zimbabwean trillion-dollar bill, whose printing was the result of spiraling inflation.The campaign was a bit more complex than a simple promo of The Zimbabwean. The newspaper is actually based in South Africa, after Mugabe exiled its publishers for exposing the corruption of his government. He then placed a 55% import tax on it, to make it unaffordable to average citizens. So the newspaper responded by trying to build up enough of a readership base in South Africa to subsidize its distribution in its home country.

From FastCompany

The New Way to Solve Complex Global Problems: Minilateralism

Sitting at UN conferences, one has to ask the hard question:  what difference do these meetings really make?  Beyond the soft law accretion, public awareness and mobilization, and other real effects–how do we explain the failure of agreements over the past 10 years, and the lack of signitories to keep their committments to the most important of the most recent one, the Milennium Development Goals?

The big idea, courtesey of Moises Naim in FP.com:

The pattern is clear: Since the early 1990s, the need for effective multicountry collaboration has soared, but at the same time multilateral talks have inevitably failed; deadlines have been missed; financial commitments and promises have not been honored; execution has stalled; and international collective action has fallen far short of what was offered and, more importantly, needed. These failures represent not only the perpetual lack of international consensus, but also a flawed obsession with multilateralism as the panacea for all the world’s ills.

So what is to be done? To start, let’s forget about trying to get the planet’s nearly 200 countries to agree. We need to abandon that fool’s errand in favor of a new idea: minilateralism.

via Minilateralism: The magic number to get real international action. – By Moisés Naím | Foreign Policy.

Count on Steven Walt to cite this as an idea close to his heart:

Need I point out that this is a decidedly realist approach? Realists have always emphasized the role of power and argued that the agenda of world politics — including the prospects for meaningful cooperation — depends mostly on the actions of the major powers.

But…an idea that he notes, “will work in some contexts but not in others.”  Perhaps a dose of realism is what institutions and arrangements based on idealism need to make them more pragmatic and workable.

Put a Ban on Ban Ki-moon?

Its been said that the UN Sec Gen is a pope without a church, a general without an army… but here is a pretty rough assessment on the leadership effectiveness of the current occupant of this high office from Jacob Heilbrun in FP.com:

Ban’s flaws were obvious dating back to his decades toiling in the South Korean foreign ministry, where he earned a telling nickname, “The Bureaucrat.” Luckily for Ban, if not for the rest of the world, The Bureaucrat was exactly what the Bush administration was looking for after years of tussling with the assertively anti-American Annan. When it became Asia’s turn to nominate a secretary-general, Bush’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, made Ban’s election her pet project. But Ban failed to charm outside observers. In his book The Best Intentions, James Traub recounts a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations during Ban’s campaign to become secretary: “[B]etween his anodyne oratory, and his unsteady grasp of English, I found that I had been lulled to sleep.”As secretary-general, Ban’s soporific effect has never left him. One U.N. watcher told me that Ban is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one around to witness its crash—if you don’t hear him, does he really exist? Aside from his role as a subsidiary of South Korea, Inc.—lining his office walls with Samsung televisions and hiring his South Korean buddies as senior advisors—his imprint has been negligible. Even Ban seems aware of what a nonentity he is: Last August, speaking to senior U.N. officials in Turin, he described his management style as elevating teamwork over intellectual attainment. But he went on to bemoan his difficulty overcoming bureaucratic inertia, ending with a gnomic admission of general defeat: “I tried to lead by example. Nobody followed.”

A Human Rights forum with Credibility? The Oslo Freedom Forum

A little chatter during the Presidential debate alternatives to the UN but the real story since then has been the impact of non-UN multilateral institutions, such as the G77 or G20.  Here’s a new one on the human rights front, brought to light by John Fund of WSJ:

Tiananmen was very much on the minds of the 200 human-rights activists who gathered in this tidy capital city where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded every year. But the Oslo Freedom Forum, organized by the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, was unlike any human-rights conference I’ve ever attended. As at other such gatherings, racism and gender discrimination were on the minds of plenty of participants. But there was no desire to blame such problems on the U.S. or other Western nations. The emphasis was on promoting basic rights in all nations at all times.

“It’s pretty simple,” says Thor Halvorssen, a human-rights activist and the conference’s 33-year-old founder. “We all should want freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom from torture, freedom to travel, due process and freedom to keep what belongs to you.” Unfortunately, he explains, “the human-rights establishment at the United Nations is limited to pretty words because so many member countries kill or imprison or torture their opponents.”

via Human Rights Beyond Ideology – WSJ.com.

The Best Reading on Iran

What’s Happening Now

• Nico Pitney liveblogging on HuffPo
• A regular stream of useful stories in the Lede NYT blog [updated several times each hour]
• Twitter impact negligible from The Cable, and Daniel Drezner of Fletcher School grades the coverage;  A defense of Twitter, not for the news content but for the solidarity by Douglas Rushkoff
• Video from Iran speaks louder than words, via The Daily Beast.  (Maybe the revolution will be on tv?)
• Continual updates from Andrew Sullivan
• Various updates from Commentary magazine, mostly on the domestic (US) political scrum over what to do, who did what, etc.

In Context

Reading list for the more policy-inclined, from Foreign Affairs magazine.

“Ignore All the Experts” and a helpful essay on the reality of confusion and the fact that most experts are/will be wrong, according to Charles Kurzman, FP.com.

And, from an expert…human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, via The Lede, NYT:

In order to calm the situation, a few things must be done. First of all, all the people who have been arrested and detained must be freed immediately. All government violence must be ordered to be stopped and the government should stop dealing with the people in an aggressive manner. The election should be voided and new elections must be held. The new elections should be held under the supervision of international observers. The families of those injured and killed should be paid compensation.  When I asked if that was a realistic formula, she said, “The people are very angry and they are not going to relent this time…. I hope the government is clever enough to realize this.”

The election was stolen.  Discussion with Iran-watcher, writer, and CNN analyst, Reza Aslan.

Helfpul new discovery in the blog On Message, noting that the regime aims to calm things down in Tehran, but nationwide protests may prove too difficult for the government to resist.

Motivation for the street from “Tehran’s Eternal Youth“?:

But young Iranians now seem more likely to fight for their rights and die trying, rather than abandon their country and seek asylum abroad as so many of us have done over the last 30 years.

How the Ayatollah gained his power, and why he could lose it:

Still, lacking a political base of his own, he set about creating one in the military. It was the end of the Iran-Iraq war, and many senior officers returning from the front demanded a role in politics or the economy for their sacrifices. Ayatollah Khamenei became a source of patronage for them, giving them important posts in broadcasting or as leaders of the vast foundations that had confiscated much of the pre-revolution private sector.

“By empowering them, he got power,” said Mehdi Khalaji of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

In the wake of the election debacle, questions are being raised about who controls whom. But over the years, Ayatollah Khamenei gradually surmounted expectations that he would be eclipsed.

“He is a weak leader, who is extremely smart in allying himself, or in maneuvering between centers of power,” said one expert at New York University, declining to use his name because he travels to Iran frequently. “Because of the factionalism of the state, he seems to be the most powerful person.”

What Should the US Do?

• Bret Stephens shows no love to Obama’s ‘inconsistency’
• Kagan says Obama sides with the Regime
• Former Iranian Hostage says stay out of domestic affairs, this isn’t a revolution, on HuffPo
• Obama’s policy options from Iran advisors, via The Cable