Defense of the International Order

Arshad Mohammed reports at Reuters:

The longest-serving U.S. diplomat warned against isolationism, protectionism and Russian aggression on Friday in a retirement speech implicitly criticizing some of U.S. President Donald Trump's policies even as he urged officials to serve the White House loyally.

Ambassador Dan Fried argued that since becoming a world power over a century ago, the United States had largely pursued an open, rules-based world, rejected "spheres of influence" where great powers bully their neighbors and contributed to "the longest period of general peace in the West since Roman times."

"This track record suggests that an open, rules-based world, with a united West at its core, is an asset and great achievement, and a foundation for more," the former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs said as he wrapped up a nearly 40-year career at the U.S. State Department.

"Yet, some argue that this is actually a liability, that values are a luxury, that in a Hobbesian or Darwinian world we should simply take our share, the largest possible," he added.

The comment was an implicit rebuke to the "America First" approach in which Trump has pledged to end what he sees as decades of other nations freeloading on U.S. security and exploiting trade agreements harmful to U.S. workers

Amb. Dan Fried, one of generation’s great diplomats, retired today. Read his powerful defense of liberal international order. pic.twitter.com/BFGwLvK3Qw

— Antony Blinken (@ABlinken) February 24, 2017

All the President's Ambassadors

Depression-era child star Shirley Temple just died.  Despite lacking a diplomatic background -- or even a college education -- she would go on to serve as ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia.  She was one of many nonprofessional American ambassadors.  Psycho star John Gavin served in Mexico, though the appointment was not odd as it may sound at first:  he had studied Latin American history at Stanford and was (and is) fluent in Spanish.

In January 2009, President-elect Obama suggested that his practice would be different.  At ABC, Jake Tapper writes:

"I want to recruit young people into the State Department to feel that this is a career track that they can be on for the long term. And so, you know, my expectation is that high quality civil servants are going to be rewarded," Obama said then.

But Obama has passed over qualified career professionals in favor of political friends and fundraisers more than any president in the modern era, according to the American Foreign Service Association.

"You know, are there going to be political appointees to ambassadorships? There probably will be some," Obama said in 2009.

Some? Actually, the majority of Obama's second-term ambassadorial nominations have been political.

The Center for Public Integrity says Obama has nominated 23 major fundraisers who have collectively raised at least $16.1 million for Obama since 2007.

At The Washington Post, Professor Henri Barkey writes about a recent nomination:

Two Norwegian lawmakers have nominated Edward Snowden, the bête noire of U.S. intelligence, for the Nobel Peace Prize. It is quite possible that this is the Norwegians’ way of showing their displeasure and shame at having the Obama administration nominate a completely unqualified person to be its ambassador to Oslo.

The nominee, a Long Island campaign bundler named George Tsunis, made a fool of himself during his Senate confirmation hearings last month. He was unaware of some of the most basic facts about Norway. He admitted never having set foot in the country, and he seemed to think that Norway, a monarchy, has a president. He also had no idea which political parties constituted Norway’s governing coalition, even though, as ambassador, he would be dealing with them. It seemed, as some later tweeted, that Tsunis had not even bothered to read the Wikipedia page for Norway.

The Huffington Post reports:

Political consultant Noah Bryson Mamet, whom President Barack Obama has nominated to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Argentina, admitted that he has never actually been to that country during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing Thursday.

In response to a question from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Mamet framed visiting the country as an "opportunity" he has not yet taken advantage of.

"I haven't had the opportunity yet to be there. I've traveled pretty extensively around the world, but I haven't yet had the chance [to visit Argentina]," said Mamet, who was nominated to the post in July 2013.

"I think this is a very significant post," Rubio said in response.

Mamet bundled at least $500,000 for Obama's reelection campaign, according to the Center for Public Integrity. He served on the Obama-Biden National Finance Committee for the 2012 campaign.

At ABC, Abby Phillip reports:

Being a Hollywood producer doesn’t disqualify someone from being an ambassador, but from the combative nature of his questioning, McCain wasn’t very impressed with the resume of Colleen Bell, who has been nominated to be ambassador to Hungary.

This exchange probably best encapsulates most of McCain’s question and answer session with Bell:

SEN. MCCAIN: So what would you be doing differently from your predecessor, who obviously had very rocky relations with the present government?
MS. BELL: If confirmed, I look forward to working with the broad range of society –
SEN. MCCAIN: My question was, what would you do differently?
MS. BELL: Senator, in terms of what I would do differently from my predecessor, Kounalakis –
SEN. MCCAIN: That’s the question.
MS. BELL: Well, what I would like to do when — if confirmed, I would like to work towards engaging civil society in a deeper — in a deeper –
SEN. MCCAIN: Obviously, you don’t want to answer my question.

Social Media and the Mideast Crisis

Social media have played a central part in the unfolding crisis in the Mideast.  Politico reports:

The Internet tools of the Arab Spring have become the weapons of a new Arabian nightmare playing out at American diplomatic missions across North Africa and the Middle East.

Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube that spread an obscure movie trailer depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad in offensive ways are facing a clamp-down from governments and even Internet companies in some cases.

Google-owned YouTube has blocked access to the video from inside Libya and Egypt. President Hamid Karzai has set up a firewall to prevent Afghans from viewing YouTube videos at all. And the U.S. Embassy in Cairo deleted its own tweets about the video after they became part of the political debate in the American presidential election.

The Atlantic reports:

American diplomat Larry Schwartz has gotten himself into some trouble this week. A senior public affairs officer at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, Schwartz on Tuesday wrote a much-discussed memo stating that the embassy "condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims," as well as several defensive tweets, some of which he later deleted. For example: "This morning's condemnation (issued before protests began) still stands. As does condemnation of unjustified breach of the Embassy." Romney condemned the "apology," as he described it, and the White House quickly disavowed the memo.

State Department officials back in Washington, it turns out, had reviewed the memo and explicitly told Schwartz not to publish it, which he did anyway. "Frankly, people here did not understand it," a State Department official told Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin. "The statement was just tone deaf. It didn't provide adequate balance. We thought the references to the 9/11 attacks were inappropriate, and we strongly advised against the kind of language that talked about 'continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.'"

Tuesday's controversial tweets from the @USEmbassyCairo account, which Schwartz reportedly runs, were unusually provocative and political but otherwise generally consistent with the feed's noticeably conversational tone. American embassies across the globe have taken to Twitter over the last year or two, an impressive soft power outreach to citizens of foreign countries, but the Cairo feed has stood out. Other feeds, even when they tweet frequently, tend to take the staid tone of official diplomacy, tweeting press releases, quotes from U.S. officials, and relevant headlines. 

The Washington Post reports:

The White House asked YouTube on Tuesday to review an anti-Muslim film posted to the site that has been blamed for igniting the violent protests this week in the Middle East.

Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council, said the White House has “reached out to YouTube to call the video to their attention and ask them to review whether it violates their terms of use.”

However, the video remained on the site as of Friday afternoon, and it is posted many other places on the Internet.

Messages to YouTube, and Google, which owns the site, were not immediately returned Friday. On Wednesday, a YouTube spokesperson said the video “is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube.”

Birthright Citizenship and Diplomats

The Center for Immigration Studies argues that, although US-born children of foreign diplomats do not qualify for birthright citizenship, implementation is uncertain:

• Despite Congress’s clear intent to not create a completely universal and automatic birthright citizenship policy, the current application of the Citizenship Clause is so lax that the United States has a de facto universal birthright citizenship policy that denies U.S. citizenship by birth to no one.
  
  
• There is no federal requirement that hospitals ask new parents if they are foreign diplomatic staff. State agencies do not instruct hospitals to differentiate between children born to diplomatic staff and those born to U.S. citizens or temporary or illegal aliens. Hospitals issue the same birth certificates to all newborns.
  
  
• The Social Security Administration (SSA) does not investigate whether SSN requests are for children of foreign diplomats. Although the agency does recognize that U.S.-born children of foreign diplomats are not eligible to receive SSNs, there is no mechanism in place for preventing such issuance.
  
  
• The State Department is currently rewriting the agency’s guidelines on birthright citizenship, signaling a possibly significant departure from current 14th Amendment jurisprudence. The agency claims that children born to foreign diplomats are “entitled to birth certificates.”
  
  
• Children of diplomats who receive U.S. birth certificates and SSNs have greater rights and protections than the average U.S. citizen because they can enjoy all of the benefits of U.S. citizenship, but also invoke diplomatic immunity if they break a law. A lack of direction from Congress has created what one might consider a “super citizen” who is above the law.
  
  
• In order to end the practice of granting automatic U.S. citizenship to children of foreign diplomats, Congress could author regulations requiring declaration of parental diplomatic status on birth certificate request forms. As an alternative, Congress could require parents to have SSNs before a U.S. birth certificate or SSN is issued to a newborn. While this latter proposal might create better results and be more easily administered, it would have the effect of ending automatic birthright citizenship not just for children of diplomats, but also for children of illegal aliens and temporary aliens — an outcome that is more aligned with the intended scope of the 14th Amendment than the outcome created by current practices.