Word: diplomats
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...getting, not policymaking. A legislative committee is now in charge of shaping plans to reform Japan's banking system, for instance. But Japanese politicians do not have big budgets for experienced staff. Even if they could plead for help from the bureaucrats, that might not be wise. Consider the diplomat who was reassigned to Tokyo this year to direct one ministry's derivatives operations: he confessed to an economist friend in Washington before he left that he didn't have a clue how derivatives worked. As former Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa concluded last winter, "I fear...
Richard Holbrooke has become Washington's favorite last-ditch diplomat. The newly nominated ambassador to the U.N. doesn't balk at hopeless missions, but he doesn't always succeed either. Three years ago, he waded into the intractable war in Bosnia and crafted a cease-fire that has lasted to this day. In 1997, as President Clinton's special envoy, he stepped into the 24-year-old struggle between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus and has so far achieved no major breakthrough. Last week he gamely turned his hand to the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, the site of a festering...
...course it is Beijing's bosses who are responsible for making their nation what former U.S. diplomat Chas. W. Freeman calls a "uniquely credible miscreant," guilty of behavior that deserves to be picked on. But the natural suspicion and swings in sentiment that always affect U.S. attitudes toward China have been hyperamplified by a convergence of election-year politics, Republican interparty fissures, and a string of unfortunate events, like the allegations of illicit Chinese campaign contributions, Indian and Pakistani nuclear blasts and reports of a possible national-security breach in U.S. satellite sales to China. Some of the steam...
DIED. AGOSTINO CARDINAL CASAROLI, 83, a tailor's son who became the Vatican's unflappable envoy to Soviet bloc nations in the 1960s; in Rome. Upon his election as Pope, John Paul II quickly named the omnicompetent prelate the Vatican's chief diplomat, a post he filled with skill and judgment from 1979 to 1990. In 1989, in perhaps his most dramatic moment, Casaroli helped broker the meeting between the Pope and Mikhail Gorbachev...
Managing his own life, it seems, is a balancing act worthy of a diplomat. Constantly, he reconciles his family's cultural and religious traditions with his overseas experience and his Sudanese patriotism with the realities of his predominantly expatriate past. He is an individual but also a member of an Islamic Arab intelligentsia from a predominantly agrarian country where less than half the nation is literate and its ethnically and religiously diverse population speaks 132 different dialects...