Letter

Embassy Row

Jerrold Green’s article in the Summer 2008 issue [“The Future of Diplomacy: Real Time or Real Estate?”] reveals an ignorance of the role of diplomatic missions. U.S. diplomats do not stay confined to their offices all day long. They are out in meetings with the people they need to know in order to analyze trends and influence host country policies.

Shuttling in “laptop” diplomats from home offices accomplishes nothing. In my diplomatic career in Africa, I spent more time than I liked briefing the visiting roving diplomats from Australia, Sweden, and other countries that did not have local embassies. They had absolutely no relationships of any use in their foreign policies. All they could do was summarize what they learned from resident diplomats.

I imagine Mauritania in northwest Africa would be one of the first candidates for “distance diplomacy.” That country has had attacks from Islamic terrorists infiltrating from Algeria. We have had several hundred Special Forces troops in that country training the local military in counterterrorism operations. There has to be an embassy in a country to coordinate that type of activity. If we have nobody on site, we leave the field to others who have embassies in every country, especially China and Russia.

What kind of idea is it to examine visa applicants through SKYPE or similar [video link] devices? The local U.S. diplomat examines in the local language and understands who should be allowed in or not. Most of the work is in determining if an applicant is likely to burrow into the United States and not go back. Will some examiner sitting in Milwaukee at his computer screen be able to make a judgment about that?

Jerrold Green replies:

I nowhere said that we should close or eliminate embassies. What I did say is that we should endeavor to make them smaller, less vulnerable, less expensive, and more efficient.

I doubt that our embassy in Nouakchott, to use Hank Cohen’s example, suffers from bloat, and thus it would not be a good candidate for being downsized. The same cannot be said for other embassies in other parts of the world.

As to processing visas from the United States, I remain skeptical that it is best to send a diplomat, his or her family, and their personal effects halfway around the world for this purpose when the same person could do the job from the United States at a fraction of the cost with little loss in efficiency. And at the end of three years we would not have to rotate this person home or send him or her to some other far-flung locale while bearing the substantial relocation costs yet again.