We joined the U.S. Foreign Service nearly 40 years ago in the same entering class, but we took very different paths to get there. One of us grew up amid hardship and segregation in the Deep South, the first in her family to graduate from high school, a Black woman joining a profession that was still very male and very pale. The other was the product of an itinerant military childhood that took his family from one end of the United States to the other, with a dozen moves and three high schools by the time he was 17.
There were 32 of us in the Foreign Service’s class of January 1982. It was an eclectic group that included former Peace Corps volunteers, military veterans, a failed rock musician, and an ex–Catholic priest. None of us retained much from the procession of enervating speakers describing their particular islands in the great archipelago of U.S. foreign policy. What we did learn early on, and what stayed true throughout our careers, is that smart and sustained investment in people is the key to good diplomacy. Well-intentioned reform efforts over the years were crippled by faddishness, budgetary pressures, the over-militarization of foreign policy, the State Department’s lumbering bureaucracy, a fixation on structure, and—most of all—inattention to people.
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Trump and the Republicans deny the overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is real and that it is man-made. But in the face of such an existential-threat reality, the foreign policies of Russia, China and the US have become extreme examples of diplomatic "magic thinking". Climate change cannot be ameliorated without a complete and total change to the current international system of perpetual economic growth. However, in our world today (as throughout history), wealth and power go hand in hand. In other words, sustainable global ecology cannot be achieved without a complete re-envisioning of international relations. But how? Vested interests play a reactionary role, as do partisan politics, and also, plain fear among the working folks of the world. Also it would take the resources and energy of three planet earths for everyone on our fragile sphere to approach the current life-style of America and the West. But this is exactly where Asia is headed. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative will create hundreds of new coal-fired power plants across the length and breadth of the Euro-Asian land mass. While wind and solar have already failed in both California and Germany -- lithium batteries are no solution to global storage capacity in either power projection or electric transportation -- the only possible sustainable alternative, global decentralized hydrogen, has yet to achieve its breakthrough. Although, we continue to work on its promise. But without a complete paradigm shift in international relations, even rural decentralized hydrogen will simply not be able to take root. Mass-urban consumer society and global man-made warming are two sides of the same dystopian golden coin. It has been fifty years since the Club of Rome published its "Limits to Growth" and still the lesson hasn't even begun to sink in among global elites. In fact, Greta Thunberg understands the problem with far greater insight than all the foreign offices around the world combined. If, as Joe Biden says, climate change is our number one existential international problem, it's time for the international diplomats to start to get serious. True peace, unlike anything the world has yet seen, needs to be our number one geopolitical aim. And to be fair, I find a certain amount of positive movement in this essay. But what would Greta and her generation think? Is US foreign policy really ready for truly sustainable world peace? And will others also lead? Simple reform is not enough.
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