Globalization and Diplomacy: A Practitioner's Perspective

Talbott
The organizational chart for these kinds of collaborative efforts is a
patchwork of boxes connected by overlapping and intersecting solid and
dotted lines. It often falls to the State Department to coordinate the
work of the other agencies of the U.S. government to make sure that
their endeavors serve an overarching and coherent strategy. The department
also works to integrate the American governmental effort into
what other governments-and, increasingly, NGOs and others-are
doing in the same areas.
THE END OF FOREIGN POLICY
In the context of the many global problems facing the United States
today, and also in the context of their solutions, the very word "foreign"
is becoming obsolete. From the floor of the stock exchange in Singapore
to the roof of the world over Patagonia where there is a hole in the ozone
layer, what happens there matters here-and vice versa. That is not only
a fact of life and a useful shorthand definition of globalization itself, it is
also a key selling point for those of us, inside the government and out,
who are trying to make foreign policy less foreign, and more relevant, to
the American people.
In the absence of a compelling, unifying threat like the one posed by
the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the need for American engagement
in the world seems less obvious. Largely as a result, the interest of
the American public and media in world affairs has waned markedly in
the last decade.
In an effort to reverse this trend, the department has, over the past
three years, sponsored 40 "town meetings" at which our diplomats have
discussed topics from the Middle East peace process to advancing human
rights. In her first 20 weeks in office, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
traveled outside Washington 15 times to talk about foreign policy with the
American people in schools, at presidential libraries, and from the deck of
an aircraft carrier. She-like President Constantinescu of Romania-has
also made use of the World Wide Web, where the secretary's and the
department's home pages average 1.7 million hits a month.
All this "outreach," as we call our public-education programs, is
far more than special pleading for the State Department or its budget.
It is a matter of making the case on the home front for American
engagement and activism abroad.
In the coming year, the United States faces a number of critical deci-
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