Boxing great Muhammad Ali traveled to Africa in early 1980. President Carter asked him to persuade African leaders to boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow because the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Ambassador Lannon Walker was abruptly pulled from negotiations in Angola to accompany The Champ as his diplomatic advisor. This was more than sports…
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As summer heat envelops much of the developing world, the power of street protests is something autocrats fear. Here’s a summary for public diplomacy specialists in free societies to consider: —In Turkey, the June 23 runoff election victory of Ekrem Imamoglu as mayor of Istanbul, the country’s largest city, was a significant setback for the…
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The opening of a Chinese patriotic film, The Eight Hundred, scheduled for July 5 at the Shanghai Film Festival, has been canceled. Apparently, its portrayal of a Nationalist army unit that stood against the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1937 was too positive. Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times reports “. . .…
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Why were the hopes for development of new African states so disappointed after they attained independence? Former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman J. Cohen took a long view. His conclusions may help Public Diplomacy officers now assigned to Africa think through how best to support the development enterprise. State and USAID officers…
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Cultural interchange is “fundamentally reciprocal” and “a matter of give and take. It means influencing and being influenced.” These were themes in a speech to the Public Affairs Institute of the University of Virginia on July 8, 1939, by the Assistant Chief of the Division of Cultural Relations of the Department of State, Charles A.…
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As the director of a VOA bureau in Cairo, I can remember hearing Israel’s opening salvo of bombing on airfields just outside the Egyptian capital. It marked the start, at 10 a.m. that sweltering Monday morning of June 5, 1967, of the six-day Arab-Israeli war whose scars even today endanger yet another generation in the perpetually…
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The United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has, in recent years, become controversial. According to a State Department summary, “The United States joined UNESCO at its founding but later withdrew in 1984 because of a growing disparity between U.S. foreign policy and UNESCO goals. After an almost twenty-year absence from the organization, the…
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A capacity crowd filled a 6th floor lecture hall at George Washington University’s School of International Studies. It was the First Monday Forum on June 3 of public diplomacy specialists and GWU students. They came to hear Dr. Nicholas J. Cull of the University of Southern California, an internationally known scholar and advocate of the…
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As a crisis watcher for more than a half century, I’m used to hearing alarm bells as serious conflicts appear in various regions of our planet. Today, the principal crisis-prone area in the world is the Arabian peninsula. One can’t miss noticing in daily headlines the threat of war between Iran and the United States.…
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I was surprised and very pleased to be invited to be the commencement speaker this year at Keuka College. I have been working with the College for the past several years on its programs in Viet Nam and elsewhere and came to know several members of the Keuka faculty and administration through our common service…
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