“The Business of the US is Business” and Diplomacy is a Two Way Street
Dispatches from Deena Stryker
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen President Trump assails Nordstrom for dropping his daughter’s shoe line, he’s accused of a conflict of interest by commentators who seem to have forgotten the words of 1920s White House occupant Calvin Coolidge. But voters didn’t put a businessman in the White House so he should behave like the Ivy League lawyers and professors whose properly schooled diplomats led us repeatedly into war.
With no sense of proportion, the media is excoriating with equal fervor National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, for talking to a Russian official about lifting sanctions before inauguration day, and Kelly Ann Conway for plugging Ivanka Trump’s shoes. Once these issues achieve headline status, not only relevant congressional committees, but also the FBI could step in to determine whether the president’s advisors have broken the rules on conflict of interest or committed a felony.
Determined to bring the President down, the Democrats are reaching all the way back to 1798. There was a tense situation with France around our war with the British, and when President Adams’ three envoys to Paris came back empty-handed, a Pennsylvania state legislator and pacifist, Dr George Logan went to France as a private citizen, met with the Foreign Minister Talleyrand, and within days, the French lifted their trade embargo, releasing American seamen. Despite the success of Logan’s mission, the secretary of state asked Congress to “curb the temerity and impudence of individuals affecting to interfere in public affairs between France and the United States”, and this resulted in the Logan Act, one of several pieces of legislation that have abetted the country’s xenophobia since the days of the Pilgrims.
Gen. Michael Flynn is being flogged by the self-serving Democrat-subservient “liberal” media for reaching out to the Russians to discuss a lowering of tensions between the nuclear superpowers. Why is the “left” opposing something that is essentially good for humanity? Isn’t the left antiwar any more? Whatever ulterior motives Trump or the US ruling class may have to seek a detente with Moscow, supporting any initiative that may result in peace is of intrinsic value.
After I married a French citizen, in the nineteen-fifties, thereby automatically acquiring French citizenship, the American consulate in Paris ruled that I could only use my American passport to travel to the US. A decade later, the Supreme Court ruled this decision unconstitutional, but the US continues to look askance at dual citizenship, the implication being one of divided rather than shared loyalties. [Editor’s Note: The raised eyebrows do not seem to apply to the mob of Neocons who dictate and plot US foreign policy, many of whom are dual Israeli/American citizens.]
By the twenty-first century, the accumulation of laws enshrining the principle of America’s carefully monitored relationships with the outside world stand in opposition to the many citizen initiatives that have offset diplomatic failures. Started when the Soviet Union made a practice of holding international meetings for various categories of socialist or communist party members from around the world, under the banner of international solidarity, and perfected by the Fulbright Act of 1946 that brings professionals and students from around the world to savor the achievements of American civilization, from refrigerators to atomic bombs, with the avowed aim of influencing decision-makers, these initiatives eventually became known as citizen diplomacy, epitomized by entities as diverse as the Rotary Club and the European Union’s Erasmus program that enables college students to study in each other’s countries. (Under Nixon, ping pong diplomacy enjoyed a brief place in budding US-China relations.)
Tennison
These initiatives have hitherto not been considered worthy of the media’s attention, but I will mention one that should be emulated. In the nineteen eighties a nurse in California, alarmed at the growing threat of nuclear war, visited Russia with a group of friends, wanting to see for herself what the enemy was all about. Sharon Tennison’s Center for Citizen Initiatives has been taking groups of Americans to meet their counterparts all over Russia ever since, and she still remembers a Soviet bureaucrat in Leningrad who surprised her by not asking for a bribe, but who is today accused of having replaced oligarchs with siloviki.
Donald Trump hates globalization that grinds business to a pulp before spitting it out in the shape of corporations regulated by international rules, ruining the art of deal-making. Like citizen diplomacy, youscratchmybackI’llscratchyours deals, known in as quid pro quo, is about finding common ground.
Aside from the fact that when Michael Flynn engaged in ‘citizen diplomacy’, he was carrying on one of America’s better traditions, it’s absurd to think that the swearing in of a real estate developer makes him better prepared to deal with foreign governments than a high ranking former military officer. As for Kelly Ann Conway, does the FBI have nothing better to do than indict her for talking about shoes?
DEENA STRYKER, Senior Contributing Editor
Born in Philadelphia, Stryker spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, her latest being
CUBA: Diary of a Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia Sanchez
America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World
A Taoist Politics: The Case For Sacredness
She began her journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome, spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before they made the revolution (‘Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young’). After spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, she wrote the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of the Soviet Union (“Une autre Europe, un autre Monde’). Her memoir, ‘Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel’, tells it all. ‘A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness’, which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and modern science and what this implies for political activism; and ‘America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World” is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from the City on a Hill’.
MAIN IMAGE: Kelly Ann Conway, a truly unflappable mouthpiece for Donald Trump. She’s being raked over the coals, along with her boss, but nepotism has always existed in ruling circles, except it is usually carried out behind people’s backs.
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