Our Envoys, Ourselves
By DEREK LEEBAERT
NYT
Washington
A GLOBAL power’s diplomatic archives are inevitably full of caustic dispatches. In Britain, a new batch of Foreign Office records is declassified each January under the “30-year rule” (a “50-year rule” before 1968). Historians can peruse elegantly handwritten mockeries of President Eisenhower’s name as exotically Eastern European, or files deriding Americans as the planet’s “most excitable” people — other than Bangladeshis.
For the most part, such documents provide little more than a snapshot of a moment in history or a window into the mind of a particular diplomat. Over the last two weeks, however, WikiLeaks has opened another perspective. Its quarter-million cables provide a sample broad enough to reflect the culture in which American foreign policy takes shape.
We encounter the mind-set of a freewheeling, democratic superpower, a pattern of thought that shows great excitement over celebrities and moments hailed as irreversibly world-changing. In this, the State Department truly represents our national disposition.
A century ago, a foreign journalist asked the theatrical impresario Charles Frohman why one saw only actors’ names on Broadway marquees, whereas in Paris the names in lights were those of playwrights. Frohman explained that in America, the emphasis is always on the doer, not the thing done: “There are stars in every walk of American life. It has always been so in democracies.” It remains true today: as the most individualistic of all democracies, America creates, rewards, obsesses over stars of every kind and intensely extols personal success.
(More here.)
NYT
Washington
A GLOBAL power’s diplomatic archives are inevitably full of caustic dispatches. In Britain, a new batch of Foreign Office records is declassified each January under the “30-year rule” (a “50-year rule” before 1968). Historians can peruse elegantly handwritten mockeries of President Eisenhower’s name as exotically Eastern European, or files deriding Americans as the planet’s “most excitable” people — other than Bangladeshis.
For the most part, such documents provide little more than a snapshot of a moment in history or a window into the mind of a particular diplomat. Over the last two weeks, however, WikiLeaks has opened another perspective. Its quarter-million cables provide a sample broad enough to reflect the culture in which American foreign policy takes shape.
We encounter the mind-set of a freewheeling, democratic superpower, a pattern of thought that shows great excitement over celebrities and moments hailed as irreversibly world-changing. In this, the State Department truly represents our national disposition.
A century ago, a foreign journalist asked the theatrical impresario Charles Frohman why one saw only actors’ names on Broadway marquees, whereas in Paris the names in lights were those of playwrights. Frohman explained that in America, the emphasis is always on the doer, not the thing done: “There are stars in every walk of American life. It has always been so in democracies.” It remains true today: as the most individualistic of all democracies, America creates, rewards, obsesses over stars of every kind and intensely extols personal success.
(More here.)
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