Education Special Section
INSIDE
Education
A Special Section of The Washington Diplomat
January 2019
Europe
Russian Election Meddling Resurfaces In the Balkans Russia’s successful blueprint for interfering in the 2016 U.S. election has been duplicated throughout Europe, most recently in the Balkans, an ethnic tinderbox where experts fear the tug of war between Moscow and the West could explode into a very real conflict. PAGE 10
United States
White House Still Struggles to Fill Key Posts Abroad
JANUARY 2019
WWW.WASHDIPLOMAT.COM
VOLUME 26, NUMBER 01 PERU
DRAINING
THE SWAMP Peru is famous for its ancient history and modern-day economic transformation. But the country has become infamous for something else entirely: corruption, which has claimed four recent Peruvian presidents. Ambassador Carlos Pareja admits that the wave of corruption scandals sweeping Latin America has shaken his country to the core, but he insists Peru is finally turning the corner. PAGE 15
Students protest gun violence
outside of the White House
following the Feb. 14, 2018,
shooting at Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School in
PHOTO: BY LORIE SHAULL,
Shootings, Safety and Stre ss Parkland, Fla., that killed
CC BY-SA 2.0, WIKIMEDIA
17 students and staff members.
COMMONS
People of World Influence S Lockdown Drills Challenge
the Psyches of Students,
afety drills have long been as much a staple in school as math and language classes. Few of us think twice about fire or tornado drills, letting muscle memory lead the way when the siren goes off. A newer drill, though – the lockdown – is not yet part
Parents and Educators
of the norm. As a result, it’s a source of anxiety for some students, teachers and parents alike — an in-your-face reminder of the potential for tragedy.
Seventy-five percent of Generation Z – people ages 15 to 21 – cited mass shootings as a significant source
•
BY STEPHANIE KANOWITZ
of stress, and 72 percent said the same about school shootings or possibility of them, according the to the American Psychological Association’s 2018 Stress in America survey, released Oct. 30. About seven in 10 Millennials report similar feelings.
Making Way For the Next Generation Of Diplomats 26 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT
| JANUARY 2019
Venerated U.S. Ambassador Thomas Shannon retired in February 2018 after an almost 35-year career — a huge blow to a demoralized State Department. But the career ambassador who served under six presidents is confident U.S. diplomacy can thrive if we nurture the next generation of diplomats. PAGE 4
The diplomatic rupture with Saudi Arabia over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi shed light on a more basic problem plaguing President Trump’s foreign policy strategy: the dearth of U.S. ambassadors in key posts across the globe. PAGE 13
United States
Culture
Senegal Women Dress to Impress
“Good as Gold” delves into the unique power and fashion sense of Senegalese women. PAGE 32
Congress, Trump Set for Power Shift One major consequence of the 2018 midterms that saw Democrats take over the House will be the newfound power Congress has to dictate, to an extent, U.S. foreign policy — and provide a check on President Trump’s agenda. PAGE 8
"Essential and entertaining reading." —Betty K. Koed, Historian
RISING STAR, SETTING SUN: Volume 26 "Essential and entertaining reading." —Betty K. Koed, Historian
RISING STAR, SETTING SUN: Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and the Presidential Transition that Changed America
Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and the that Changed America | Presidential | www.washdiplomat.com Issue 01 | Transition January 2019
Rising Star, Setting Sun is a riveting new history that explores the complicated, poignant, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief and consequential transitionVictor of powerShiblie from Dwight D. Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy.
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The exchange of leadership between the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifthAnna presidents of Managing Editor Gawel the United States marked more than a succession of leaders. It symbolized—and Larry Luxner Newsgenerational Editor shift triggered—a in American politics, policy, and culture.
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"The presidential transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy starkly contrasted the John Brinkley, Mike Crowley, parties, temperaments, and generations of the two leaders, yet the transfer of power proceeded amicably inEric the national interest. John Rising Star, Ham, StephanieShaw's Kanowitz, Setting Sun slips behind the veil of civility to take the measure of both men and John Lennon, Ryan Migeed, assess their personal antagonisms."
—Donald A. Ritchie, Historian Emeritus of the United States Senate and Kate Oczypok, Gail Scott, author of Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932
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web www.washdiplomat.com • editorial news@washdiplomat.com Rising Star, Setting Sun is a riveting new history that explores the complicated, poignant, and consequential transition of power from Dwight D. Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy. The exchange of leadership between the thirty-fourth and thirtyfifth presidents of the United States marked more than a succession of leaders. It symbolized—and triggered—a generational shift in American politics, policy, and culture. Drawing extensively from primary sources, including memoirs and memos of the time, Rising Star, Setting Sun paints a vivid picture of what Time called a "turning point in the twentieth century." Praise: "The presidential transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy starkly contrasted the parties, temperaments, and generations of the two leaders, yet the transfer of power proceeded amicably in the national interest. John Shaw's Rising Star, Setting Sun slips behind the veil of civility to take the measure of both men and assess their personal antagonisms." —Donald A. Ritchie, Historian Emeritus of the United States Senate and author of Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932
"Shaw vividly portrays the generational clash between the upstart former lieutenant and the iconic general. Following a campaign marked by raw personal attacks, they overcame their disdain, with a passing of the torch and stirring rhetoric that became a high point in each president's career." —Richard Cohen, Chief Author of The Almanac of American Politics
Where to Buy:
Pegasus Books, hardcover, May 2018, ISBN: 9781681777320
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John F. Kennedy.
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The exchange of leadership between the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth presidents of the United States marked more than a succession of leaders. It symbolized—and triggered— a generational shift in American politics, policy, and culture. Drawing extensively from primary sources, including memoirs and memos of the time, Rising Star, Setting Sun paints a vivid picture of what Time called a "turning point in the twentieth century."
ON THE COVER
Photo taken at the Peruvian Residence by Lawrence Ruggeri of RuggeriPhoto.com.
"John Shaw's Rising Star, Setting Sun slips behind the veil of civility to take the measure of both men and assess their personal antagonisms." —Donald A. Ritchie, Historian Emeritus of the United States Senate and author of Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932
1/2 page vertical print 2 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
Contents
THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
13
26 33 18
19 NEWS PEOPLE OF WORLD INFLUENCE The departure of a seasoned U.S. ambassador leaves a big hole at Foggy Bottom.
4
15 19 BOOK REVIEW Historians place Trump’s presidency into perspective. 22
NORDIC VANTAGE POINT
8 NEW FACES ON THE HILL
Women’s health and education are key to global development.
New committee chairs in the House and Senate are set to shake up U.S. foreign policy.
23
10 MOSCOW’S MEDDLING
Newer studies show significant growth in autism among American children.
Russia’s blueprint for election interference may be playing out in the Balkans.
13
U.S. MIA?
Key U.S. ambassadorships sit empty under Trump, but the backlog may be easing. COVER PROFILE: PERU Despite a growing economy, Peru remains caught in a web of corruption.
15
BREAKING THEIR VOWS Trump and his evangelical base are breaking their vows to help persecuted Christians.
18
MEDICAL
EDUCATION 26
COLLATERAL VICTIMS
Parents and students grapple with the new norm of school shootings and lockdown drills.
CULTURE 32
BRILLIANT STATEMENT
“Good as Gold” illuminates how fashion and power play off each other in Senegal.
33
SPORTING CHANCE
Embassies score by using sports to up their PR game.
34
LEGENDS ON ICE
The Canadian Embassy takes the facemasks off of hockey’s 100 greatest players.
35
TAXING ART
“Vested Values” reveals the unique way Mexico lets its artists pay their taxes.
REGULARS 37
CINEMA LISTING
38 EVENTS LISTING 40 DIPLOMATIC SPOTLIGHT 46 CLASSIFIEDS 47 REAL ESTATE CLASSIFIEDS JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 3
WD | People of Wor ld Influence
State’s Encyclopedia U.S. Ambassador Thomas Shannon Retires After 35-Year Career BY AILEEN TORRES-BENNETT
alleged misuse of Temporary Protected Status. If fully implemented, the decision would become one of the largest forced removal exercises in our history. And the object of that removal would be people who have lived legally within our borders, who have become helpful, contributing members of our communities and our larger society, and who pose no threat to our national security.” Shannon is now a senior international foreign policy adviser at the law firm of Arnold & Porter and the U.S. board co-chair of the Inter-American Dialogue, a D.C.-based think tank. The Diplomat invited Shannon to discuss his take on TPS, as well as other key foreign policy issues. He also shared highlights from his expansive diplomatic career.
V
enerated U.S. Ambassador Thomas Shannon retired in February 2018 after an almost 35-year career at the State Department. He started off as a consular/political officer in Guatemala in 1984 and ended as the third highest-ranking official in the agency as undersecretary for political affairs. He also briefly served as acting secretary of state during the fraught transition to the Trump administration, eventually handing the reins to former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Shannon’s departure was a big blow to State’s rank-and-file, particularly at a time of uncertainty and low morale under Tillerson, who had asked Shannon to stay on the job. CNN’s Elise Labott wrote that Tillerson praised the career ambassador, who served under six presidents, calling him a “walking encyclopedia.” In a Feb. 1 article shortly after he announced his retirement, The Washington Post’s Carol Morello described Shannon as “a standard-bearer of diplomatic integrity and professionalism for demoralized employees unsure of their value in the Trump administration.” But Shannon told reporters last February that after helping the agency transition to the new administration, he was moving on for personal, not political reasons, citing the recent death of his mother and the need to make way for a new generation of diplomats. (He officially stayed on until June 2018.) “Thirty-five years is a long time. I’ve fought the good fight,” he said. That “fight” spanned the globe and included high-profile postings as U.S. ambassador to Brazil and as a roving envoy focused on Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia under Secretary of State John Kerry. His wide-ranging diplomatic expertise also included sensitive talks with Russia and Venezuela, as well as helping to oversee Iranian nuclear compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). In addition, he supported U.N.-sponsored peace processes in Yemen and South Sudan, which, he regrets, were not successful under his watch. Shannon’s opinion carried heavy weight in the State Department. Among the last counsel he gave was a “constructive dissent” of Trump’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) policy. The administration decided to end TPS for El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Haiti. El Salvador was granted TPS because of devastating earthquakes in 2001; Honduras and Nicaragua because of Hurricane Mitch in 1998; and Haiti because of the 2010 earthquake. The administration argued that TPS
THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT: You spent 35 years at State. What are you proudest of in your tenure, and what do you wish you could have had more influence on?
PHOTO: ARNOLD & PORTER
“
Now, under Secretary [of State Mike] Pompeo, I believe that the administration has hit its stride on foreign policymaking and implementation and that the value of the department and its officers is understood.
4 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
THOMAS SHANNON
former U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs
was meant to be temporary, not extended indefinitely, and that conditions back home had improved since the initial natural disasters that led to the TPS designation. Pro-immigrant advocates countered that ending TPS was a cruel decision that will force hundreds of thousands of law-abiding residents who have made homes here to return to countries still overrun by violence and poverty. Shannon agrees with the latter group, and the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) recognized his efforts with its 2018 Christian A. Herter Award for Constructive Dissent. In his remarks at the awards ceremony in October, Shannon explained why he disagreed with the administration’s policy on TPS. “The decision to end Temporary
”
Protected Status for El Salvadoran, Honduran, Nicaraguan, and Haitian citizens who had sought refuge in the United States following the depredations of earthquakes, hurricanes and tropical storms broke with longstanding American policy,” he said. “The decision upended a bipartisan commitment of support and solidarity to people who had suffered great loss, and who had built new lives for themselves in the United States. The decision would affect hundreds of thousands of people, and the U.S. citizen spouses and children that many of these refugees had gained over nearly two decades in the United States.” He added, “The decision will have a painful human cost that cannot be separated from the decision, or justified or ameliorated by the effort to end
THOMAS SHANNON: My years of public service as an American diplomat were a period of great honor and satisfaction for me. To serve my country across such a dynamic and momentous period in global history was an incredible privilege, and I am grateful to the six presidents and 11 secretaries of state under whom I served and who showed such confidence in me. I spent much of my career working in countries in the midst of profound change and transformation. From Central and South America to Southern Africa, I had the opportunity to use American power to shape and direct these periods of change to the benefit of the United States and the countries in which I was working. My four years in South Africa, from 1992 to ’96 [when anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela become the country’s first black president], were especially consequential and resonated in a powerful and positive way throughout the rest of my career. Of course, not all my accomplishments and satisfactions were professional during this period of time. I met, courted and married my wife, Guisela, during this period. Together we brought two sons into this world, and we raised them to manhood within the Foreign Service and traveling from one posting to another. My family remains a source of great pride and comfort. In a world facing so many challenges, understanding our limits in shaping global events becomes a refuge and protection. President Franklin Roosevelt once said of Lincoln, “Lincoln was a sad man because he could not get it all done at once. And nobody can.” Nobody likes a sad diplomat, so recogSEE S HANNON • PAGE 6
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lationships with key European allies and unnecessarily opened space for Russia and China in the Middle East. That said, I understand the great frustration felt by the president and others at Iran’s depredations and malign influence in the region. Having made the decision to withdraw, we now bear a very special responsibility to address the problem that Iran presents in a way that not only meets our concerns, but also those of our former JCPOA partners.
Shannon CONTINUED • PAGE 4
nizing our limits becomes an important part of our effectiveness. That said, the three conflicts that were hardest for me to leave behind were Yemen, South Sudan and Venezuela. I helped lead the U.S. policy response and the diplomacy in these three crises. All three were unresolved when I retired, and I regret that I could not see them through to a successful conclusion.
TWD: U.S. presence continues in Afghanistan. Can you discuss the State Department’s strategy there? How long do you think the U.S. will maintain a heavy presence?
TWD: AFSA awarded you for your efforts to promote the extension of TPS for El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Haiti. How did you practice “constructive dissent,” and why do you think TPS was ultimately not extended? TS: [M]y constructive dissent regarding the decision to not extend Temporary Protective Status to El Salvadorans, Hondurans, Nicaraguans and Haitians living lawfully in the United States had two purposes. First, to ensure that the secretary [of state] had the best thinking, analysis and recommendations possible from the department and our embassies as he considered this issue. TPS had become politicized, and there was an effort to carry this politicization into department deliberations. I thought that inappropriate and therefore worked to protect the integrity of the policymaking process. My second purpose was related to the impact of the decision to not extend TPS. The decision undid nearly two decades of U.S. policy and overturned a bipartisan consensus on a migration issue at a moment when there was little
PHOTOS: STATE DEPARTMENT
U.S. Ambassador Thomas Shannon delivers his farewell remarks to State Department employees on June 4, 2018.
common ground on such issues. Also, the decision needlessly harmed our partners in Central America and the Caribbean, and caused them to question our reliability as an ally. TWD: You managed State during the transition from Obama to Trump. What were the most pressing concerns of the transition? TS: The most immediate and pressing concern was to prepare the department to be able to respond immediately and constructively to the new administration. Our effectiveness depends on the trust that exists between elected leadership and career members of the
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Foreign and Civil Service. It was our purpose to respect the will of the American people and to help the incoming administration understand the immediacy of the national security challenges that it faced as the administration grasped the reins of power. To do this well not only required discipline, but also an ability to marshal personnel and resources. The very real problems that the department faced in staffing senior positions and funding our programs were significant challenges, but one that I believe we met. Now, under Secretary [of State Mike] Pompeo, I believe that the administration has hit its stride on foreign policymaking and implementation and that the value of the department and its officers is understood. TWD: Having led talks with Russia, what is your take on the current state of U.S.-Russia relations and Vladimir Putin’s refashioning of Russia’s role in the world? TS: The relationship between the United States and Russia has a deep and complicated history that shaped the trajectory of the 20th century. The aftermath of that century still haunts both countries and affects how they respond to each other. What is worth highlighting is that even in the worst moments of the Cold War, we found a way to maintain open communication and work to resolve problems of mutual concern. What worries me currently is that we have both shown a capability to cause problems, but we have shown little capability to understand and resolve problems. We have retreated to a position of accusation and disdain, and that is both sad and dangerous. It is my hope that in the months to come we can restart our bilateral talks and begin to establish some common ground on which to base the relationship. TWD: You helped to oversee Iranian compliance with JCPOA. What is your opinion on the Trump administration cutting U.S. support for the nuclear deal? TS: I did not agree with this decision. The JCPOA was a remarkable accomplishment, with significant nonproliferation benefits. Given what else the Iranians were up to in the Middle East and beyond, I thought removing the nuclear issue from the table, even if only for a determined amount of time, would give us enough time to strengthen our allies and change the balance of power in the Middle East in a way that favored our interests and undercut those of Iran. Also, the decision seriously harmed our re-
TS: U.S. strategy and purpose in Afghanistan has been to support the elected, legitimate government of Afghanistan and enhance the ability of Afghan security forces to protect the state and the population from the Taliban and other insurgent forces. Our purpose has also been to deny terrorist groups such as ISIS any significant presence or space in which to operate. To achieve these goals, the U.S. works with our Resolute Support Mission partners in support of Afghan authorities. The U.S. has also supported efforts by the Afghan government to explore reconciliation efforts with the Taliban. This support has been expressed both bilaterally and multilaterally. Regarding the longevity of the U.S. presence, our support will continue until there is a viable and sustainable political solution to the current conflict. TWD: Now that you’ve retired from State and can talk more freely, what do you think the department’s priorities should be right now? TS: The State Department’s priorities, in regard to foreign policy, are always those of the president and the secretary of state. In regard to the institutions that are the State Department and the Foreign Service, both are in the midst of significant generational change. Fully 60 percent of the Foreign Service has been in for 10 years or less. This change has the potential to create a stable, experienced diplomatic corps that could serve continuously across at least two decades — if we can convince our officers to stay in place. This means providing them with the resources and training necessary to do their jobs, the support necessary to care for their families, and the respect and access necessary for them to have an impact on policymaking and its implementation. TWD: You’ve served under six presidents and 11 secretaries of state. Can you share some of your most memorable moments through the years? TS: I began my career under President Reagan and Secretary [of State George] Shultz and ended it under President Trump and Secretary Pompeo. Every president and secretary for whom I worked were great Americans and remarkable public servants. While there are many moments of importance and meaning to me, what most moves me as I look back across my career is seeing the role I played in the democratic trajectory of our great republic and its relationship with the world. Knowing that I was embedded in that journey is a source of pride and satisfaction. But my comfort is tempered by the knowledge that some of our biggest challenges lie ahead. In this regard, if I feel nostalgic, it is a nostalgia for a future of which I will not be a part. WD Aileen Torres-Bennett is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.
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WD | United States
Fresh Faces on Hill New Committee Chairs Bring Check on Trump Foreign Policy in House, Support in Senate BY RYAN R. MIGEED
O
ne major consequence of the 2018 midterm elections — in which Democrats won a historic popular vote victory and gained 40 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives — will be the newfound power Congress has to dictate, to an extent, U.S. foreign policy. As Brian McKeon and Caroline Tess recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, Congress has “the power of the purse, the power to declare war, and the power to regulate the armed forces, trade, and immigration. Congress can fund programs it supports and withhold money from those it doesn’t. It can block initiatives that require legislation and use investigations to expose and curtail executivebranch wrongdoing.” That last part is especially likely to affect President Trump. Observers expect a Democratic-led House to open a number of investigations into the president and administration officials. Under new leadership, the House Intelligence Committee may reopen an investigation into collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. journalist Jamal Khashoggi, saying that There are dozens of other high-profile if the crown prince was in front of a jury, controversies the House could target, “he would have a unanimous [guilty] although it likely won’t do so all at once. verdict in 30 minutes.” Meanwhile, Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), Among the issues it could scrutinize, according to a list compiled Nov. 12 chair of the House Foreign Affairs Comby Axios, are: Trump’s tax returns; the mittee, is also retiring after six years on family’s business ties; the hush money the committee. In his farewell letter to paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels; colleagues, Royce urged lawmakers to the use of personal emails; Cabinet maintain U.S. leadership on the world members’ abuse of travel and other stage and reach out across the aisle. perks; the policy of separating families Among the issues he hopes the commitat the border; the travel ban; the hur- tee continues to address are: maintainricane response in Puerto Rico; and the ing pressure on North Korea, Iran, Syria discussion of classified information at and Russia; standing by America’s European partners; investing in diplomacy, Mar-a-Lago. That’s just a partial list, but even a development and defense; advancing handful of investigations would keep global health; empowering women and girls; demanding accountthe administration — already ability for war crimes; and stretched thin — tied up in lechampioning wildlife congal matters potentially for the servation. rest of Trump’s term. Whether it’s wildlife trafThe legal headaches may be ficking, cyberspace threats or bad news for the White House, democracy promotion, new but they provide Congress with members will hold a range of an opportunity to reassert itself views on U.S. policies overinto foreign policy debates that seas — and three committees have thus far been the domain of an unpredictable president. Sen. James Risch in particular will allow them (R-Idaho) to express those views. And there will be plenty of Here are the expected incoming chairs fresh faces to help shape America’s globof the foreign policy, intelligence and al agenda. The influential Senate Foreign Rela- military-related committees in the Sentions Committee will see a new chair ate and House: take the gavel after the retirement of Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who has chaired Senate Foreign the committee since 2015. A prominent Trump foe, Corker most recently Relations Committee railed against Trump’s ambivalence over whether Saudi Crown Prince Moham- LIKELY CHAIR: med bin Salman ordered the killing of SEN. JAMES RISCH (R-IDAHO)
8 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
PHOTO: PIXABAY / MOTIONSTUDIOS
Rex Tillerson because of Romney’s hawkish stance SEN. BOB MENENDEZ (D-N.J.) on Russia, according to one source. James Risch, who holds the most On the Democratic side, seniority on the committee after Bob Menendez of New Corker, is expected to fill the role Jersey is likely to remain of chairman in the wake of Corkthe ranking member, deer’s retirement this year. Initially spite earlier federal cora Trump skeptic who supported Sen. Bob ruption charges that were Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in the Menendez eventually dropped in (D-N.J.) 2016 Republican presidential pri2018. The son of Cuban maries, Risch has become a defender immigrants, Menendez is a strong supof Trump’s agenda. In November, Risch porter of comprehensive immigration voted against a resolution to end U.S. reform, including the Dream Act, and a support for Saudi Arabia’s controversial vocal critic of authoritarian regimes in military campaign in Yemen — despite China and Russia. broad bipartisan support for the measure, including from Sens. Corker, Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rand Paul Senate Select (R-Ky.). Committee The second-term senator and former Idaho governor has been recognized on Intelligence as the “most conservative” senator in the U.S. by the National Journal for LIKELY CHAIR: two years in a row. He has supported SEN. RICHARD BURR (R-N.C.) Trump’s decision to withdraw from both the Paris climate accord and the LIKELY RANKING MEMBER: Iran nuclear deal. He’s also a vocal advocate of the president’s “maximum pres- SEN. MARK WARNER (D-VA.) sure” campaign against North Korea. Richard Burr, now in his third And unlike Corker, he’s vowed to air his grievances against Trump in private, not term in the Senate, is expected to continue chairing the committee, in public. Meanwhile, former Republican presi- while Mark Warner is expected to dential nominee and newly elected Sen. remain ranking member and vice Mitt Romney from Utah is reportedly chairman of the committee. Unlike its counterpart in the angling for the seat left open on the Foreign Relations Committee by Corker’s House, the Senate Committee on exit. Trump had briefly considered him Intelligence under Burr has made Sen. Richard Burr for secretary of state before choosing a purposeful effort to avoid even (R-N.C.) LIKELY RANKING MEMBER:
the appearance of partisanship. The committee publicly broke with the House Intelligence Committee in May when Burr and Warner said in a joint statement that their committee agrees with U.S. intelligence agencies’ assessment that the Russian government tried to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. In November, Burr said in an interview with Bloomberg News that the committee’s own Russia investigation will extend into 2019 for as long as six months while the committee continues questioning witnesses in closed-door hearings. Warner, a former Virginia governor, Sen. Mark Warner also said in early December that the committee has (D-Va.) made multiple criminal referrals to special counsel Robert Mueller. In addition, Burr and Warner have worked together to address the litany of scandals that have plagued tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google, including massive privacy breaches and the spread of Russian misinformation on social media. At an August 2018 hearing, Burr said that Russia’s cyber campaign during the 2016 election is as serious as “terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, espionage or regional instability.”
Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs LIKELY CHAIR:
SEN. RON JOHNSON (R-WIS.) LIKELY RANKING MEMBER: SEN. GARY PETERS (D-MICH.)
text of the Secure Elections Act as we continue ready drawing up a list of ways to go after outspoken skeptic of negotiato walk through its passage,” Lankford previ- Trump’s foreign policy — starting at the tions with North Korea over its ously told The Diplomat in a statement. top. Engel told The Washington Post that nuclear weapons program and a Harris, a potential 2020 Democrathe plans to call Secretary of State supporter of bolstering border ic presidential contender, has also Mike Pompeo to appear before security while reducing waste expressed frustration with the delay, the committee, after Pompeo was at the Department of Homeland which comes at the request of the accused of “snubbing” the comSecurity. White House, she was told. HowevHe has also sounded the alarm mittee’s invitation to testify earlier er, some Democrats are now backabout the spread of Chinese last year. He also plans to invesing a different proposal spearheaded influence in the West, includtigate the Trump Organization’s Rep. Michael by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that business interests in Russia and McCaul (R-TX10) ing through its appropriation is widely seen as tougher than the how these might have affected of American technology and its Secure Elections Act, further putforeign policy decisions by the White state-funded “Confucius Institutes” on U.S. colting the issue of election security in Sen. James Inhofe House. lege campuses. In an April 2018 Foreign Policy (R-Okla.) limbo. But there may also be room for agree- op-ed, he called for the institutes in America to ment between Engel and Trump. He be shut down. was one of only 13 House Democrats Senate Armed who opposed the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. A staunch supporter of Israel, House Permanent Select Services Committee Engel also praised the administration’s Committee on Intelligence controversial decision to move LIKELY CHAIR: the U.S. Embassy in Israel to LIKELY CHAIR: SEN. JAMES INHOFE (R-OKLA.) Jerusalem. REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA28) “I hope to work collaborativeLIKELY RANKING MEMBER: ly with the administration on a Sen. Jack Reed LIKELY RANKING MEMBER: SEN. JACK REED (D-R.I.) range of issues. But respect is a (D-R.I.) REP. DEVIN NUNES (R-CA22) two-way street, and the administration needs to respect Congress’s reJames Inhofe, a self-described “unabashed Many have noted how partisan conservative” who served in the Army, is ex- sponsibility to conduct oversight,” Engel pected to continue chairing the committee, told The Diplomat in an emailed state- Rep. Adam Schiff this committee has become under its current chairman, Devin while Jack Reed, a West Point graduate who ment. Michael McCaul, the previous chair- (D-CA28) Nunes, a Trump loyalist who has also served in the Army, is expected to remain man of the House Committee on stoked controversy for, among other things, in his role as ranking member. Beyond the two leadership posts, both the Homeland Security, beat out Reps. Joe Wilson publicly releasing what Democrats allege is a Foreign Relations and the Armed Services (R-SC2) and Ted Yoho (R-FL3) — as well as misleading memo accusing the FBI and Justice committees may be stages on which likely 2020 his senior colleague Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ4) Department of surveillance abuse. In March, House Intelligence Committee Represidential contenders hope to make a mark. — for the position of ranking member on the publicans unilaterally declared an end to the Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) sits on For- Foreign Affairs Committee. McCaul is a former federal prosecutor who committee’s yearlong investigation into Russian eign Relations while Sen. Elizabeth served as chief of counterterrorism and nation- interference in the 2016 presidential election. Warren (D-Mass.) — who recently delivered a foreign policy address out- al security in the U.S. attorney’s office for the lining her priorities — sits on Armed Western District of Texas before being elected SEE COM M IT T EES • PAGE 45 Services and its Subcommittee on Stra- to Congress. On Capitol Hill, he has been an
tegic Forces. Over the summer, the committee supCurrent chairman Ron Johnson, ported a national defense budget that a former longtime businessman, is authorized $716 billion for fiscal 2019, expected to stay on as head of the Sen. Ron Johnson including base spending of $639 for the committee. Most recently, he voted (R-Wis.) Defense Department and $69 billion for against the Senate bill to remove overseas contingency operations. U.S. forces from the conflict in Yemen. He’s also a sharp critic of Russian meddling in Ukraine and the Kremlin’s reported violations of nuclear While seniority is more ingrained in the cularms treaties. ture and workings of the Senate, the speaker of Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) lost her close the House and the House majority leader have race for re-election in November, opening up much more direct influence over committee the ranking member position on this com- assignments in their chamber. Under House mittee charged with oversight of U.S. election rules, the members of each party meet and vote security ahead of the 2020 presidential elec- to nominate members to each committee. The tion, among other issues. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp number of members on each committee — and (D-N.D.) also lost her re-election bid, opening the party ratio of each committee — is subject another spot on this committee for Democrats. to negotiations between the majority and miWhile Sen. Tom Carper nority leaders (except for the Committee on (D-Del.) is next in senior- Ethics, which is mandated under House rules ity, he is expected to stay to contain five members from each party). on as ranking member House Republicans selected most of their of the Environment and ranking members on Nov. 30. House DemoPublic Works Commit- crats have yet to decide all of their chairs as of tee, according to a Nov. press time. 16 report by Sam Mintz in Politico. Sen. Gary Peters House Foreign Sen. Gary Peters has expressed his in(D-Mich.) Affairs Committee terest to become the top Democrat on the Homeland Security LIKELY CHAIR: Committee. A former investment advisor and U.S. Navy reservist who was first electREP. ELIOT ENGEL (D-NY16) ed to the House in 2008, Peters has primarily had the economy and the financial secRANKING MEMBER: tor among his top priorities. But election REP. MICHAEL MCCAUL security is likely to become a seminal issue Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY16) (R-TX10) for the Homeland Committee heading into 2019 and 2020. In August, the Senate Rules Committee Eliot Engel and his former Republican counabruptly postponed its markup of the biparti- terpart on the committee, Ed Royce, generally san Secure Elections Act, introduced by Sens. worked well together to preserve funding for James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Kamala Harris diplomacy, rebuking Trump’s proposed budget (D-Calif.), both members of the committee. cuts to the State Department. Both also took a “This is an important bill that I will not let fail. tough stance on Russia. I look forward to working with members and Now set to take over from Royce as chairman, groups that have technical concerns with the Engel, seen by some on the left as a hawk, is al-
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Moscow ’s Meddling Russia’s 2016 U.S. Election Interference Playbook May Be Playing Out in the Balkans BY RYAN R. MIGEED
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ussia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential contest continues to reverberate around the country, and inside the White House. But Donald Trump’s victory is not the first time Moscow has been accused of using asymmetric tactics to meddle in other countries’ affairs. In 2015, Ukraine’s pro-Western new president, Petro Poroshenko, warned about the spread of misinformation on social media by Russian hackers seeking to weaken his government and strengthen backing for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support of separatists in the east. This type of low-cost, high-impact information warfare may have provided the blueprint for Russia’s attempts to disrupt and divide the American electorate ahead of the 2016 vote. While that race cast a harsh glare on Russia’s role in the Trump campaign, Moscow is no stranger to sowing political discord abroad. An analysis by the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy advocacy group released in September 2017 accused Russia of meddling in the affairs of at least 27 European and North American countries since 2004 through cyber attacks, misinformation campaigns and other tactics. The documented disruptions stretch back to 2004, when former Russian Deputy Prime Minister and purported arms dealer Yuri Borisov was accused of contributing $400,000 to the campaign of Lithuanian Prime Minister Rolandas Paksas, who was impeached for granting Borisov citizenship. Three years later in Estonia, another former Soviet republic, hackers used Russian IP addresses to launch a barrage of denial-of-service attacks that shut down the internet in the tech-reliant Baltic nation, which had become one of NATO’s newest members. But those cyber attacks generally flew under the radar until it was discovered that Russian governmentaffiliated hackers infiltrated the U.S. in myriad ways, from Kremlin troll farms buying polarizing ads on Facebook to hackers stealing prominent Democratic emails that were then published by WikiLeaks. Russia has repeatedly denied accusations it is interfering in other nations’ affairs, pointing out — correctly — that the U.S. itself has a long history of foreign meddling and even toppling unfriendly regimes, such as leftwing governments in Latin America during the Cold War. At the same time, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made no secret of his disdain for NA-
PHOTO: ВЛАДА НА РЕПУБЛИКА МАКЕДОНИЈА FROM МАКЕДОНИЈА
Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, right, shakes hands with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in Oteševo, Macedonia, after signing an agreement on June 17, 2018, to end the two countries’ name dispute. A Macedonian referendum on the issue did not garner a high enough turnout to pass the change, but Zaev is moving ahead with the effort in parliament.
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Yes, Russia is contributing to the spread of noxious political ideas in a lot of places, including the United States. But those noxious political ideas exist anyway. JEFFREY MANKOFF
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deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
TO’s postwar expansion and the West’s promotion of democracy. There is growing evidence that Russia has continued a pattern of interfering in elections across Europe to skew the results toward pro-Russia candidates, inflame populist tensions and undermine faith not only in democracy, but also in the European Union and NATO. In 2016, hundreds of Facebook accounts later active in the U.S. presidential campaign were pushing the British to leave the EU during the Brexit referendum. Investigators in the U.S. and U.K. also believe Russia funneled money to people associated with the leave camp. (There is evidence that Russian trolls also supported Catalonian secessionists in Spain to weaken EU unity.) In France, the far-right National Front party accepted a loan from a Russian bank with ties to the Kremlin. Its leader, Marine Le Pen, has expressed admiration for Putin. And during the 2017 presidential election,
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Russian hackers repeatedly tried to break into the files of Le Pen’s opponent, Emmanuel Macron; the day before the election, thousands of Macron’s emails were leaked online. In Germany’s 2017 parliamentary elections, the major parties agreed not to use any hacked material for political gain. And indeed, no Russian interference was detected, surprising many experts who had come to see hacks and social media barrages as the new norm. But Russia has not given up on exploiting the internet for political gain or undermining Western democracy. Even in Germany, for instance, intelligence officials accused Russia of stealing data from members of parliament in 2015 and spreading fake news that went viral, notably a fabricated story about a German-Russian girl raped by migrants in Berlin — which touched a nerve at the height of Europe’s refugee crisis. More recently, on Nov. 14, separate reports emerged that Russian-linked
hackers attacked both the U.S. and Germany on the same day. “First, U.S. cybersecurity companies reported that the group known as Cozy Bear — allegedly an arm of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, best known for being the first Russian hacking team to infiltrate the Democratic National Committee — seemed to have come back to life,” wrote Max de Haldevang in Quartz on Dec. 1. “The group was the likely source of new hacking attempts on U.S. government agencies, think tanks, and businesses, the companies said.” That same day, according to Der Spiegel magazine, German authorities detected an attack on email accounts belonging to the country’s lawmakers, military and embassies. German policies toward Russia, including sanctions for the annexation of Crimea, are especially critical to Moscow given the high level of trade between the two countries. Maintaining economic and geopolitical influence seems to be the primary driver behind Russia’s attempts to keep neighboring states such as Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltics close to its orbit and away from the EU or NATO. This dynamic is currently playing out in the Balkans, a tinderbox of ethnic tensions that has a complicated history with Russia. The region is home to sizeable Russian-speaking populations that share a common Slavic heritage with Russia and loyalty to the Russian Orthodox Church. But political and economic alliances
have shifted since the fall of the Soviet Union. Nine of the area’s 12 nations are in NATO. Balkan nations such as Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Slovenia are already members of the EU, and the bloc has offered the prospect of membership to six others: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. Further European integration on Russia’s doorstep would pose a significant threat to Moscow’s hegemony in the region. And given the Balkans’ history as the flashpoint of World War I and the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia — from which many Balkan states have yet to recover — there’s growing concern that the tug of war between Russia and the West could spark another devastating conflict. That’s why many experts are sounding the alarm about Russia inserting itself into the recent referendum to rename Macedonia, as well as its efforts to maintain influence in the linchpin Balkan nation of Serbia.
MACEDONIA FIGHTS HISTORY — AND RUSSIAN FACEBOOK POSTS
Macedonia’s bid to join the EU and NATO has for decades been blocked by Greece over what it sees as territorial designs on a region in Greece with the same name. The dispute is rooted in cultural history — both claim to be the original home of Alexander the Great. But it also has more recent implications. Greece has opposed international recognition of Macedonia since it became an independent republic after the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991. Macedonia has already changed its consti-
PHOTO: KREMLIN.RU, CC BY 4.0, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, is interviewed by journalist Megyn Kelly in June 2017 at a meeting for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, where Putin was repeatedly questioned about alleged Russian cyber attacks.
tution to make clear it has no territorial ambitions on Greece and changed its flag to avoid symbols claimed by the Greeks, according to a March 20, 2018, report by Marc Santora for The New York Times. But Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev has been determined to finally bury the hatchet and pave the way for his country to join the EU and the security umbrella of NATO. Earlier this year, the two countries’ leaders negotiated a compromise: Greece would lift its opposition if Macedonia offi-
cially renamed itself North Macedonia. On Sept. 30, Macedonia held a nationwide referendum to decide on the name change. Although 91 percent voted to make the name change, turnout did not meet the required 50 percent threshold to make the decision binding, sending it to Macedonia’s parliament. As of print time, the legislative process was still underway. Russia, meanwhile, has repeatedly attempted to dissuade Eastern European states from joining the EU and NATO. It is a strat-
egy that appears to be lifted from the Soviet Union’s Cold War playbook, to draw a number of “satellites” into a sphere of influence that more or less gives Russia a buffer zone between it and Western European nations, such as France and Germany, that have invaded the country at various times in the past two centuries. Moscow insists that countries on its periphery can have relations with both Russia and the EU, as long as the West doesn’t try to dominate the region at Russia’s expense. EU and U.S. officials counter that Russia’s onslaught of cyber attacks and manipulation of social media suggest it wants to remain the dominant player in the region. But just how effective are Russia’s methods of persuasion and coercion? By one count, hundreds of new websites appeared over the course of Macedonia’s referendum campaign encouraging voters to boycott the referendum. Many did just that — only about one-third of eligible voters turned out at the polls. Many others burned their ballots, emboldened by dozens of Facebook posts falsely claiming, among other things, that Google would eliminate Macedonian from its list of recognized languages. But the negative attacks haven’t stopped Zaev from declaring victory after the nonbinding referendum and pushing ahead with plans to change the country’s name by securing the support of a majority of parliament. As with the Brexit vote and the 2016 presidential election in the U.S., some experts demur on how definitive or measurable Russian interference was in the Macedonia referendum. “It’s hard to show cause and effect. CerSEE BAL K ANS • PAGE 12
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Balkans CONTINUED • PAGE 11
tainly they were active,” said A. Ross Johnson, a history and public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “Was that the decisive factor or not? I don’t know. It’s very hard to say,” Johnson told The Diplomat. Molly McKew, who has advised former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government and former Moldovan Prime Minister Vlad Filat, wrote in Wired early last year that we cannot fully know the impact of social media persuasion for a number of reasons. First, because we have just began analyzing this issue; second, the analytical tools to measure the impact are not readily available; and third, social media companies “obfuscate” what they know about their own technologies and the repercussions. Referencing fake protests in American cities, where people actually showed up to events that had been created and promoted by Russian agents on social media ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, McKew noted that, “Russian accounts and agents accomplished more than just stoking divisions and tensions with sloppy propaganda memes…. These accounts aimed to get people to do specific things.” “This corrosive effect is real and significant,” McKew argued, although she cautioned that we’re only at the beginning of understanding the direct impact of such meddling. “Which part of the fear of ‘sharia law in America’ came from Russian accounts versus readers of InfoWars? How much did the Russian campaigns targeting black voters impact the low turnout, versus the character attacks run against Clinton by the Trump campaign itself? For now, all we can know is that there is shared narrative, and shared responsibility.” Macedonia’s low voter turnout is a sign that Moscow did potentially affect behavior with inflammatory Facebook accounts promoting boycotts and ballot-burning. “It’s reasonably effective,” said Jeffrey Mankoff, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and author of the 2009 book “Russian Foreign Policy: The Return of Great Power Politics.” “The Macedonian referendum is an example where I think you can make a pretty strong case that these activities have had real political results,” he told The Diplomat in a phone interview. America and its European allies have woken up to the threat posed by Russia’s online warfare. In January 2017, Congress allocated $8 million to fight the Russian disinformation campaign in Macedonia. But, as reported by Marc Santora and Julian Barnes on Sept. 16 in The New York Times, that money did not arrive for more than a year.
PHOTO: PIXABAY / ERICH WESTENDARP
In Serbia, whose capital, Belgrade, is seen above, Russian cultural ties run deep, but the Kremlin (below), is also accused of using local grievances to fuel conspiracy theories and keep the country close to Moscow’s orbit.
IN SERBIA, RUSSIAN INFLUENCE GOES OFFLINE
In Serbia, meanwhile, Russian influence has become even more complex and intertwined with daily life. There, Russia is “deeply engaged in local language media, both with Kremlin-owned websites like Sputnik and with bots that harp on local grievances,” according to an April 10, 2018, report by Steven Erlanger for The New York Times. Russian state media broadcasts reports in Serbian, including nowstandard conspiracy theories such as reports claiming “NATO and the Islamic State were plotting together to spread chaos at the World Cup,” Michael Birnbaum reported for The Washington Post on Oct. 3. Russia’s low-cost but highly effective media strategy has also convinced ordinary Serbs that Moscow is their biggest benefactor, a falsehood amplified by Serbia’s own notoriously inaccurate news media. Serbia receives 4 billion euros in direct foreign investment from EU countries and only 8 million from Russia. But these facts are “mostly ignored by Serbian media,” according to a March 2018 paper Johnson wrote for the Wilson Center. The paper also noted that Serbian media underreport the country’s military interactions with NATO, which far exceed military-to-military exchanges with Russia. This information war is working. As Birnbaum wrote, “Many Serbs mistakenly believe Russia is their biggest partner for trade, aid and the military” even though Russia’s contribution to the Serbian economy is dwarfed by EU — and even U.S. — investment. This points to the importance of on-the-ground reporting by organizations like Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which is funded by the U.S. and the EU in countries where the press has not traditionally been independent. RFE/RL is still actively involved in the region, according to Johnson,
12 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
PHOTO: PIXABAY / PEGGY AND MARCO LACHMANN-ANKE
who visited Kosovo in September on a research trip with the Wilson Center. “We should be grateful that RFE/ RL and also [Voice of America] are doing the great work that they’re doing. But I don’t think it’s fully appreciated by enough in the administration, in the foreign policy establishment, in the international community, so there should be more attention to that,” said Johnson, who is also a senior adviser at RFE/RL. When it comes to the Balkans, which are not NATO allies, Mankoff said that the U.S. has an interest in countering Russian efforts at destabilizing countries that could have security implications for our allies — but not necessarily “an obligation to do that.” “At the end of the day, this is something that the U.S. is not going to be able to do by itself,” Mankoff told The Diplomat. On the information battleground, Russia has the advantage of being able to tug on cultural strings. Serbian affinity for Russia, ethnic ties and Orthodox commonality are intangible markers that give more weight to Russia’s ties with ordinary Serbs. Russia is also reaping the rewards of its longtime support for Serbia in its dispute with Kosovo, including during the Kosovo War that saw the territory split from Serbia.
In a similar vein, Russia plays on Serbian allegiance in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs coexist in an awkward power-sharing agreement. In Oct. 7 elections, Bosnian Serb nationalist Milorad Dodik won a seat in the country’s three-member presidency, defeating a moderate incumbent. A close ally of Russia, Dodik wants his autonomous Serb region known as Republika Srpska to break away from the Muslim-Croat part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It’s a frightening prospect given that Bosnia is a microcosm of the ethnic fault lines that tore the former Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s. Many of the same grievances that fueled the Balkan wars persist to this day — something Russia is well aware of. Experts say that Russia is not only looking to gain an economic and political edge in the region, but is also trying to sow chaos by exploiting the deep ethnic hatreds and weak, corrupt governance that plague the Balkans. The purpose of this divide and conquer strategy is to drive a wedge between Balkan states and the West — with very little effort or cost. “Historical, political, ethnic, and economic rivalries are rife across the Balkans, from the uneasy tripartite status of Bosnia to the grudging status of relations between Serbia and Kosovo. In the words of a Rus-
sian foreign ministry staffer, ‘It’s full of opportunities for us to play everyone against each other – and frankly, we don’t have to do very much,’” wrote Mark Galeotti in an April 4, 2018, policy brief for the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Often, Moscow develops opportunities to be all things to all audiences. To the Serbs, for example, it portrays Macedonia (like BosniaHerzegovina and Kosovo) as little more than an EU or American client — a line that also plays well in Greece. At the same time, to the Macedonians, the Russians have begun claiming that their country is under threat from U.S. plans to carve it up to create a ‘Greater Albania.’” Galeotti added that, “Small, impoverished nations in which corruption is rife and in which checks and balances are rudimentary offer all kinds of opportunities for acquiring influence, as the Russians buy allies and clients within the elite.” But whether Moscow is succeeding in turning the Balkans into the latest tug of war between Russia and the West is another matter. For instance, any attempts by Dodik to redraw the borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina would be met with fierce resistance; even Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said the country must be kept intact. Looking at the bigger picture, Russian influence in the Balkans is mixed. Despite Serbia’s allegiance to Moscow, it’s pursuing EU membership and has even made overtures to its archenemy, Kosovo, in a bid to unlock closer relations with the bloc. In other European nations, some far-right, pro-Russia politicians have made headway, but many others have failed to win elections. Moreover, the impact of Russian disinformation campaigns is difficult to gauge because voters are often driven by a host of issues unrelated to Russia, such as immigration and the economy. Many countries from Bosnia to Germany are simply disillusioned with the EU, not necessarily enamored with Russia. Ultimately, Moscow is causing some short-term “chaos” in Europe, according to Johnson. But he is skeptical that such troublemaking can alter the chessboard as much as Putin hopes it will. “Russia is trying to increase its influence with some success, but not achieving its goals,” Johnson told The Diplomat. “Everything that happens in Serbia is not because of Russia.” Mankoff echoed this sentiment. “If you make it about Russian influence, you’re in a way absolving people in these countries of responsibility for their own problems. Yes, Russia is contributing to the spread of noxious political ideas in a lot of places, including the United States. But those noxious political ideas exist anyway,” Mankoff said. In a region like the Balkans, however, which is fraught with age-old ethnic hatreds and mistrust, this may be enough to turn a war of words into something more dangerous. WD Ryan R. Migeed (@RyanMigeed) is a freelance writer based in Boston.
United States | WD
U.S. MIA? Key Ambassadorships Sit Empty Under Trump, Although Backlog Slowly Easing BY ANNA GAWEL AND ERIC HAM
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he shocking death and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi in October ignited a diplomatic firestorm that still rages across the geopolitical landscape. Despite President Trump’s equivocations on the murder, the CIA and a number of Republican senators have concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman likely ordered the killing of Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, prompting questions about the wider implications for U.S.-Saudi relations. But the diplomatic crisis has shed light on another, more fundamental challenge confronting the Trump administration’s foreign policy strategy: the dearth of U.S. ambassadors in key posts across the globe, including Riyadh. As the White House navigates a turbulent political minefield, both abroad and at home with a new Democraticled House, it is doing so without the full weight and imprimatur of a major component of American diplomacy. As a result, key allies and other nations must fill the vacuum left by a mercurial U.S. president who is shaping policy oftentimes in 280 characters or less. The Trump administration has hit the two-year mark and as of this printing, roughly 60 ambassadorships remain unfilled. Of those, however, the majority have nominees awaiting confirmation. (The State Department also has vacancies in high-ranking positions such as assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor.) The announcement of nominees was slow-going at the start of Trump’s presidency but has sped up dramatically in recent months. Notably, on Nov. 13, the White House announced it would nominate retired four-star Army Gen. John P. Abizaid to be the next U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, a post that has been vacant for the entirety of Trump’s presidency. While many posts have nominees, that does not guarantee they will be confirmed — and the problem now is that the clock is ticking. When a session of Congress ends every two years, nominees who did not get up-or-down floor votes essentially have to start the process from scratch during the next session. There is an exception to this rule. Members can reach a unanimous consent agreement to keep certain nominations on the calendar for the following session. Such agreements, however, are relatively rare and usually only apply to a few select candidates. Fortunately, though, nothing gets the bureaucratic process moving like make-or-break deadlines. Congress is likely to make one big final push at the end of 2018 to approve a slew of nomi-
PHOTO: STATE DEPARTMENT
Then-U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson joins President Donald Trump for a bilateral meeting with Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang in Hanoi on Nov. 12, 2017. The Trump administration has been plagued by one of the highest turnover rates in modern White House history. Since this photo was taken, Tillerson and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster have left, while Chief of Staff John Kelly is on his way out as well.
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Among the unfilled U.S. ambassadorships are: Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Lebanon, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Sudan, Nigeria and Liberia. nees before the session wraps up. As of press time in December, the final list of confirmations had not yet been finalized, but there was already a significant yearend scramble to get key nominees confirmed. On Dec. 14, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee cleared a large number of ambassadorial candidates, many of them career diplomats. Among them were: Christopher Paul Henzel (Yemen); lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse (Australia); Earle D. Litzenberger (Azerbaijan); Lynne M. Tracy (Armenia); John Matthews (Brunei); Kyle McCarter (Kenya); Michael S. Klecheski (Mongolia); and Sarah-Ann Lynch (Guyana). The yearend confirmation blitz is likely to make a significant dent in the number of empty ambassadorships abroad. And while Trump has been criticized for not pushing hard enough to get U.S. ambassadors in place, he is hardly the first president to encounter problems getting
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his nominees confirmed. The nominees of both Republican and Democratic presidents regularly face lengthy delays in Congress, often due to bureaucratic logjams or partisan gridlock. Some are blocked for purely political reasons, a time-honored tactic used in the Senate by both parties. Some political appointees don’t pass muster for lack of experience. In early 2014 under President Obama, for example, the confirmation of 50 ambassadorial nominees was stalled in part due to scheduling delays, but also because of partisan turf battles in Congress. Months earlier, Senate Democrats had invoked the so-called “nuclear option” to eliminate filibusters for most presidential nominations, citing Republican obstructionism. As a result, many judicial and executive branch appointments were able to pass with a simple majority in the Senate, as opposed to the 60-vote threshold that had been re-
quired for decades. The rule change shifted power in the Senate from the minority to the majority party, but it didn’t eliminate delays for diplomatic posts because the minority could still employ procedural tactics to slow-walk nominations. Democrats at the time accused Republicans of purposely dragging out ambassadorial confirmations using these procedural gimmicks, such as refusing to consider groups of nominees at the same time, as had been the norm, or abusing the power of individual senators to place “holds” on nominations for any reason whatsoever. For instance, Obama nominated Deputy White House counsel Cassandra Q. Butts to be ambassador to the Bahamas in February 2014. Her nomination languished until the 113th Congress ended. Obama re-nominated her in February 2015, but her confirmation was blocked by several Republican senators. Butts died in May 2016 of an illness — still waiting for a Senate vote a whopping 865 days after her initial nomination. Republicans now essentially argue that Democrats are playing the same game, resulting in the current backlog. In addition to procedural stalling techniques, senators can place holds on nominations to bring the legislative vetting process to a grinding halt. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently accused New Jersey Sen. Bob SEE VACANCIES • PAGE 14 JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 13
Vacancies CONTINUED • PAGE 13
Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of “putting our nation at risk” by blocking nominations. “Today, there are more than 60 State Department nominees awaiting confirmation in the United States Senate. That’s more than a quarter of all the senior-level confirmable positions at the department,” Pompeo said in an Oct. 10 statement. “More than a dozen of these qualified political nominees are being held up by Senate Democrats because of politics.” Menendez promptly fired back, issuing a release the next day that disputed Pompeo’s numbers and argued that some of Trump’s political nominees failed to disclose key information, PHOTO: STATE DEPARTMENT suchAlthough as financialevery conflicts of interest and, to in one NOTE: effort is made assure your ad is free of mistakes in spelling and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo swears in Kiron Skinner as director of policy planning on Sept. 4, case, sexual harassment allegations. Menendez content it is ultimately up to the customer to make the final proof. also cited nominees’ “track records of deeply of- 2018, filling a key post at Foggy Bottom. Under Pompeo, the backlog of diplomatic vacancies has fensive public statements, unbefitting of an of- improved. The first two faxed changes will be made at no cost to the advertiser, subsequent changes ficial representative of the United States, includ- worked diligently with Senate Republicans to cally, Trump has been particularly slow to put will ing be derisive billed atcomments a rate ofabout $75 current per faxed alteration. Signed ads are considered approved. sitting advance 131 nominees to the Senate floor. Of forth nominees compared to his two predeU.S. senators, extremist views on immigrants, those, 107 have been confirmed,” Menendez cessors. The majority of the current batch of Please checkabout thiswomen. ad carefully. Mark any your22 ad. and demeaning comments ” added. “Evenchanges now, afterto almost months, the nominees was just announced this past fall. The Menendez also rebutted charges that Demo- Trump administration has failed to nominate Trump administration has also been plagued cratsis were holding qualified career profesIf the ad correct signupand fax to: (301) 949-0065 changes leadership and by one of the highest turnover rates in modern anyone for 49needs State Department sionals. “The Senate Foreign Relations Com- ambassadorial posts, including two undersec- White House history, further hampering the mittee has Diplomat advanced more than 40 933-3552 career retary positions, and ambassadors to critical vetting process. The Washington (301) nominations during the Trump administration, countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Australia, Perhaps most importantly, the president as well as more than 1,550 Foreign Service Of- Mexico, Pakistan, Egypt and Singapore.” (Nom- does not appear to place a high value on diploApproved ficers.__________________________________________________________ While Senate Democrats do not control inees for Australia and Saudi Arabia have since macy, insisting that he himself can make grand the ___________________________________________________________ committee or floor schedule, career nomi- been named.) bargains directly with heads of state and delChanges nations have been processed in as few as 11 egating U.S. foreign policy to a small cadre of While Congress can make or break a nomi___________________________________________________________________ days,” he said, with the median time averaging nation, there has to be a nomination in the first advisors, such as son-in-law Jared Kushner and approximately six weeks. place — and that falls on the White House. members of his Cabinet. “Since January 2017, Senate Democrats have Here, Trump’s track record is mixed. StatistiThe mood at the top invariably trickles down to the State Department, which executes the president’s directives. The hollowing-out of the U.S. Foreign Service was especially pronounced Specialists in Reproductive Health Care under former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, as the one-time ExxonMobil CEO embraced the deep budget and staffing cuts proposed by Dedicated to providing reproductive services and infertility health care the White House, causing morale at Foggy Botwith pleasant surroundings in a state-of-the-art facility. tom to plummet. A snapshot of vacancies in December 2017 — four months before Tillerson was fired — reveals the lack of urgency in filling ambassadorships. At the time, 33 vacancies had been awaiting nominees, 10 nominees were awaiting confirmation and only 35 Trump-nominated ambassadors were in place, according to a Dec. 8, 2018, report by CNN. When Tillerson left at the end of March, eight out of 10 top State Department leadership positions were also vacant, either because staff had left, were fired or the administration never filled the positions. Postings abroad continued to sit empty as well, including ambassadorships to critical allies such as Mexico, the European Union, Turkey, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. Since then, however, staffing has significantly improved under Secretary of State Pompeo, who ended Tillerson’s hiring freeze. According to the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), Trump has made a total of 188 appointments as of Nov. 16, split roughly between political appointees and career diplomats. Shortly after taking office, Pompeo was able to shepherd through key ambassadorships to South Korea, Germany, Somalia and Nicaragua, among others. Over the summer, respected diplomat David Hale, a former ambassador Yemi Famuyiwa, M.D., F.A.C.O.G. to Pakistan, Lebanon and Jordan, was quickly approved as undersecretary for political affairs, the number-three slot at State. In October, asTower Oaks Professional Park sistant secretaries were confirmed for Western 3202 Tower Oaks Blvd Suite 370 • Rockville, Maryland 20852 Hemisphere affairs; conflict and stabilization operations; and legislative affairs; along with an ambassador-at-large to combat human trafficking. And in December, David Schenker was confirmed to be assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, a key position, while R. www.montgomeryfertilitycenter.com Clarke Cooper became assistant secretary of
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state for political-military affairs. Pompeo has also resurrected special envoy posts, which don’t require Senate confirmation and which had been eliminated under Tillerson, who viewed them as redundant and unnecessary. On Nov. 9, Pompeo appointed veteran Africa hand J. Peter Pham of the Atlantic Center to serve as special envoy to the Great Lakes region, which includes the Democratic Republic of Congo, a potential flashpoint given the country’s volatile elections and a growing Ebola outbreak. Pham was initially put forward to head up State’s African Affairs Bureau, but his nomination was held up by Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma over a territorial dispute involving Morocco. (Tibor Nagy now heads the Africa desk.) Other special envoy posts filled by Pompeo include those focusing exclusively on Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Ukraine and Syria. Despite the progress under Pompeo, myriad essential posts remain unfilled around the world. The list includes: Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Sudan, Nigeria and Liberia. Many have nominees now in place — such as El Salvador, Iraq, South Africa, Sweden, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — but it’s unclear who will make the cut before 2018 ends and the process has to begin again in the new year. For other postings, such as Mexico, Egypt and Pakistan, no nominees have yet been named. To exacerbate the problem, it is not just embassies that lack leadership, but regional offices and multilateral agencies, too. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has no American representative — nor does the African Union or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. And with Nikki Haley leaving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the confirmation battle over her replacement, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, will likely be contentious given the high-profile nature of the job and the former Fox News personality’s relative lack of diplomatic experience. Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann, now president of AFSA, said the vacancies only amplify the disorganization coursing through the administration’s foreign policy agenda. At the same time, the pace of nominations has increased, sparking optimism that the second half of Trump’s term will see ambassadors in place at top U.S. embassies. “The administration seems to have picked up the pace on nominations and it looks like the Senate is also moving rapidly on confirmation hearings,” Neumann told us via email. “I hope this means that they will confirm a lot of career people before the end of the session. I really don’t know why the nomination process has moved so slowly. Not having ambassadors in major countries does limit the effectiveness of the embassies, although we do have some very good professional officers in change of the missions.” While Neumann believes the wealth of knowledge and experience still on the ground in the form of acting envoys is enough to quell concerns over Trump’s unpredictable approach to diplomacy, others say acting ambassadors don’t carry the same weight as confirmed ones do. “With so many empty posts, the State Department is relying on lower-level officials to pick up the slack, even in embassies of strategic importance,” wrote Robbie Gramer in an April 9, 2018, article for Foreign Policy. “The State Department claims it has a cadre of talented career diplomats filling the gaps in interim roles. But the stand-ins lack the clout of formal ambassadors, who are presidentially nominated and Senate-confirmed. “Foreign leaders take notice when the top SEE VACANCIES • PAGE 46
Cover Profile | WD
Draining Peru’s Swamp Despite Growing Economy, Peru Remains Mired in Ever-Expanding Cesspool of Corruption BY LARRY LUXNER
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eru, which is world-famous for its delicious ceviche, the majestic ruins of Machu Picchu and pisco sour — a sweet but potent alcoholic beverage — is also apparently a Latin American cesspool of corruption. The last four presidents of Peru before the current one, Martín Vizcarra, are all being investigated for wrongdoing in connection with Odebrecht, a giant Brazilian construction and engineering conglomerate whose web of corruption scandals has ensnared governments from Colombia to Ecuador to Peru. “We’ve had political turbulence, dictatorships and military governments in Peru’s history, but our democracy continues to function very well, even with the corruption we’ve seen in the last few years,” said Carlos Pareja, Peru’s ambassador to the United States. “Our former president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, took office in July 2016 but had to resign, due to this big tsunami of corruption related to Odebrecht. The vice president, Vizcarra, took over, with no complaints from the judicial system or the press. It was a very smooth transition.” Pareja spoke to The Washington Diplomat on Oct. 30 during one of our Ambassador Insider Series events, held at the Peruvian Embassy near Dupont Circle. The Q&A, followed by a reception, attracted about 100 people, including the Washington-based ambassadors of Jamaica, Belgium, Paraguay and Nicaragua (also see photos in this month’s spotlight section). Nearing retirement after a long career in the Foreign Service, the 68-year-old Pareja is no stranger to Washington. From 1984 to 1990, he was a political counselor at the embassy. The ambassador’s father, José Pareja Paz-Soldán, was a prominent member of Peru’s Foreign Ministry as well as director of the Diplomatic Academy of Peru. And his great-grandfather actually started the Peruvian Foreign Service in 1864. Pareja has also been posted as ambassador to Chile, Spain and Switzerland, and was chief of state protocol in Peru. In addition, he’s served at the Peruvian Foreign Ministry as directorgeneral for the Americas, and later director-general for Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf — a post he held until returning to Washington for his current assignment in September 2016. Peru currently has 32 million inhabitants, well over a third of them in Lima. That makes it South America’s fourth-largest metropolis after São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. Nearly twice the size of Texas, Peru
PHOTO: LAWRENCE RUGGERI
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These scandals have been terrible, but I’m really optimistic that after we have fallen so low, we will survive and be better off. CARLOS PAREJA
ambassador of Peru to the United States
is the world’s second largest exporter of copper, after Chile, and has a GDP of $211 billion. It’s also, along with neighboring Colombia, one of the world’s top cultivators of coca, the main ingredient in cocaine. On the whole, Peru’s economy — once dubbed the “Pacific Puma” — is one of the most enviable in Latin America. After decades of military rule and the highly polarizing presidency of Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s that saw both economic gains and authoritarian backsliding, Peruvians are doing better than many of their neighbors. The country has seen four successful democratic elections since 2001, along with steady, robust economic growth driven by sound, market-oriented policies. Yet Peruvians, while doing relatively well economically, don’t trust their own leaders — and all four of their most recent presidents have been toppled by allegations of corruption and human rights abuses. (A fifth, Alberto Fujimori, is in jail while his daughter Keiko, an influential politician, was recently arrested for
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corruption.) The list of disgraced presidents includes Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, in office from 2016 to 2018, who resigned ahead of an impeachment vote in the wake of a string of scandals, including accusations that he took bribes from Odebrecht and tried to buy votes to avoid impeachment. Likewise, Ollanta Humala, in office from 2011 to 2016, is accused of taking bribes from Odebrecht to bankroll his election campaign; he is currently in pre-trial detention. Alejandro Toledo, in office from 2001 to 2006, is also accused of taking millions of dollars in bribes from Odebrecht. He’s currently a fugitive in the U.S. fighting extradition back to Peru. Finally, Alan García, in office from 1985 to 1990 and again from 2006 to 2011, had a particularly roller-coaster presidency. His first term was marred by an economic crisis and social unrest. Under his second term, Peru registered impressive economic, but eventually, García, too, was suspected of taking kickbacks from Odebrecht.
In December, he sought asylum in the Uruguayan residence to escape bribery charges in connection with the Odebrecht scandal, but his request was denied. “As in many countries, people are not confident in their governments. Many don’t believe in their traditional leaders or institutions any more,” Pareja conceded. “And social media is so important now, especially for young people. It’s quite a revolution.” It’s a seismic revolution that has shaken the entire region. Odebrecht, the company at the center of this corruption tsunami, has already admitted to having paid close to $800 million in bribes to politicians in a dozen countries, in exchange for help winning lucrative contracts to build everything from gas pipelines to hydroelectric dams. Nearly half that total, $349 million, involves Brazil, where the conglomerate is based. Also implicated are politicians in Peru, Venezuela, Panama, Angola, Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia, Mexico, Mozambique and the Dominican Republic. To be fair, Peru — which marks its 200th anniversary of independence in 2021 — has made enormous strides in reducing endemic poverty among its millions of indigenous citizens. Under President Alberto Fujimori, who ruled from 1990 to 2000, the murderous Shining Path terrorist group was defeated. But the violent crackdown also resulted in the deaths of nearly 70,000 SEE PER U • PAGE 16 JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 15
Former Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was the first Latin American head of state to visit the White House after President Trump’s inauguration. But on March 23, 2018, Kuczynski resigned ahead of an impeachment vote in the wake of a string of scandals, including accusations that he took bribes from Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht. CREDIT: OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY BENJAMIN APPLEBAUM
PHOTO: BY CONGRESO DE LA REPÚBLICA DEL PERÚ FROM LIMA, PERÚ - MINISTROS DE JUSTICIA Y TRABAJO ASISTIRÁN HOY MARTES A COMISIONES DEL CONGRESO, CC BY 2.0
The Peruvian Congress sits on Plaza Bolivar in Lima. Peru has been rocked by a series of corruption scandals that have taken down four presidents and a number of lawmakers.
Peru CONTINUED • PAGE 15
people. Fujimori was ultimately sentenced to 25 years in prison on corruption and human rights charges. In December 2017, Kuczynski freed the 79-year-old former strongman on humanitarian grounds. Given that Kuczynski narrowly defeated Keiko Fujimori in the 2016 election and that he considered the Fujimori family dynasty to be his political rivals, the pardon raised more than a few eyebrows. So did the fact that Kuczynski survived an earlier impeachment attempt thanks only to the abstentions of a few lawmakers from Fujimori’s party. The apparent quid-pro-quo sullied Kuczynski’s reputation and cemented his downfall. Meanwhile, Alberto Fujimori’s release sparked an outpouring of joy among his supporters, and widespread rioting by those who remembered his authoritarian rule with fear and loathing. (Kuczynski’s pardon was overturned by the Supreme Court in October and Fujimori is now back in jail.) Meanwhile, Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko, is also now in prison, facing charges she accepted $1.2 million in bribes from Odebrecht in 2011. A judge ordered Keiko Fujimori to serve three years in prison as a preventative measure while prosecutors investigate claims she ran a “de facto criminal organization” within her political party to launder campaign donations. The once-powerful politician, who lost presidential election runoffs in 2011 and 2016, denies all wrongdoing and claims the charges against her are politically motivated. “Politics in Peru currently looks more like a crime series. But it also shows that in spite of the daily surreal events, Peruvian institutions have the strength to overcome them and move forward,” said Katya Salazar, executive director of the Due Process of Law Foundation. “President Vizcarra is making the right decisions,
several judges have been detained or removed from their positions, and the new head of the judiciary is an honest judge and academic. It’s our responsibility to keep monitoring the situation and not dismay.” “Political persecution doesn’t exist in Peru. There’s full rule of law,” Vizcarra told Bloomberg recently. “Corruption doesn’t respect borders, and therefore heads of state need to work together to fight it.” The new president has made headway in his push to curb corruption. Voters overwhelmingly approved a series of reforms that Vizcarra proposed in a Dec. 9 referendum. Among the measures that voters supported, according to exit polls: allowing the public to vote on nominated judges; making political parties and campaign finance laws more transparent; and ending consecutive re-election for legislators. But voters rejected a fourth measure that would have added a second legislative body by recreating the Senate that Peru had until 1992, when Fujimori dissolved Congress. Ironically, despite the referendum, which marked a clear victory for Vizcarra over the opposition led by Keiko Fujimori, the Fujimori dynasty retains strong support. Pushed to explain Alberto Fujimori’s enduring popularity — especially among average Peruvians who wax nostalgic about his authoritarian rule — Pareja said that in the late 1980s, his country was an economic basket-case teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. That, he said, was largely the fault of then-President García. “Fujimori won the election in 1990 because people were afraid of a liberal revolution,” Pareja said. “Upon taking office, he implemented the privatization of state-owned companies. Much of the progress you see in Peru today came from the Fujimori regime’s economic transformation. He also put an end to terrorism, and people are really grateful for that. Unfortunately, his was a very corrupt government.” So, apparently, were all the governments that followed Fujimori, at least until the current one.
16 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
Peru at a Glance Independence Day July 28, 1821 (from Spain) Location Western South America, bordering the South Pacific Ocean, between Chile and Ecuador
Flag of Peru
Capital Lima Population 31.3 million (July 2018 estimate) Ethnic groups Mestizo (mixed Amerindian and white) 60.2 percent, Amerindian 25.8 percent, white 5.9 percent, African descent 3.6 percent, other (includes Chinese and Japanese descent) 1.2 percent, unspecified 3.3 percent (2017 estimate) Religious groups Roman Catholic 60 percent, Christian 14.6 percent, unspecified 21.1 percent (2017 estimate) GDP (purchasing power parity) $430.3 billion (2017 estimate)
GDP per-capita (PPP) $13,500 (2017 estimate)
GDP growth 2.5 percent (2017 estimate) Unemployment 6.9 percent (2017 estimate) Population below poverty line 22.7 percent (2014 estimate)
Industries Mining and refining of minerals; steel, metal fabrication; petroleum extraction and refining, natural gas and natural gas liquefaction; fishing and fish processing, cement, glass, textiles, clothing, food processing, beer, soft drinks, rubber, machinery, electrical machinery, chemicals, furniture SOURCE: CIA WORLD FACTBOOK
PHOTO: PIXABAY
Peru has enjoyed steady economic growth, in part driven by a thriving tourism industry built around popular sites such as the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu.
“Peru is going through a period of presidential banditry where all elected presidents — Fujimori, Toledo, García, Humala and Kuczynski — are being accused or investigated for alleged bribery, money laundering or conflicts of interest,” said Francisco Durand, a political science professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. “Keiko Fujimori joins the infamous list and runs the risk of being jailed again together with her inner circle. All these politi-
cians, invariably, claim to be ‘persecuted’ but the cases are not baseless.” In Transparency International’s 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index, Peru ranks 96th — placing it on par with Brazil and Colombia, but not as bad as Ecuador, Mexico, Russia, North Korea or Venezuela. On the other hand, it scores worse than Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba and even Argentina. But Latin America’s epic fight against graft has barely
registered with its neighbor to the north. Asked whether the United States under Donald Trump has neglected Latin America — as some highlevel U.S. diplomats including John Feeley, the former U.S. ambassador to Panama who resigned last year in protest, have alleged — Pareja, unsurprisingly, took a diplomatic approach. “Our region has no major conflicts, no religious wars and no civil wars, even though we do have a very dif-
ficult situation in Venezuela,” he said. “We are not a threat to the security of the United States. Maybe that’s why the White House focuses on Iran, North Korea, China and the Middle East. On the contrary, we are quite friendly with the U.S., and fortunately, our two countries have a very warm relationship.” Pareja pointed out that 11 members of Congress and nearly 200 business executives accompanied Vice President Mike Pence to Peru for the Summit of the Americas, which Lima hosted last April. And he added that Kuczynski was the first Latin American head of state to visit the White House after Trump’s inauguration. Despite some nostalgia for the law-and-order days of Fujimori, Pareja said he does not see a trend toward authoritarianism, even with the recent election of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil. “Argentina came out of a very populist, corrupt government under [Cristina Fernández de] Kirchner, and now they’re going in the right direction. So are Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica,” he said. “Most of our governments in Latin America are on the right path now.” Meanwhile, “President Vizcarra has found that leading the fight against corruption is politically advantageous to him; his popularity shot up 16 points in the last month,” said Julio Carrión, associate chair of the University of Delaware’s Political Science and International Relations Department. “The forces that are fighting to end corruption in the judiciary and the nefarious practice of using undeclared funds in electoral campaigns have found a powerful ally. Nevertheless, it is too early to tell whether this anti-corruption campaign will have enduring consequences.” Pareja admits that most Peruvians are “furious” at their country’s legacy of corruption but that his country has finally turned a corner. “President Vizcarra sees this issue as a matter of great importance,” Pareja told us. “These scandals have been terrible, but I’m really optimistic that after we have fallen so low, we will survive and be better off.” WD Tel Aviv-based journalist Larry Luxner is news editor of The Washington Diplomat.
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WD | United States
Christian Contradiction? White Evangelicals Overwhelmingly Support Trump’s Steep Cuts to Refugee Admissions BY JOHN BRINKLEY A bombed-out church stands in Syria, destroyed by the country’s civil war. Despite Donald Trump’s vow to help persecuted Christians in Syria, Christian refugee arrivals from Syria to the U.S. have dropped by 94 percent under his presidency.
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he United States admits more Christian refugees than Muslim ones every year, yet most white evangelical Christians are opposed to letting them into the country. The Trump administration — particularly Vice President Mike Pence, an evangelical Christian himself — has made the plight of persecuted Christians overseas a key plank of its religious freedom agenda. Trump’s initial travel ban on mostly Muslim-majority nations, for example, included an exemption for Christians. In his speeches, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo regularly places a greater emphasis on the repression faced by Christians over other religious groups, such as Rohingya Muslims. The State Department even labeled the Islamic State’s targeting of Christians as “genocide.” Critics say this increased focus on Christians has come at the expense of other religious groups, namely Muslims, and is part of an effort to appease Trump’s far-right Christian base. Yet opinion polls in 2018 have found that white evangelicals are markedly more opposed to refugee admissions than other Christians are, despite the fact that most evangelical leaders ostensibly support welcoming refugees as part of the core Christian ethos of helping the less fortunate. A Washington Post-ABC News poll last January found that 75 percent of white evangelicals approved of President Trump’s immigration crackdown, compared with 46 percent of all adults. Another, in May, by the Pew Research Center, found that 68 percent of white evangelicals thought the United States had no responsibility to admit refugees. Only 25 percent of evangelicals thought it did — compared to 50 percent of Catholics and 43 percent of mainline Protestants. Those who were religiously unaffiliated by far supported refugee admissions, at 65 percent. Experts speculate that some evangelicals may not be aware that the U.S. is currently admitting far more Christians than it does Muslims, or they may not understand the distinction between refugees, who represent a small fraction of overall immigration to the U.S., versus other types of immigrants. The anti-refugee sentiment may also have as much to do with politics as it does with religion. White evangelicals overwhelmingly tend to be Republican and their politics on most issues closely aligns with the GOP Party. Evangelicals in particular have been strong supporters of Trump. (The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians.) This
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PHOTO: PIXABAY
Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt. EXODUS 23:9
loyalty has not wavered despite the myriad controversies surrounding the president that seemingly contradict fundamental evangelical values, from Trump’s widely publicized infidelities to his unabashed materialism. In fact, a PRRI survey last April found evangelical support for Trump at an all-time high, with 75 percent holding a favorable view of the president. That support extends to Trump’s immigration crackdown, which includes significant cuts to refugee admissions. President Obama authorized 110,000 total refugee admissions for fiscal 2017, but when Trump took office, he reduced it to 50,000. In September, Trump announced he would further cut admissions to no more than 30,000 in fiscal 2019, down from last year’s limit of 45,000 (of whom only 22,000 had been admitted as of Oct. 31). The administration cited the backlog of over 300,000
18 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
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pending asylum cases as a reason for the 2019 cap, which marks the lowest ceiling since the resettlement program formally began in 1980. For Christian refugees, the picture is mixed. On the one hand, arrivals are down dramatically because Christians have been caught in Trump’s wider crackdown on immigration. On the other, Christians are taking a larger share of refugee admissions than their Muslim counterparts. Ironically, despite the administration’s rhetoric on helping persecuted Christians, Trump’s refugee cuts have slashed the number of Christian refugees accepted into the U.S. by 64 percent compared to the final months of the Obama administration, according to an Oct. 3 report by the libertarian Cato Institute. Both Trump and Pence have been especially vocal about the persecution Christians face in the Middle East. On
the campaign trail, Trump pledged to help Christians in Syria. At a May 2017 conference, Pence decried that “nowhere is this onslaught against our faith more evident than in the very ancient land where Christianity was born.” Yet Christian refugee arrivals from Syria alone have dropped by 94 percent, while those from Iraq have plunged by 99 percent. But Muslims have been hit harder by the cuts, with overall Muslim refugee arrivals down by 93 percent, according to Cato. Christians are also increasingly edging out Muslims for the dwindling number of slots available each year. In 2016, Obama’s last year as president, the U.S. admitted about 16,700 Muslim refugees and about 17,000 Christian ones, according to the State Department. In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, those numbers fell to about 5,240 and 5,460, respectively. In fiscal 2018, which ended Sept. 30, the number of admissions fell to its lowest level since 1977, and the disparity between Muslim and Christian admissions ballooned. About 3,495 Muslims were granted refugee status, compared with 15,318 Christians. “While refugees of nearly every religious group are impacted by the overall decline in refugee admissions, it certainly seems that Muslims have been particularly singled out,” Matthew Soerens, U.S. director of church mobilization for World Relief, said in an Oct. 2 article for Christianity Today, noting that other religious minorities such as Jews and Yazidis have been shut out as well. With a few exceptions, rank-and-file evangelicals’ hostility toward refugee admissions isn’t shared by their leaders. About 500 conservative evangelical pastors signed a letter in February 2017 asking Trump to reconsider his plan to dramatically reduce refugee admissions. “As Christians, we have a historic call expressed over two thousand years, to serve the suffering. We cannot abandon this call now,” the letter said. One of those who did not sign the letter was Franklin Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. He supported Trump’s effort to ban Muslim immigration to the United SEE EVANG EL ICAL S • PAGE 21
Book Review | WD
Trump and History Leading U.S. Historians Frame Challenges Posed by Trump Presidency into Broader Context BY JOHN T. SHAW
A
merican historians have long been troubled by Donald Trump, first when he was a longshot presidential candidate, then as the Republican nominee for president and especially now as the occupant of the White House. In addition to Trump’s volatile temperament and disregard for traditional norms of governing, the president’s limited interest in and understanding of the nation’s history and his scant regard for cherished American ideals have triggered strong reactions by many scholars. During the summer of 2016, as the presidential campaign was intensifying, more than 600 historians formed an ad hoc group called Historians Against Trump and outlined their concerns in an open letter. “Today we are faced with a moral test,” they wrote. “As historians, we recognize both the ominous precedents for Donald J. Trump’s candidacy and the exceptional challenge it poses to civil society. Historians of different specialties, eras and regions understand the enduring appeal of demagogues, the promise and peril of populism, and the political uses of bigotry and scapegoating,” they declared. “Historians understand the impact these phenomena have upon society’s most vulnerable and upon a nation’s conscience. The lessons of history compel us to speak out against a movement rooted in fear and authoritarianism. The lessons of history compel us to speak out against Trump.” While it is too early for fair-minded historians to fully assess Trump’s presidency, several of the nation’s most celebrated historians are delving into America’s past to place the challenges posed by Trump into historical context. While three books under review differ in aspiration, format and emphasis, they are clear responses to the rise of Trump. They argue, either directly or by implication, that American history contains both hopeful and disappointing chapters, that the rise of Trump does not reflect America’s best values and that wise future leaders and resilient citizens will be needed to get the nation back on track and in line with its best traditions.
‘THE AMERICAN SPIRIT’
“The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For” by David McCullough is a compilation of 15 speeches that McCullough delivered between 1989 and 2016. McCullough is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who has written impressive books on John Adams, Harry S. Truman, the Wright Brothers, the Panama Canal
CREDIT: OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY JOYCE N. BOGHOSIAN
President Trump walks across the South Lawn of the White House on Nov. 1, 2018, to board Marine One.
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All has seemed lost before, only to give way, after decades of gloom, to light. And that is in large measure because, in the battle between the impulses of good and evil in the American soul, what Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature’ have prevailed just often enough to keep the national enterprise alive. JON MEACHAM
author of ‘The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels’
and the Brooklyn Bridge. McCullough begins his book with an homage to history, saying the study of the past represents a “larger way of looking at life. It is a source of strength, of inspiration. It is about who we are and what we stand for and is essential for our understanding of what our own role should be in our time.” His references to the current political circumstances are brief and indirect. “Yes, we have much to be seriously concerned about, much that needs to be corrected, improved, or dispensed with. But the vitality and creative energy, the fundamental decency, the tolerance and insistence on truth, and the good-heartedness of the American people are there still plainly,” he writes in his introduction.
One of McCullough’s featured speeches was delivered in 1994 at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Even at this time, McCullough depicted an unsettled nation trying to find its way in the post-Cold War era. He also underscored the urgency of truth-telling by our leaders. “In its approach to world problems, in its foreign policy, America seems oddly at sea. Without an enemy, some are saying we have lost our sense of direction. The old certainties don’t serve any longer,” he said. “In our foreign policy, as in our own national life, we need less fanfare, less stagecraft and circumventing. We need to talk sense, to speak the truth, to work harder and stay faithful to our fundamental truths.”
”
In remarks he gave several years later at Dartmouth College, McCullough argued that many of the important aspects of presidential leadership are impossible to quantify. There is, he said, no “ready measurements” for the integrity of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln’s depth of soul, the courage of Harry S. Truman or the charm of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Each leader had his own magic and possessed qualities that inspired trust from the American people. McCullough, for example, was struck by Kennedy’s refusal to make policy or political debates personal. “He almost never talked about himself. The first person singular almost SEE B OOK R EVIEW • PAGE 20 JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 19
Book Review CONTINUED • PAGE 19
never entered into anything he said, in contrast to so many others since. It was a big part of his appeal,” McCullough argued. McCullough delivered a speech at Ohio University in 2004 that showed his optimism and his belief in the intrinsic goodness of the American people. “When bad news is riding high and despair in fashion, when loud mouths and corruption seem to own center stage, when some keep crying that the country is going to the dogs, remember it’s always been going to the dogs in the eyes of some, and 90 percent, or more, of the people are good, generous-hearted, law-abiding citizens who get to work on time, do a good job, love their country, pay their taxes, care about their neighbors, care about their children’s education and believe, rightly, as you do, in the ideals upon which our way of life is founded.”
‘THE SOUL OF AMERICA’
“The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels” by Jon Meacham is the most explicit rebuke of Donald Trump of the three books. Meacham has written highly regarded books on Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. A professor at Vanderbilt University, he is a former editor of Newsweek and has won a Pulitzer Prize for biography. Meacham addresses the Trump era directly. He says that the “Soul of America” began as a magazine article after the racially charged violence in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 and grew into a book-length exploration of the highs and lows of American history. “Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by the fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress — a period like our own,” he writes. “The fires of fear in America have long found oxygen when broad, seemingly threatening change is afoot. Now, in the second decade of the new century, in the presidency of Donald Trump, the alienated are being mobilized afresh by changing demography, by broadening conceptions of identity, and by an economy that prizes Information Age brains over manufacturing brawn.” He is concerned that David Duke, a white supremacist and a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, has offered effusive praise for Trump. “For many, the fact that we have arrived at a place in the life of the nation where the grand wizard of the KKK can claim, all too plausibly, that he is at one with the will of the president of the United States seems an unprecedented moment. History, however, shows us that we are frequently vulnerable to fear, bitterness, and strife. The good news is that we have come through such darkness before.” “The Soul of America” ranges across American history, dealing with the postCivil War era; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War; American isolationism prior to World War II; the decades-long fight for women’s suffrage; the history of the Ku Klux Klan; the civil rights struggles for African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s; McCarthyism; and the leadership of presidents such as Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson. Meacham’s description of the KKK in particular is both sobering and instructive. The KKK first arose shortly after the Civil War when a handful of former Confederate officers in Tennessee started a group that claimed to honor the South’s history and traditions. However, the movement that emerged often terrorized freed African Americans, many of whom were voting and holding offices in the South. The KKK was halted, or at least driven underground, around 1890 but then reemerged in 1915. It grew into a movement of about 2 million people, including 11 state governors, 16 U.S. senators, up to 75 members of the U.S House of Representatives and a Supreme Court justice, Hugo Black. But the KKK was eventually defeated by the courts, the press, several Re-
20 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
publican presidents and courageous citizens who took stands against the politics of fear. “The work of combatting broadly held views like those of the Klansmen of the 1920s is almost never easy or quick. It requires years of persistent witness and of standing firm in protest when it would be more convenient to give in and move on,” Meacham writes. “This book is a portrait of hours in which the politics of fear were prevalent — a reminder that periods of public dispiritedness are not new and a reassurance they are survivable,” he writes. “In the best of moments, witness, protest and resistance can intersect with the leadership of an American president to lift us to higher ground. In darker times, if a particular president fails to advance the national story — or, worse, moves us backward — then those who witness, protest and resist must stand fast, in hope, working toward a better day. Progress in American life, as we will see, has been slow, painful, bloody and tragic. Across too many generations, women, African Americans, immigrants and others have been denied the full promise of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Yet the journey has gone on, and proceeds even now.” Meacham warns about the tendency to look to the past in a nostalgic way, forgetting the struggles and setbacks. “There’s a natural tendency in American political life to think that things were always better in the past. The passions of previous years fade, to be inevitably replaced by the passion of the present. Nostalgia is a powerful force, and in the maelstrom of the moment many of us seek comfort in imagining that once there was a Camelot — without quite remembering that the Arthurian legend itself was a court riven by ambition and infidelity. One point of this book is to remind us that imperfection is the rule, not the exception.” Meacham urges Americans to keep calm and resolute during hard times. “With countries as with individuals, a sense of proportion is essential. All has seemed lost before, only to give way, after decades of gloom, to light. And that is in large measure because, in the battle between the impulses of good and evil in the American soul, what Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature’ have prevailed just often enough to keep the national enterprise alive.” Meacham believes the United States has done its best when led by presidents with an instinct to speak to the nation’s hopes rather than its fears. “I am writing now not because past American presidents have always risen to the occasion but because the incumbent American president so rarely does. A president sets the tone for the nation and helps tailor habits of heart and of mind…. We are more likely to choose the right path when we are encouraged to do so from the very top. The country has come to look to the White House for a steadying hard, in word and deed, in uneasy times.” Meacham observes that Americans have made many mistakes over the years, but have often corrected them. “We have managed, however, to survive the crises and vicissitudes of history. Our brightest hours are almost never as bright as we like to think; our glummest moments are rarely as irredeemable as they feel at the time. How, then, in an hour of anxiety about the future of the country, at a time when a president of the United States appears determined to undermine the rule of law, a free press and the sense of hope essential to American life, can those with deep concerns about the nation’s future enlist on the side of the angels?” He urges citizens to participate in the political process by making their views known and acting on them. He also counsels Americans to resist tribalism, respect facts and reason, be
resolute but also humble — and study history. “A grasp of the past can be orienting,” he writes.
‘TURBULENT TIMES’
“Leadership in Turbulent Times” by Doris Kearns Goodwin focuses on leadership by examining Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. Goodwin, also a Pulitzer Prize winner, has written books about each of these men and draws from these books to consider broader issues related to leadership. She ponders timeless questions: Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Do the times make the leader or does the leader shape the times? How can a leader inject a sense of purpose and meaning into people’s lives? Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than personal ambition? “It is my hope that these stories of leadership in times of fracture and fear will prove instructive and reassuring. These men set a standard and a bar for all of us. Just as they learned from one another, so we can learn from them. And from them gain a better perspective on the discord of our times. For leadership does not exist in a void. Leadership is a two-way street,” she writes. In her profiles, Goodwin examines these men when they first entered public life, as they faced dramatic reversals that shattered their public and private lives, and as American presidents. While each man’s career was different, they all suffered adversity and Goodwin believes this profoundly shaped them. “Scholars who have studied the development of leaders have situated resilience, the ability to sustain ambition in the face of frustration, at the heart of potential leadership growth. More important than what happened to them was how they responded to these reversals, how they managed in various ways to put themselves back together, how these watershed moments at first impeded then deepened, and finally and decisively molded their leadership,” she writes. While Goodwin offers wide-ranging assessments of all four men, she seems most impressed by Roosevelt and Lincoln. FDR was a man of wealth and privilege whose charmed life was shattered when he contracted polio at the age of 39. His arduous and often agonizing seven-year rehabilitation restored most of his health, but left him unable to walk and confined to a wheelchair. However, his ordeal turned him into a more compassionate and empathetic man. He had an optimist spirit, a shrewd, problem-solving intelligence and a powerful ability to speak to Americans. FDR possessed, Goodwin writes, a “unique transverse intelligence that cut naturally across categories” and that allowed him to devise creative and often bold solutions to seemingly intractable problems. He led the United States during the Depression and World War II, projecting confidence, competence and resolve. He was able to explain the nation’s challenges to Americans clearly and vividly. He was also a visionary who, even during the chaos of war, looked to the future as he conceived a sweeping program to provide housing and education assistance for returning American veterans and a plan to create the United Nations to rebuild the shattered international system. Goodwin is most taken by Lincoln, a man who emerged from poverty and seemingly endless failures to become a world-class statesman. “One would be hard put to invent a leader who could have better guided us through the darkest days of the Civil War, a leader both merciful and merciless, confident and humble, patient and persistent — able to mediate among factions, sustain our spirits, and translate the meaning of the struggle into words of matchless force, clarity and beauty,” she writes. She is intrigued by Lincoln’s disciplined self-education, penetrating intelligence, steadfast humor and unequaled ability to express lofty ideas in simple prose. “While his mind was neither quick nor facile, young Lincoln possessed singular powers of reasoning and comprehension, unflagging curiosity and a fierce, almost irresistible, compulsion to understand the meaning of what he heard, read or was taught,” she writes.
Evangelicals CONTINUED • PAGE 18
States, saying it was “not a Bible issue.” In a January 2017 interview with the Huffington Post, Graham said, “It’s not a biblical command for the country to let everyone in who wants to come, that’s not a Bible issue. We want to love people, we want to be kind to people, we want to be considerate, but we have a country and a country should have order and there are laws that relate to immigration and I think we should follow those laws. Because of the dangers we see today in this world, we need to be very careful.” “People don’t understand who refugees are, who are coming here,” said Galen Carey, vice president of government relations at that National Association of Evangelicals. He said there had been a lot of “misinformation” disseminated about refugees, some of it “designed to invoke fear,” and “that has a lot of people concerned about their security and way of life.” Immigrants who come to the United States and apply for refugee status are subject to extreme vetting before they enter the United States, “but people don’t know that,” Carey said. The vetting process can take as long as two years and involves multiple U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Almost half of those who apply for refugee status are turned down, according to the State Department. The majority of those who are accepted are women and children. William Canny, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services, said only a small number of refugees is admitted for resettlement in the U.S. each year. “There are some 22 million people [worldwide] with refugee status currently,” he said.
PHOTO: STATE DEPARTMENT
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert visits a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh on Nov. 3, 2018. Refugee advocates say the Trump administration has placed a greater emphasis on Christian refugees over other religious groups, such as Rohingya Muslims.
“Only a little over a million are deemed as needing resettlement” by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and “only about 150,000 actually get resettled in any given year…. Historically, the U.S. has taken about half of that 150,000. Now we’re taking many fewer.” Another factor is that many Americans, not just evangelicals, don’t know what the word “refugee” means. “Under the Refugee Act of 1980, a person is a refugee if they are unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin because they have suffered or fear they will suffer persecution based on nationality, race, religion, political opinion, or membership in a particular
social group,” according to Refugee Council USA. Since that law took effect, about 3 million refugees have been resettled in the United States. However, “no refugee resettled to the United States under the current refugee program has committed a deadly terrorist attack,” said Elizabeth Foydel, deputy policy director for the International Refugee Assistance Project in New York. Moreover, a 2016 study by the Cato Insti-
tute found that the chance of an American being killed in a terrorist attack carried out by a refugee in any given year was 1 in 3.64 billion. Like Carey of the National Association of Evangelicals, Foydel said there was “a very disturbing popular narrative about what a refugee is.” There are frequent claims that they are “a security threat or terrorists.” She said there was also “a pervasive narrative about people coming to take American jobs,” when in fact, “refugees are an asset to the American economy. They put more into it than they take out.” Until now, Foydel said, refugee admissions were not a political issue. She said the Obama administration had welcomed refugees to the U.S., and so had the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Trump has claimed, without evidence, that the migrant caravan en route from Central America to the United States included “many criminals” and “unknown Middle Easterners.” Rev. Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network reported on Oct. 25 that there were “felons” and “exotics” in the caravan. CBN defined an exotic as someone from outside Latin America. CBN also claimed that the caravan was organized and funded by “radical leftists.” Carey said the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) was trying to counter the hostility and misinformation that mainstream white evangelicals have about refugees. “We’ve done a number of things to educate our leaders, so they will also educate their followers,” he said. NAE has held “events to help people understand the issues,” and, hopefully, “to take a new look at the situation.” Canny said that for refugees, “bringing them in and offering them a new life is for these people, frankly, a miracle.” WD John Brinkley is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.
E M B A S S Y R O W, D. C .
Life Is No Longer One Dimensional
Book Review CONTINUED • PAGE 20
Lincoln matured into a historically impressive leader through serious introspection and grinding work. He also had an abundance of kindness, empathy, humor, passion and ambition. Goodwin said he “continued to grow as a leader who became so powerfully fused with the problems tearing the country apart that his desire to lead and his need to serve coalesced into a single indomitable force. That force has not only enriched subsequent leaders but has provided our people with a moral compass to guide us. Such leadership offers us humanity, purpose and wisdom, not in turbulent times alone, but also in our everyday lives.” Reading these three books is mostly uplifting, but it also reminds us of how far America has strayed from its best traditions. The books offer nuanced accounts of American history in which remarkable advances have sometimes been followed by stunning reversals and even regression. These books make it clear that it’s not credible to argue that the trajectory of American history is a steady, upwardly tilting arc. To put it bluntly, how can a country that once produced Lincoln, the Roosevelts or Eisenhower now be led by Donald Trump? Still, the United States has worked through difficult times before, in large part through inspired leadership in the White House. But
American history also shows that relentless and courageous efforts by common citizens have been needed in the past and will be essential in the future. Can this be achieved again? All three of these books seem to be saying yes. But the current generation of Americans must rise to the task. Will this happen? We of course hope so, but it may take years of struggle. Meacham frames America’s current challenge starkly, but also hopefully. “To know what has come before is to be armed against despair. If the men and women of the past, with all their flaws and limitations and ambitions and appetites, could press on through ignorance and superstition, racism and sexism, selfishness and greed, to create a freer, stronger nation, then perhaps we, too, can right wrongs and take another step toward that most enchanting and elusive of destinations: a more perfect Union,” he writes. “For all of our darker impulses, for all of our shortcomings, and for all of the dreams denied and deferred, the experiment begun so long ago, carried out so imperfectly, is worth the fight,” Meacham concludes. “There is, in fact, no struggle more important, and none nobler, than the one we wage in service of those better angels who, however besieged, are always ready for battle.” WD John T. Shaw is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat. He is the author of four books, including “The Ambassador: Inside the Life of a Working Diplomat” and “Rising Star, Setting Sun,” and he is the director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University.
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WD | Nordic Vantage Point
A New Kind of Fund Op-ed: Health and Education for Women and Girls Are Key to Global Development BY NORWEGIAN AMBASSADOR KÅRE R. AAS
S
ometimes numbers can be overwhelming. Like the fact that every year, nearly 6 million mothers and children throughout the world die from preventable conditions. Or that each year, around 12 million girls get married before turning 18, with most of them soon having to care for children rather than pursue their education. I sometimes wonder what the impact on the global economy would be if we managed to reduce those two numbers. Without having the exact answer, I’m still convinced that it would create a win-win situation. Any country should see its spending on health and education, particularly for women and children, as an investment, not a burden. This is particularly true for the poorest countries in the world. Such investments are the basis for growth and economic stability, ultimately contributing to global security. That is why health, education and the rights of women are fundamental priorities for Norway’s international development policy. PHOTO: © UNICEF / ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS Girls need to go to school. Women Above, Geraldine Suzette Matute, 16, sits in her classroom in Honduras, where she was repeatedly bullied. In 2017, 42 percent of Honduran should be allowed to choose when children did not have access to education. Below, a health worker vaccinates 3-year-old Rahaf in the eastern part of Aleppo in Syria, where they want to have children. And both routine immunizations have stopped in many parts of the war-torn country, triggering disease outbreaks such as measles. women and men should be given the opportunity to work, realize their potential Investing in health and education and help make the econofor girls and women is an investment in my and their local communities more resilient. Good development. Too many lives hang in health is the key to achieving all these goals. the balance to not take this seriously. During my time as ambassador of Norway to AfKÅRE R. AAS, ambassador of Norway to the U.S. ghanistan, I saw firsthand PHOTO: © UNICEF / KHOUDER AL-ISSA how vaccination programs and access to basic health services prevent children from dying of diseases stance by transforming taxation systems or increas- es for all citizens and invests in health and nutrition that can easily (and cheaply) be cured. And I have ing public monetary contributions. specifically for women, children and adolescents. seen the joy that kids and young adults express The GFF targets women and children in 50 of the The GFF is an example of how international dewhen they are given the opportunity to go to school. poorest countries of the world. It focuses on build- velopment may be funded in the future. Everybody They are well aware that in many cases, the alterna- ing overall health systems as opposed to specific knows that traditional aid will never be sufficient. tive would be to labor in jobs that children should issues such HIV/AIDS or malaria — a shift in tradi- It also makes recipient countries dependent and be spared from doing — or, for many teenage girls, tional development funding models. The emphasis therefore vulnerable when the money dries up. to be married off before they’re ready. on women and children is also key because numerIt is therefore worth noticing how this new model Norway has taken a leading role internationally ous studies have shown that improving the health is being used in a sector such as health services for to secure financing for global health. One of our and education prospects of women and children is women and girls. Previously marginalized and neachievements is the creation of the Global Financ- the fastest way to lift a country out of poverty. glected, this sector holds the key to future prospering Facility (GFF), a brainchild of the World Bank, The concept seems to have many followers: A do- ity for many of the poorest countries in the world. the U.N., Canada and Norway. nor conference in Oslo recently managed to raise $1 Investing in health and education for girls and Dealing solely with health services for women, billion in pledges for the GFF. women is an investment in development. Too many children and adolescents, the GFF is not a tradiExperience shows that it works. During the three lives hang in the balance to not take this seriously. WD tional aid fund. It’s designed to blend donor, philan- years that the GFF has been in operation, many have thropic and private sector funds with concession- already been helped. Using the mechanisms of GFF, Nordic Vantage Point is a series of columns ary loans — and then add firm commitments from Cameroon, for instance, is on its way to increasing written by Kåre R. Aas, who has served as Norway’s the recipient country itself. No country will receive its health budget from 8 percent of the state budget ambassador to the U.S. since September 2013, grants from the GFF unless it makes changes to its in 2017 to 20 percent by 2020. And Nigeria has es- prior to which he was political director at the own ways of providing medical services, for in- tablished a basic minimum package of health servic- Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Oslo.
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22 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
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Medical | WD
Autism Expansion Newer Tallies Put Autism Cases Among American Children at One in 40
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Because the rate of autism keeps increasing, more and more children need treatment, and many may be waiting to see a doctor. DR. WEI BAO
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assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa
PHOTO: ESB PROFESSIONAL / SHUTTERSTOCK
BY STEVEN REINBERG
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et another study reveals that autism is far more common than once thought, with nearly 3 percent of American children diagnosed with the disorder. A federal study published last week reported that one in 40 children have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and a second study that was published online Dec. 3 in the journal JAMA Pediatrics arrived at the same conclusion. Previously, it was estimated that one in 59 children have autism. More troubling was that Dr. Wei Bao, lead researcher on the second study, found that 30 percent of kids who are diagnosed aren’t getting treatment. “We know that autism may have lifetime impact to the individual and the family,” said Bao, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa. “There should be efforts to reduce the number of those untreated to as low as possible.” It’s not clear who did and did not receive treatment, Bao added. It might be that untreated children have a very mild form of autism, he noted. “Because the rate of autism keeps increasing, more and more children need treatment, and many may be waiting to see a doctor,” Bao said. The reasons why more kids are identified with autism are unclear, Bao said. He speculated that it’s probably a combination of a real increase in the condition coupled with better diagnosis and changing definitions of autism that have identified more
LEARN MORE: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about autism at www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/index.html.
forms of the disease. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) covers a wide range of behaviors that affect a child’s social and communication skills. It’s often marked by difficulty communicating, engaging in repetitive behaviors and restricted interests. In its most serious manifestation, children can be nonverbal and appear cut off from the world. Many children, however, have less severe forms of autism and are able to function in school and in social situations. Autism is often treated with medications that help alleviate symptoms, and also behavioral therapy. Nearly 64 percent of children with the disorder in the study received behavioral treatment, and 27 percent took medications, Bao’s team found. The researchers also found geographic differences in where autism is more or less common. Bao isn’t sure why these disparities exist — it might be due to the prevalence of diagnosis, differences in racial and ethnic groups or environmental triggers, he suggested. For the study, Bao and colleagues collected data on 43,000 children who took part in the 2016 Na-
tional Survey of Children’s Health. The investigators found that 2.8 percent of the children had been diagnosed with autism. The same database was mined in the earlier government study. Thomas Frazier is chief science officer for Autism Speaks, an autism advocacy organization. He said, “The one in 40 number from this study shows that ASD is common, and contributes to data indicating that autism prevalence continues to increase.” Autism is and should continue to be a public health priority, he said, so “we need to understand why the prevalence is increasing.” This study and earlier studies have shown that many children with autism are not being identified as early as they could be, Frazier added. “Even when children are identified early, many have difficulty accessing treatments and services,” he said. Several things can be done to improve this situation, Frazier suggested. For example, better access to treatment is needed, especially in areas where the availability of services is limited. In addition, parents need training in techniques that have been shown to be effective in improving the developmental abilities of children with autism. Frazier also said that health insurance needs to cover autism treatment, and public funding is needed to cover treatment for the uninsured. Importantly, he said, “families need to be connected to interventions and other supports as soon as a developmental condition is identified.” WD Steven Reinberg is a HealthDay reporter. Copyright © 2018 HealthDay. All rights reserved. JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 23
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AT&T is a global leader in mobile 5G.
This year AT&T expects to be the first company to introduce mobile 5G in the U.S. based on industry standards. But there’s a lot more to our 5G leadership than just being first. We’ve invested billions in our wireless infrastructure over the last decade, built a leading software-defined network and helped shape global 5G standards. The result is a 5G foundation that’s broad, deep and highly secure.
AT&T is leading the way, again. © 2018 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved.
24 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
© 2018 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved.
Beltway 5G Washington D
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T:13”
Diplomat Spread - Newspaper Art
JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 25
Education A Special Section of The Washington Diplomat
January 2019
PHOTO: BY LORIE SHAULL, CC BY-SA 2.0, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Students protest gun violence outside of the White House following the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 students and staff members.
Shootings, Safety and Stress Lockdown Drills Challenge the Psyches of Students, Parents and Educators •
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afety drills have long been as much a staple in school as math and language classes. Few of us think twice about fire or tornado drills, letting muscle memory lead the way when the siren goes off. A newer drill, though – the lockdown – is not yet part
26 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
of the norm. As a result, it’s a source of anxiety for some students, teachers and parents alike — an in-your-face reminder of the potential for tragedy.
Seventy-five percent of Generation Z – people ages 15 to 21 – cited mass shootings as a significant source
BY STEPHANIE KANOWITZ
of stress, and 72 percent said the same about school shootings or the possibility of them, according to the American Psychological Association’s 2018 Stress in America survey, released Oct. 30. About seven in 10 Millennials report similar feelings.
Serving students ages 18 months to grade 12
Open House Saturday, Jan 12 9:30am
School
PHOTO: CC BY-SA 3.0, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
The Hope Columbine Memorial Library commemorates the 1999 school massacre that killed 12 students and one teacher.
More than half – 56 percent – of Gen Zs who are still in school say they experience stress at least sometimes when considering the possibility of a shooting at their school and 21 percent say that possibility is a source of stress either constantly or often. Nearly 75 percent of parents also called school shootings a significant source of stress. The Pew Research Center found similar results when it surveyed 13- to 17-year-olds and their parents about school shootings. Fiftyseven percent of the teens who responded said they worry about the possibility of a shooting happening at their school, with a quarter saying they are very worried. Meanwhile, 63 percent of parents said they are worried, too. When it comes to what can be done to prevent this kind of violence, a majority of teens
in the Pew survey supported improved mental health screenings, preventing people with mental illness from purchasing guns, banning assault-style weapon bans and using metal detectors in schools. A smaller percentage saw allowing teachers and school officials to carry guns in schools as a more effective approach. Students and parents have good cause for concern. As of Nov. 29, more than 219,000 students had experienced gun violence at school since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, in which 13 died, according to data The Washington Post has collected. In the first 21 weeks of 2018 alone, 23 school shootings occurred, including the Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas SEE SH O OT I N G S • PAGE 28
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“
I think kids look to adults to check that they’re safe, so the behavior and emotional state of the teachers and staff is really important in terms of presenting these drills. RANDI POCHTAR
”
clinical assistant professor at New York University Langone Health
Shootings PRESCHOOL - 8TH GRADE
CONTINUED • PAGE 27
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High School in Parkland, Fla., where 17 students died. School shootings may seem like a new source of violence, but they’re not. The first one dates to July 1764, according to K12academics.com. Almost 100 years would pass before the next one was documented to have happened in 1853, but they became fairly frequent until the first three decades of the 20th century in the United States, increasing sharply in the late 1980s. The deadliest year on record was 2006-07, when 38 people died from school shootings, according to the K12 website. But it was Columbine, witnessed on live television, that spurred school districts nationwide to begin implementing plans to protect students and employees in active-shooter situations. The lockdown drill was born. Today, it’s a standard part of most school districts’ emergency preparations. Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) in Virginia, which serves more than 188,000 students, defines a lockdown as “security measures taken to protect against intruders” who are inside
the building or on campus. An actual lockdown involves having students stay in place with a teacher or staff member, locked in classrooms in a place outside potential lines of fire and unobservable from the outside with the lights off, window coverings down and door windows obscured. In July, the Fairfax County School Board approved nearly $3 million in funding for eight positions to augment security training in schools and 18 positions for psychologists and social workers. This came in response to a June report that called for the hiring of mental health professionals at all county middle schools and some elementary schools. (All county high schools already have full-time psychologists and social workers.) District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) instructs students to report to the nearest available classroom if they’re in the halls when a lockdown is declared, and personnel are asked to display the Emergency Procedures Guide cover in their door window. The red side out means assistance is needed, while green means all-clear. According to the Wilson High School website, DCPS requires two lockdown drills per year. For the 2018-19 school year, the Code of Maryland Regulations requires all public schools and facilities to conduct seven emergency drills, including at least one lockdown and one active-shooter drill.
AN IMPORTANT LINE OF DEFENSE: PARENTS
The idea behind lockdown drills is to keep students – and adults at the schools – safe, but for some children, these drills can do more to cause anxiety than alleviate or prevent it. I know because my daughter had trouble falling asleep for nights after a lockdown drill when she was a kindergartner at a Fairfax County school. Although the teachers never told her class that someone might enter the school with a gun and in fact tried to make it into a game, hiding in a corner and staying quiet as the 28 or so of them huddled together, my daughter sensed that something was off. She had asked me what the lockdown drills are really for, and I took a cue from the teachers, reiterating that they are simply practicing ways to be safe, much like a fire drill. But fire drills didn’t give her nightmares. Now in third grade, my daughter is less affected. She still reports that a lockdown drill happened, but as far as I know, she sleeps soundly. It’s becoming part of the routine. The drills have never bothered her younger brother, a first-grader now. Perhaps he’s less perceptive, or perhaps hearing her discuss them and my reassurances eliminated the fear factor before he got to elementary school. Although I wasn’t surveyed, I count myself among those parents who are very worried about a school shooting directly affecting my children. I’m sad that lockdown drills exist. But I watched on TV as the teen with a bloody stump for a foot fell out of a Columbine High School window and I know why they exist. My youngsters don’t yet have the emotional maturity to reconcile the fear with the rationale.
That’s why a parent’s response to lockdown drills is one of the most crucial aspects to helping children deal with them, experts say. Children are quick to pick up on grownups’ stress. “Right now, this topic is brand new for us, so I think a lot of adults – parents and educators – feel upset and frustrated and sad and angry that this has to be part of the school day,” said Dr. Matthew Biel, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at MedStar Georgetown University Medical Center. “My hunch is kids are picking up on those feelings.” “Parents need to make sure to not elevate the emotional damage of these experiences for the kids by asking 100 questions about the drills,” Biel added. When you do that with a lot of emotion, kids start to wonder more and get scared. Parents who feel anxious should seek help from one another or trained professionals. “Adults need to be supportive among each other – parents supporting parents, teachers supporting teachers, school leaders supporting school leaders and so forth – so that when it comes time to communicate with the kids, our own sense of distress is ameliorated so that we can be calm and accurate but also reassuring,” he said. As children get older – often between the ages of 12 and 14, although there’s no rule about emotional readiness — and become more aware of shooting incidents, they may want to talk to their parents about it, which allows for more emotional transparency from the adults. Teens will “welcome parents showing a controlled degree of vulnerability,” Biel said. Knowing that parents share their worries and deal with them responsibly can alleviate anxiety. “If your kid is asking why those things happened or if we’re in danger, I think it’s really important to respond to those SEE SH O OT I N G S • PAGE 30
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and skills of how to respond in an emergency, without elevating their anxiety or perceived safety,” according to NASP.
Shootings CONTINUED • PAGE 29
WATCHING FOR SIGNS OF STRESS
things.” For youngsters, beware of overexplaining. Call lockdown drills “safety drills,” lumping them in with fire and natural disaster preparedness practices. “It’s not necessary to have any more explanation than that,” Biel said. “The message should be safety, safety, safety…. Safety is a positive term. It’s not a threatening term.”
Children – and many adults – have a tough time expressing the source of their anxiety. The youngest students especially might not link a lockdown drill to feelings of fear. Instead, their distress becomes apparent through behavioral changes, such as my daughter’s difficulty sleeping. Other changes to watch for include acting out, silliness, aggression, irritability, agitation, withdrawing and changes in appetite, sleeping or grades, Pochtar said. THE ROLE OF TEACHERS If anything deviates from the baseline, parents should contact teachers and school psychologists, AND SCHOOLS initiating that crucial chain of communication. It’s Just as the right amount of communication bealso important to use words such as “safety” often tween parents and children can ease anxiety, the and euphemize the word “lockdown” by calling PHOTO: SHANNON HICKS / NEWTOWN BEE same is true for open dialogue among students, the practice a “hideout,” Pochtar said. The trick is Connecticut State Police lead children from the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, teachers and school administrators. “figuring out how to both protect the mental health following the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting that killed 26 people, including 20 children “I think kids look to adults to check that they’re Conn., of students while also balancing the importance of between the ages of 6 and 7. safe, so the behavior and emotional state of the preparedness.” well as after the event. teachers and staff is really important in terms of Lastly, adults and students must remember that Lockdown drills are more likely to distress children and school shootings are, in fact, rare. “The odds of a student presenting these drills,” said Randi Pochtar, a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychia- adults who have a history of anxiety or past traumas, so school being the victim of a school-associated homicide are about 1 try at New York University Langone Health. “We want them administrators should communicate with parents and stu- in 2.5 million,” according to NASP. to be calm and confident, reassuring, and really focusing this dents before the drill takes place. Of course, internalizing that can be easier said than done. “Communication between parents and schools is really im- As a parent, my logical brain understands how that’s reasaround safety.” Schools can take several steps to create safe, effective and portant and for schools to be getting feedback from parents, suring, but emotionally, I still can’t wrap my head around it. minimally traumatic lockdown drills. The National Associa- feedback from kids, about how the drills are going so that they For my daughter, who still doesn’t have all, or even most, tion of School Psychologists (NASP) PREPaRE Workgroup can then take that information and incorporate it moving of the details about the need for lockdown drills, they’re alhas guidelines for schools as they prepare for lockdown forward,” said Pochtar, who is also a child psychologist at the ready going from a scary unknown to just another part of drills. They say it is critical that drills align with students’ NYU Langone Child Study Center. any given day. Sometimes she goes to gym or art class, and Lockdown drills don’t always cause negative emotions. For other times she hides in the corner of her classroom waiting developmental levels and take into consideration past traumatic experiences, special needs and personalities — all of some children, repeatedly practicing ways to stay safe can feel for the all-clear. WD which can fluctuate with age. Schools should involve men- reassuring. “Although there is little empirical research about tal health professionals at every stage of planning, including drills, existing research suggests that drills implemented ac- Stephanie Kanowitz is a contributing writer during the drill in case a participant shows signs of stress, as cording to best practice can increase students’ knowledge for The Washington Diplomat.
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A Maryland University of National Distinction 30 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
Culture arts & entertainment art
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diplomatic spouses
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The Washington Diplomat | January 2019
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history
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DIPLOMACY
Competitive Streak Local embas-
sies flex their diplomatic
muscles and
promote their respective
nations by
capitalizing on the American
love of all things sports. PAGE 33
SPORTS
Hockey Legends Despite its
popularity in
JEWELRY
SENEGAL
SHINES “Good as Gold” examines how jewelry served as a symbol of Senegalese women’s status and political prowess — connecting political, historical, familial and religious identities into a single, striking fashion statement. PAGE 32
the U.S., hockey is about as Canadian as
maple syrup. So it’s only
fitting that
the Canadian Embassy is home to an expansive
exhibition commemorating the centennial of the National Hockey League. PAGE 34
ART
Tax Relief “Vested Values” sheds light on a program
offered by the Mexican
government that allows qualified artists to pay
their income taxes with
A mid-20th-century gold-plated necklace from Dakar.
their artwork. PAGE 35
PHOTO: BY FRANKO KHOURY, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 31
WD | Culture | Jewelry
Shining Example ‘Good as Gold: Fashioning Senegalese Women’ Makes a Bold Statement •
BY MACKENZIE WEINGER
Good as Gold: Fashioning Senegalese Women THROUGH SEPT. 29
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN ART 950 INDEPENDENCE AVE., SW
(202) 633-4600
| HTTPS://AFRICA.SI.EDU
A
new exhibition with style, elegance and a wealth of history delves into the unique power and fashion sense of Senegalese women. The National Museum of African Art show “Good as Gold: Fashioning Senegalese Women” keeps a tight focus on the gold itself, tracing the history of the precious metal in the region and its importance to a woman’s fashioning of self and place in West African society. As the exhibition showcases, each exquisite, intricate piece of gold jewelry serves as a symbol of a woman’s status and political prowess — connecting political, historical, familial and religious identities in a single, striking fashion statement. “For me, gold is like a wonderful story that is only enhanced through the retelling. And it is that enduring wonder, that incredible quality, that this exhibition celebrates,” the museum’s director, Gus Casely-Hayford, said. “Many of the makers are now lost to history, but we mustn’t forget to acknowledge their audacious brilliance,” he added. The exhibition stems from a gift by art historian Marian Ashby Johnson, who researched gold and jewelry for decades in Senegal. Her collection includes over 250 pieces of West African jewelry, as well as almost 2,000 field and archival photographs. The show very much feels like a life’s work is on display, and this deep understanding helps build an impressive narrative for visitors about the importance of gold and jewelry to Senegalese women. Amanda Maples, guest curator of the exhibition, said, “This is primarily a story about women. It’s also a story about fashion, the city as an urban center, and about fashioning an identity and a platform for women.” PHOTO: MACOUMBA N’DIAYE Complicated twists and (MAK INFORMATIQUE) braids, as well as depictions Senegalese designer Oumou of everything from butterflies Sy created “Signare to flowers, decorate the pieces Ensemble” for the exhibit. on display. Again and again, the artistry and technical skill of each goldsmith emerges from the pieces, along with a sense of the unique style of each woman the item was made for. Beyond the pieces of gold jewelry and the history they tell, the exhibition also showcases a stunning contemporary creation. The National Museum of African Art commissioned fashion designer Oumou Sy — Senegal’s so-called “Queen of Couture” — to create a new haute couture ensemble for and inspired by the exhibition. It’s a beautiful, bold piece that centers the show, providing a link between contemporary design and historical memory. While visitors could easily wander through the show transfixed alone by the glittering pieces on display, the curators do an excellent job of telling the history and roles of Senegalese women through gold. One critical issue the show delves into is the Senegalese concept of sañse, from the Wolof tribe, which means “dressing up” or looking and feeling good. It’s about crafting and presenting 32 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
PHOTOS: BY FRANKO KHOURY, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
Intricate gold jewelry serves as a symbol of power and status for Senegalese women, as seen in an expansive display at the National Museum of African Art.
a public persona — an idea truly at the heart of “Good as Gold,” which seriously considers the way a woman in Senegal may have used a piece of gold jewelry to build her fashion and take control of her own image. “I really wanted a full, head-totoe, breathtaking ensemble ... [to show] how much importance goes into dressing well,” Maples said. The exhibition takes a fascinating, and feminist, approach to jewelry and fashion — and the way these elements play into political and personal power. Beauty and fashion, it reminds viewers, are far from a mere empty, vacant gesture. “It is an exquisite exhibition. And, wandering around, it left me thinking of three enduring thoughts: West African gold, it’s an incredible material, different in my mind due to its sumptuous, lustrous quality — different to gold from anywhere else,” Casely-Hayford said. “But also the tradition of goldsmithing, particular to West Africa, that tradition of making and remaking. And also that other thing that this exhibition celebrates, which is history, which is the way in which this incredible, durable material is a wonderful way of celebrating many of the things this institution was formed to celebrate: community, continuity, history, and all of them in their own ways fragile,” Casely-Hayford added. “But when celebrated through this incredibly enduring and glorious material, they become all the more magnificent.” WD Mackenzie Weinger (@mweinger) is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.
Diplomacy | Culture | WD
Being a Good Sport Embassies Score by Using Sports to Promote National Pride, Friendly Competition •
BY KATE OCZYPOK AND ANNA GAWEL
W
hen you think of sports that bring athletes from different countries together, the Olympics instantly come to mind. In that same spirit of togetherness — tinged with a streak of competitiveness and national pride — local embassies often organize various sporting events in the name of fun, friendship and charity. Sports diplomacy itself is a global endeavor, with an age-old track record that dates back to the first Olympics held in 776 B.C. As was the case in ancient Greece, it’s not easy to separate sports from politics. The result is not always pretty — the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany being a prime example — but more often than not, sports reveal the best of humanity and can bring even the bitterest rivals together (also see “Sports Diplomacy: Is It Just ‘War Minus the Shooting’ or More?” in the May 2018 issue of The Diplomat). In the early 1970s, for instance, “Ping-Pong diplomacy” paved the way for renewed dialogue between Beijing and Washington and for President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China. More recently, the détente between North and South Korea at the Pyeongchang Winter Games led to a political breakthrough in talks over the North’s nuclear weapons program. The State Department continues to engage in sports exchange programs to foster goodwill abroad, hosting initiatives for underprivileged children and deploying famous athletes such as baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. and basketball star Shaquille O’Neal to countries such as Russia, China, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Ukraine and Lebanon. Meanwhile, in D.C., local embassies often capitalize on Americans’ love of all things sports to promote their respective nations. And given its international character, the nation’s capital serves as an ideal arena for embassies to flex their soft diplomacy muscles.
GOAL-ORIENTED DIPLOMACY
Taking advantage of homegrown talent is an obvious way for embassies to connect with American fans. The Embassy of Poland, for instance, has hosted children’s camps led by Washington Wizard’s starting center — and Polish native — Marcin Gortat (now with the LA Clippers), whose MG13 Foundation hosts basketball camps for children back in Poland. To celebrate its own basketball transplant, Tomáš Satoranský, the Czech Embassy organized a Czech Heritage Night with the Washington Wizards in 2017. Likewise, the Swedes held a Swedish Heritage Night last February to cheer on Washington Capitals hockey players — and native Swedes — Nicklas Bäckstrom, André Burakovsky and Christian Djoos. After the Caps won the 2018 Stanley Cup, Danish Ambassador Lars Gert Lose hosted a reception at his residence toasting fellow Dane and Caps center Lars Eller. And the Embassy of Canada — a country known for exporting hockey legends — is currently hosting “The 100 Greatest NHL Players,” an exhibition that pays tribute to a century’s worth of record holders, Stanley Cup champions and Hockey Hall of Famers (see story on page 34). Embassies have also highlighted their connection to America’s favorite pastime, baseball. This past fall, the Japan Information & Cultural Center put on the exhibition “A New League” to showcase the historical ties between the U.S. and Japan shaped by baseball (also see “Embassy Exhibition Showcases Unique U.S.-Japan Relationship through Baseball” in the Diplomatic Pouch). Those links date to the 1880s, when Japanese high schools began developing baseball programs with the help of American educators. World War II put a stop to those baseball collaborations, but they quickly resumed during America’s postwar occupation of Japan. Many Americans are aware of Japan’s affinity for baseball through famous Japanese-
Above, embassy teams participate in a futsal tournament held at The St. James Sports and Active Entertainment Center over the summer. At left, Australian Ambassador Joe Hockey held an exhibition tennis match in October to launch the refurbished grass tennis court at his residence.
born Major League Baseball players such as Ichiro Suzuki and World Series MVP Award winner Hideki Matsui of the New York Yankees, whose nickname is Godzilla. Other connections may not be as obvious. For example, Finland is not normally associated with baseball, but pesäpallo, a fast-moving bat-and-ball sport that is heavily influenced by American baseball, is considered Finland’s national pastime (also see “Finns Fly, Skate, Bat Their Way to Sports History” in the Diplomatic Pouch). On that note, embassies frequently host events to introduce Americans to sports with which they may not be familiar. Last summer, the Embassy of Argentina participated in PHOTO: JOY ASICO / ASICO PHOTO the first Argentina Heritage Polo Tournament in Poolesville, Md., to help raise funds for the largest pediatric hospital in Latin America. Several years ago, the embassies of cricket-playing nations such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Africa held their own cricket tournament in Maryland. Played by millions across the planet, cricket remains on the fringes of American athletics, although that is slowly changing, particularly as immigrant communities from countries like India continue to expand. In fact, the U.S. Youth Cricket Association, based outside of Baltimore, Md., and the Washington Warriors Cricket Club have visited dozens of schools in Maryland and Virginia to sell educators on the merits of the sport. And this past September, Washingtonians got a firsthand taste of Muay Thai, a combat boxing sport characterized by the combined use of fists, elbows, knees and shins. The Thai Embassy and the Tourism Authority of Thailand debuted “Rumble in D.C.,” a traditional Muay Thai match held at the Wilson Plaza outside the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. Spectators also witnessed a Wai Kru performance (a Thai ritual done before the match to show respect), sampled Thai cuisine from local vendors and got temporary Thai tattoos. Like Muay Thai, many sports boast a global following but are only just now gaining ground in the U.S. While still not nearly as popular as football (the American kind), rugby — football’s rough-and-tumble British predecessor — is increasingly being embraced by Americans. The New Zealand Embassy has regularly held the Ambassador’s Shield, a tournament that pits New Zealand players against an American team, to introduce young Washingtonians to this Kiwi tradition (also see “Rugby, Cricket, Fencing, SEE S PORT S • PAGE 47 JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 33
WD | Culture | Art
Home of Hockey Canadian Embassy Takes Facemasks Off with ‘The 100 Greatest NHL Players’ •
BY KATE OCZYPOK AND ANNA GAWEL
The 100 Greatest NHL Players THROUGH FEBRUARY
EMBASSY OF CANADA ART GALLERY 501 PENNSYLVANIA AVE., NW
(202) 682-1740
C
anada is America’s second-largest trading partner, exporting roughly $280 billion in goods to the U.S. that range from cars to plastics to electrical machinery. But for many Americans, the export they most commonly associate with Canada is something else entirely: hockey. In fact, the National Hockey League (NHL) was established in Canada in 1917 and originally was only comprised of four Canadian teams. Since then, of course, hockey has become readily identifiable as an American sport, although the league still has seven teams based in Canada and a slew of Canadians playing for the other 24 U.S. teams. Given these connections, it’s only natural that the Canadian Embassy be the site of an expansive exhibition commemorating the NHL’s centennial celebration. “The 100 Greatest NHL Players” features a collection of original portraits by Tony Harris that pay tribute to a century’s worth of record holders, captains, Stanley Cup champions and Hockey Hall of Famers. “Our embassy is a fitting location for the exhibition,” said Canadian Ambassador David MacNaughton in a press release. “Canada is the home of hockey and Washington, D.C., is the home of the current Stanley Cup champions.” The Canadian Embassy approached the NHL to showcase Canadian artwork. The portraits depict 83 Canadian-born players — an impressive list that includes 39 centers, 21 defensemen, 15 goaltenders, 15 right wings and 10 left wings. Collectively, they have been Stanley Cup champions a total of 309 times. A blue-ribbon panel that included executives, members of the media and NHL alumni had the task of selecting who made the cut. An even more daunting task was painting 100 of the greatest National Hockey League players. But when artist Tony Harris was asked to do so, he took it in stride — and felt honored. “As you know, hockey is as Canadian as anything,” Harris said. “[S]o the NHL asked me to do this and that’s how my exhibit ended up down in D.C.” But it wasn’t an easy road. “I had to get the project done in 11 months,” said Harris, who noted that he was averaging about 22 hours per painting, which came out to about 2,000 hours of work and 15-hour days. The project was completed in November 2017, the 100th anniversary of the NHL. Because of time constraints and the fact that about 30 of Harris’ subjects have passed away, the artist used photographs to create his lifelike portraits. Harris is a fan of hockey and was delighted to paint his favorite player, Tony Esposito, a former Chicago Black Hawk in the 1970s and ’80s. “He and I ended up having some phone calls,” Harris said. “He was my idol growing up. It was very cool to speak with him.” There were a few times over the course of the year when he received feedback from players such as Bernie Parent, a retired goaltender who played for the Philadel-
34 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
PHOTOS: EMBASSY OF CANADA
Artist Tony Harris, above, created a series of portraits that pay tribute to a century’s worth of hockey legends. At left, hockey fans enjoy Harris’s exhibit, “The 100 Greatest NHL Players,” on display at the Canadian Embassy.
phia Flyers, among other teams. “His wife and he were so gracious,” Harris said. “He was a sweet man. He said [his portrait] looked like he was ready to jump right out of the painting; those were fun bits to remember.” The opening night of Harris’s exhibit at the embassy was wellreceived, with about 150 stopping by before the Washington Capitals took on the Edmonton Oilers at the Capital One Arena (the Caps won). Guests donned their hockey jerseys while sampling draft beer and ketchup chips, a Canadian favorite. Harris, who grew up in Ontario playing hockey, observed the similarities between sports and art, with each requiring a certain dedication. “One of the things that translates well with me is that I understand what it is like to be an athlete,” he said. Harris hopes that people appreciate his portraiture not only from an artistic perspective, but also as a reflection of the international, universal appeal of sports (also see story on page 33). “One of the unique things about hockey is that it’s become such a global sport,” he said. “If you look on the wall, you’ll see Russia, Finland, Sweden, the U.S., Norway and Canada — so many countries are represented.” As far as new projects, there is still a lot of work for Harris with different teams in the NHL. He is currently in the middle of painting players who have played 1,000 games. He also does family portraits and works a lot in the golf industry. “I have been very lucky,” he said. “The sports world has been good to me and kept me busy for 25 years.” WD Kate Oczypok (@OczyKate) is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat. Anna Gawel (@diplomatnews) is the managing editor of The Washington Diplomat.
Art | Culture | WD
Creative Accounting ‘Vested Values’ Shows How Mexicans Can Pay Their Taxes with Art •
BY JOHN LENNON
Vested Values THROUGH JAN. 29
MEXICAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE 2829 16TH ST., NW
(202) 728-1628
| WWW.INSTITUTEOFMEXICODC.ORG
T
he term “starving artist” may be a well-worn cliché, but it holds an element of truth. For the most part, art is not a lucrative profession. Even large museums in the U.S. fight for their financial survival, relying on private collectors and corporate donors. Unlike in some other countries, the U.S. generally does not have a tradition of government supporting the arts. Likewise, small, independent artists cannot count on the government to sustain them. Instead, they often struggle to sell their work, find benefactors and make ends meet. Some can’t even pay their taxes. The IRS may have little sympathy for the artistic process, but tax collectors in some countries are a bit more forgiving and, well, more creative. Mexico is one of those, and the fruits of its proud 60-year-old tradition are currently on display at the Mexican Cultural Institute in the exhibit “Vested Values.” Over 40 paintings, sculptures and photographs highlight a program offered by Mexico’s Tax Administration Service called Pago en Especie — or “payment in kind”— that allows qualified Mexican artists to pay their income taxes with their artwork. The Mexican Cultural Institute, housed in a Beaux Arts building on 16th Street that used to be home to the Mexican Embassy, is showcasing works submitted under this unique arrangement. The institute’s executive director, Alberto Fierro, says that “many thousands of artists have benefited from this payment in kind program,” and that their works provide a fresh look at Mexico’s thriving arts culture. “Vested Values” was curated in Mexico City and came to Washington in mid-September, intended not only to show the value that the Mexican government places on art, but also to illustrate what contemporary artists in the country are creating. Striking abstract oil paintings are on display, as well as imaginative paper cuts, sculptures cleverly composed of waste materials, and photographs drawn from the strains and stresses of daily life in Mexico’s rural areas. Fierro notes that 40 percent of the population struggles with poverty, bringing expressions of contemporary culture into stark relief against the backdrop of modern life. It is a continuing challenge, he says, for artists to express the conditions facing the urban and rural poor in Mexico while balancing such expressions with the richness of the country’s historic heritage. Fierro, who is also the minister for culture and education at the Mexican Embassy, says the job of the cultural institute is to “build links of collaboration” so that “people in the arts will come and learn from the experience.” Free tours are provided on request to groups of students “to show the richness of Mexican creativity,” Fierro said, “and to show how in the arts, Mexico has always been a Western actor in dialogue with Western culture.” Current partners with the institute’s cultural outreach program include the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has assembled the museum’s largest interactive technology exhibition to date. “Pulse” comprises three major installations that use heart-rate sensors to create kinetic and audiovisual experiences based on visitors’ own biometric data. The Mexican Cultural Institute is hosting its own Lozano-Hemmer exhibition called “Voice Array” in conjunction with “Pulse.” “Voice Array” records the voice of a visitor and translates it into flashes of light in a unique sound-and-light pattern. Each new recording pushes all previous recordings one position down and gradually one can hear the cumulative effect of 288 previous recordings. The result is a collaborative piece that evolves and adapts in each city it is displayed and each context in which it is shown. Another collaborative effort this past year included an exhibit titled “Women Who Make Ibero-America: Power Behind the Everyday.” Held at the Hillyer Art Space, a
PHOTOS: MEXICAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE
Above, Damián Ortega’s “Geoda #23,” made of waste materials, is featured in “Vested Values,” which highlights a unique program offered by the Mexican government that allows qualified artists to pay their income taxes with artwork.
small arts venue in Washington, the exhibit featured contemporary photography from countries across Latin America, Spain and Portugal, focusing on how women preserve traditions while also fostering social change (a theme that resonates around the world.) The international popularity of Mexican cuisine has also sparked widespread interest in a year-long series at the institute called “Mexican Table,” a showcase of regional culinary favorites coupled with the music and colorful traditions that have made Mexican food a major international draw. Each of the sessions of “Mexican Table” regularly sells out. The building that houses the Mexican Cultural Institute is a work of art in itself — a timeless setting that provides a stunning backdrop to the contemporary exhibits on display. A private home for U.S. Cabinet-level officials and visiting dignitaries in the early 20th century, it was purchased by the Mexican government in 1921 and became the embassy and the ambassador’s residence. In 1930, renowned Mexican artist Diego Rivera, then director of the prestigious San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City, recommended that the academy send one of his contemporaries, Roberto Cueva del Rio, to the United States to display his work. Three years later, Cueva del Rio began to paint a series of murals on the walls of the 16th Street mansion — a project that took nearly a decade to complete. Cueva del Rio’s striking murals capture significant chapters and heroes in Mexican history, eschewing political commentary to portray the diversity of Mexican culture, the dignity of ordinary men and women, the beauty of the countryside and the evolution of modern Mexico. Restoration work was completed in 2018 to make the murals even more vibrant and fresh. Together, the murals that capture seminal events of Mesoamerican history, the exhibits that highlight the contemporary artistry of present-day Mexico, and the institute’s collaborations with U.S. museums, performers and artists all combine to paint a distinct picture of a complex, innovative nation. Just as “Vested Values” recognizes the value that Mexico’s government places on the priceless contributions of the country’s artists, so too does the institute itself embody the importance of sharing Mexican creativity and culture, both past and present, with American audiences. WD John Lennon is a former Voice of America program director who is retired and lives in Alexandria, Va. JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 35
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36 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
Film | Culture | WD
Cinema Listings *Unless specific times are listed, please check the theater for times. Theater locations are subject to change.
ENGLISH Aquaman
Directed by James Wan (Australia/U.S., 2018, 143 min.) Arthur Curry learns that he is the heir to the underwater kingdom of Atlantis, and must step forward to lead his people and be a hero to the world. ATLANTIC PLUMBING CINEMA
On the Basis of Sex
Directed by Mimi Leder (U.S., 2018, 120 min.) This is the true story of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her struggles for equal rights and what she had to overcome to become a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. ANGELIKA MOSAIC
LANDMARK’S BETHESDA ROW CINEMA
LANDMARK’S E STREET CINEMA
If Beale Street Could Talk
Directed by Barry Jenkins (U.S., 2018, 119 min.) A newly engaged Harlem woman races against the clock to prove her lover’s innocence while carrying their first born child. AFI SILVER THEATRE ANGELIKA MOSAIC
LANDMARK’S BETHESDA ROW CINEMA
LANDMARK’S E STREET CINEMA
Bird Box
Directed by Susanne Bier (U.S., 2018, 124 min.) In the wake of an unknown global terror, a mother must find the strength to flee with her children down a treacherous river in search of safety, but due to unseen deadly forces, the perilous journey must be made blindly. WEST END CINEMA
Bohemian Rhapsody
Directed by Bryan Singer (U.K./U.S., 2018, 134 min.) “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a foot-stomping celebration of Queen, their music and their extraordinary lead singer Freddie Mercury, who defied stereotypes and shattered convention to become one of the most beloved entertainers on the planet. ANGELIKA MOSAIC
ATLANTIC PLUMBING CINEMA
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Directed by Marielle Heller (U.S., 2018, 106 min.) Melissa McCarthy stars as Lee Israel, the best-selling celebrity biographer who finds herself unable to get published because she had fallen out of step with the marketplace, so she turns her art form to deception. LANDMARK’S BETHESDA ROW CINEMA
LANDMARK’S E STREET CINEMA
The Washington Diplomat
At Eternity’s Gate
With an as-yet-unexecuted prison sentence hanging over his head, Mohammad Rasoulof secretly filmed this movie in rural northern Iran. Its title character, Reza, is a Tehrani who moves to the country to live a peaceful, principled life running a goldfish farm. Instead, he finds himself in a corrupt town run by a mysterious company that has designs on his property.
Directed by Julian Schnabel (Switzerland/U.K./France/U.S., 2018, 110 min.) “At Eternity’s Gate” is a journey inside the world of a man who, despite skepticism, ridicule and illness, created some of the world’s most beloved and stunning works of art. It is based on Vincent van Gogh’s (Willem Dafoe) personal letters and common agreement about events in his life that present as facts, hearsay and moments that are just plain invented.
FREER GALLERY OF ART SUN., JAN. 27, 2 P.M.
Sly
LANDMARK’S BETHESDA ROW CINEMA
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
Directed by David Yates (U.K./U.S., 2018, 134 min.) The second of five all-new adventures in J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World finds the powerful Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald captured by MACUSA (Magical Congress of the United States of America). But, making good on his threat, Grindelwald escaped custody and has set about gathering followers, most unsuspecting of his true agenda: to raise pure-blood wizards up to rule over all non-magical beings (English and French). ATLANTIC PLUMBING CINEMA
The Favourite
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (Ireland/U.K./U.S., 2018, 119 min.) In early 18th century England, a frail Queen Anne occupies the throne and her close friend Lady Sarah governs the country in her stead. But when a new servant Abigail arrives, her charm endears her to Sarah. AFI SILVER THEATRE ANGELIKA MOSAIC
LANDMARK’S BETHESDA ROW CINEMA
LANDMARK’S E STREET CINEMA
Free Solo
Directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (U.S., 2018, 100 min.) Follow Alex Honnold as he becomes the first person to ever free solo climb Yosemite’s 3,000ft high El Capitan Wall. With no ropes or safety gear, he completed arguably the greatest feat in rock climbing history. WEST END CINEMA
Green Book
Directed by Peter Farrelly (U.S., 2-18, 130 min.) When Tony, a bouncer from an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx, is hired to drive Dr. Don Shirley, a world-class Black pianist, on a concert tour from Manhattan to the Deep South, they must rely on “The Green Book” to guide them to the few establishments that were then safe for African-Americans. Confronted with racism, danger — as well as unexpected humanity and humor — they are forced to set aside differences to survive and thrive on the journey of a
PHOTO: SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
Opera singer Maria Callas is the subject of “Maria by Callas.” lifetime (English, Italian, Russian and German).
ATLANTIC PLUMBING CINEMA
Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People
Directed by Oren Rudavsky (U.S., 2018, 84 min.) Joseph Pulitzer spoke of “fake news” over 100 years ago and fought the dangers that the suppression of news augured for democracy long before our present threats to press freedom. Oren Rudavsky’s riveting account traces Pulitzer’s unlikely rise from a penniless Jewish immigrant to a baron of the press. LANDMARK’S BETHESDA ROW CINEMA THU., JAN. 17, 7:30 P.M.
Maria by Callas
Directed by Tom Wolf (France, 2018, 113 min.) This intimate look at the life and work of Greek-American opera singer Maria Callas is told in her own words (English, French and Italian). ANGELIKA POP-UP
Mary Queen of Scots
DIRECTED BY JOSIE ROURKE (U.K., 2018, 124 MIN.) Queen of France at 16 and widowed at 18, Mary Queen of Scots defies pressure to remarry. Instead, she returns to her native Scotland to reclaim her rightful throne. But Scotland and England fall under the rule of the compelling Elizabeth I. Each young queen beholds her “sister” in fear and fascination. Rivals in power and in love, and female regents in a masculine world, the two must decide how to play the game of marriage versus independence. ANGELIKA MOSAIC
LANDMARK’S BETHESDA ROW CINEMA
LANDMARK’S E STREET CINEMA
The Mule
Directed by Clint Eastwood (U.S., 2018, 116 min.) A 90-year-old horticulturist and World War II veteran is caught transporting $3 million worth of cocaine through Michigan for a Mexican drug cartel. ANGELIKA MOSAIC
Stan & Ollie
Directed by Jon S. Baird (U.K./Canada/U.S., 2018, 97 min.) Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly bring their brilliant comedic chops to bear as legendary comedy duo Stan “Laurel” and Ollie “Hardy” in this hilarious road movie recounting the pair’s famed 1953 “farewell” tour of Britain and Ireland. ANGELIKA MOSAIC OPENS FRI., JAN. 18
Vice
Directed by Adam McKay (U.S., 2018, 132 min.) “Vice” explores how a bureaucratic Washington insider quietly became the most powerful man in the world as vice president to George W. Bush, reshaping the country and the globe in ways still felt today. AFI SILVER THEATRE ANGELIKA MOSAIC
Vox Lux
Directed by Brady Corbet (U.S., 2018, 110 min.) “Vox Lux” follows the rise of Celeste from the ashes of a major national tragedy to pop super stardom. The film spans 18 years and traces important cultural moments through her eyes, starting in 1999 and concluding in 2017. ANGELIKA MOSAIC
ATLANTIC PLUMBING CINEMA
FARSI The Graveless
Directed by Mostafa Sayari (Iran, 2018, 73 min.) Fulfilling their recently deceased father’s final wishes, four adult siblings transport his body across the harsh Iranian desert to the remote village where he wanted to be buried. As the temperature rises, the body begins to decompose, and tempers flare as old family secrets and resentments boil to the surface. FREER GALLERY OF ART FRI., JAN. 18, 7 P.M.
A Man of Integrity
Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof (Iran, 2017, 117 min.)
Directed by Kamal Tabrizi (Iran, 2018, 90 min.) This political spoof is a hilarious takedown of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a religious hard-liner who ruled for eight years before running afoul of the country’s top clergy. Kamal Tabrizi’s film portrays Ahmadinejad as a malapropismprone buffoon who lucks into office by accidentally saving hundreds of people from a bomb at a rock concert, and remains in power only as long as his handlers deem him useful. FREER GALLERY OF ART SUN., JAN. 20, 2 P.M.
FRENCH Razzia
Directed by Nabil Ayouch (Belgium/France/Morocco, 2017, 119 min.) In this heartfelt and mesmerizing drama, five Moroccans from different social and religious strata are pushed to the fringes by their government and social circumstances. We encounter the stunning Salima, who refuses the traditional stereotypes of wife, mother and woman; a Jewish café owner caught between honoring his past and his desires; the troubled bourgeois teen Inès; and part-time singer and full-time Freddie Mercury fan Hakim (French and Arabic). LANDMARK’S E STREET CINEMA WED., JAN. 9, 7:30 P.M.
JAPANESE Dragon Ball Super: Broly
Directed by Tatsuya Nagamine (Japan, 2019, 100 min.) Goku and Vegeta encounter Broly, a Saiyan warrior unlike any fighter they’ve faced before. ANGELIKA MOSAIC OPENS WED., JAN. 16
Shoplifters
Directed by Hirokazu Koreeda (Japan, 2018, 121 min.) After one of their shoplifting sessions, Osamu and his son come across a girl in the freezing cold. At first reluctant to shelter the girl, Osamu’s wife agrees to take care of her after learning the hardships she faces. Although the family is poor, barely making enough money to survive through petty crime, they seem to live happily together until an unforeseen incident reveals hidden secrets and tests the bonds that unite them. THE AVALON THEATRE
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January 2019
Street of Shame
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan, 1956, 85 min.) Kenji Mizoguchi brought a lifetime of experience to his final film, the heartbreaking tale of a brothel full of women whose dreams are constantly shattered by their socioeconomic realities. Set in Tokyo’s red-light district (the literal translation of the film’s Japanese title), “Street of Shame” was deeply cutting and hugely popular. In fact, when an anti-prostitution law was passed in Japan a few months after its release, some said the film had been a catalyst. FREER GALLERY OF ART WED., JAN. 2, 2 P.M.
NORWEGIAN The Quake
Directed by John Andreas Andersen (Norway, 2018, 106 min.) Two years ago, geologist Kristian Eikjord warned everyone about the potential for a catastrophic tsunami in the breathtaking disaster thriller “The Wave.” Now he’s back with another warning even more terrifying: that a massive earthquake is about to strike Oslo, with its vulnerable urban infrastructure and large population. But no one will listen to his frantic warnings. As the quake strikes, Kristian desperately attempts to rescue his scattered family members, braving collapsing skyscrapers and creaking elevator shafts. WEST END CINEMA
SILENT I Was Born, But…
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu (Japan, 1932, 90 min.) Join pianist Andrew E. Simpson as he accompanies one of Yasujiro Ozu’s most popular films. This charming comedy is a blithe portrait of one family’s toils from the rascally perspective of stubborn little boys. Before the screening, Simpson will demonstrate his process for creating live scores for classic silent movies. FREER GALLERY OF ART SUN., JAN. 13, 2 P.M.
SPANISH Roma
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón (Mexico/U.S., 2018, 135 min.) The most personal project to date from Academy Awardwinning director and writer Alfonso Cuarón, “Roma” follows a young domestic worker for a family in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma in Mexico City. Delivering an artful love letter to the women who raised him, Cuarón draws on his own childhood to create a vivid and emotional portrait of domestic strife and social hierarchy amidst political turmoil of the 1970s. LANDMARK’S E STREET CINEMA
JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 37
WD | Culture | Events
Events Listings *Please check the venue for times. Venue locations are subject to change.
ART THROUGH JAN. 6
Churchill’s Shakespeare
A towering leader during World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was also a lifelong admirer of Shakespeare. Compelling materials from Cambridge’s Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill’s home Chartwell, and the Folger collection show the man himself and trace Shakespeare’s influence on his speeches and ideas. FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY
THROUGH JAN. 6
Sense of Humor
Humor may be fundamental to human experience, but its expression in painting and sculpture has been limited. Instead, prints, as the most widely distributed medium, and drawings, as the most private, have been the natural vehicles for comic content. Drawn from the National Gallery of Art’s collection, this exhibition celebrates this incredibly rich though easily overlooked tradition through works including Renaissance caricatures, biting English satires, and 20th-century comics. NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
THROUGH JAN. 6
Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen
Trevor Paglen is an awardwinning artist whose work blurs the lines between art, science and investigative journalism to construct unfamiliar and at times unsettling ways to see and interpret the world. This is the first exhibition to present Paglen’s early photographic series alongside his recent sculptural objects and new work with artificial intelligence. SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
The Washington Diplomat
THROUGH JAN. 13
Designed to delight and surprise, the treasures created by the firm of Carl Fabergé have inspired admiration and intrigue for over a century, both for their remarkable craftsmanship and the captivating stories that surround them. The fascination with Fabergé continues to uncover new discoveries about the storied jeweler to the tsars and his remarkable creations. This exhibit unveils recent research and explore how the 2014 discovery of a long-lost imperial Easter egg prompted new findings about Hillwood’s own collection.
EMBASSY OF ARGENTINA
THROUGH FEB. 8
Roberto Fernandez Ibañez: Visions and Reflections
HILLWOOD ESTATE, MUSEUM AND GARDENS
THROUGH JAN. 13
Nordic Impressions
THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION
THROUGH JAN. 13
Rachel Whiteread
As the first comprehensive survey of the work of British sculptor Rachel Whiteread, this exhibition brings together some 100 objects from the course of the artist’s 30-year career, including drawings, photographs, architecture-scaled sculptures, archival materials, documentary materials on public projects and several new works on view for the first time. Throughout her celebrated career, Whiteread has effectively recast the memories
PHOTO: COURTESY OF RODARTE; © GREG KESSLER/KESSLER STUDIO
The spring/summer 2018 runway designs by celebrated American luxury fashion house Rodarte are on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts until Feb. 10. of these locations and objects to chart the seismic changes in how we live, from the late 20th century and into the 21st.
NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
THROUGH JAN. 20
The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy
Chiaroscuro woodcuts — color prints made from the successive printing of multiple blocks — flourished in 16th-century Italy, interpreting designs by leading masters such as Raphael, Parmigianino and Titian, while boasting extraordinary craft and their own often striking palette. NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
THROUGH JAN. 21
Japan Modern: Photography from the Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck Collection Celebrating the Freer|Sackler’s recent acquisition of a major Japanese photography collection, this exhibition features a selection of works by
groundbreaking 20th-century photographers. Whether capturing evocative landscapes or the gritty realities of postwar Japan, this presentation focuses on Japanese artists’ search for a sense of place in a rapidly changing country. The images highlight destinations both rural and urban, in styles ranging from powerful social documentary to intensely personal. FREER GALLERY OF ART
THROUGH JAN. 21
Japan Modern: Prints in the Age of Photography
When photography arrived in Japan in the mid-19th century, traditional woodblock printmakers were forced to adapt their craft to keep pace with the new medium. This exhibition explores Japanese artists’ reactions to the challenges of modernity, examining the collapse of the traditional woodblock-printmaking industry in the face of the printing press and photography, and then tracing the medium’s resurrection as an art form, through which printmakers recorded scenes of their changing country in striking new ways. FREER GALLERY OF ART
THROUGH JAN. 21
No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man
Each year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, a city of more than 70,000 people rises out of the dust for a single week. During that time, enormous experimental art installations are erected and many are ritually burned to the ground. Cutting-edge artwork created at Burning Man, the annual desert gathering that is one of the most influential events in contemporary art and culture, will be exhibited in the nation’s capital for the first time this spring. RENWICK GALLERY
THROUGH JAN. 27 PHOTO: KEN AND KIYO HITCH COLLECTION
The woodblock “Kobe Port” by Kawanishi Hide is featured in the “Japan Modern” exhibition at the Freer Gallery of Art.
38 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
January 2019
creative energy to discover the “aesthetics of happiness” and how to surround ourselves with shapes and colors that increase our motivation and creativity.
Fabergé Rediscovered
“Nordic Impressions” is a major survey of Nordic art spanning nearly 200 years and presenting 53 artists from Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden, as well as the selfgoverning islands of Åland, Faroe and Greenland. The exhibition celebrates the incredible artistic diversity of Nordic art, from idealized paintings of the distinctive Nordic light and untouched landscape to melancholic portraits in quiet interiors and mesmerizing video works that explore the human condition.
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Roberto Huarcaya: Amazogramas
Just over two years ago, Limaborn artist Roberto Huarcaya
began a project that took him to a national park in the Amazon jungle in southeastern Peru. Throughout the first year, Huarcaya found it impossible to “depict” the vast web of emotions that the Peruvian jungle inspired. To solve this dilemma, Huarcaya discarded the sophisticated cameras he used on his initial journeys and chose to go back 175 years, resurrecting one of the first procedures used in photography: the photogram — a technique that, without a lens or a camera, allows for accurate reproductions of objects. The result are large-scale photo-based installations that demonstrate the landscape´s superiority over those trying to capture it. OAS ART MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAS
THROUGH JAN. 29
Vested Values
“Vested Values,” a selection comprising more than 40 works of various Mexican contemporary artists, explores the representation of nature and its sociocultural environment. Each of the works reveals how particular methods of production, implementation and execution of contemporary art can offer a complex impression of the diverse elements that define a society, which in turn promotes a continuous dialogue on both experience and perception. Each of the works originates through an arrangement with Mexico’s Tax Administration Service that allows Mexican artists to pay their taxes with their artwork. Today, artists can pay their income tax using media that ranges from digital art to photography. MEXICAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE
THROUGH FEB. 1
Joy in Colors
The selection of paintings in Alexandra Arata’s “Joy in Colors” comes after more than two years of studies on the latest research into the psychology of color and the impact that its use has on our way of living and feeling. Arata taps into her
Curated by Fabián Goncalves Borrega, this exhibition features four of Uruguayan artist Roberto Fernandez Ibañez’s photographic series addressing the human impact on the environment: Earthy Resilience, Melting Point, The Hand and Rara Avis. His photographic material not only changes when it is exposed to light, but it can also be transformed, tuned and textured by techniques and laboratory processes. Fernandez Ibañez says he harnesses the environment’s capabilities to transform to shape his own artwork. OAS ART MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAS F STREET GALLERY
THROUGH FEB. 10
Rodarte
The celebrated American luxury fashion house Rodarte, founded by sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy, are featured in the first fashion exhibition organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The display explores the distinctive design principles, material concerns and reoccurring themes that position the Mulleavys’ work within the landscape of contemporary art and fashion. Spanning the first 13 years of Rodarte, nearly 100 complete looks, presented as they were shown on the runway, will highlight selections from their most pivotal collections. NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS
THROUGH FEB. 18
Gordon Parks: New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950
During the 1940s American photographer Gordon Parks (1912– 2006) grew from a self-taught photographer making portraits and documenting everyday life in Saint Paul and Chicago to a visionary professional shooting for Ebony, Vogue, Fortune and Life. For the first time, the formative decade of Parks’s 60-year career is the focus of an exhibition, which brings together 150 photographs and ephemera. NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
THROUGH MARCH 1
Shane Pickett: Djinon Djina Boodja Look at the Land I Have Travelled
During his lifetime, Shane Pickett (1957-2010) was one of Western Australia’s most significant contemporary Aboriginal artists. “Djinong Djina Boodja (Look at the Land That I Have Travelled)” features works from the most radical and significant phase of his career. Balancing innovation with tradition, modernity with an ancient spirituality, they are complex visual metaphors for the persistence of Nyoongar culture against the colonizing
Events | Culture | WD
tide of modernity.
EMBASSY OF AUSTRALIA ART GALLERY
THROUGH APRIL 14
Ambreen Butt – Mark My Words
This is the first solo exhibition in Washington, D.C., for PakistaniAmerican artist Ambreen Butt (born 1969). Featuring 13 mixedmedia works on paper, “Mark My Words” reveals the connection between the artist’s global consciousness and the physical mark-making techniques that she uses to create her works. NATIONAL MUSUEM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS
THROUGH APRIL 28
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse
Innovative Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer brings the largest interactive technology exhibition to the Hirshhorn. “Pulse” takes up the entire second level, with three major installations using heart-rate sensors to create audiovisual experiences from visitors’ biometric data. Together, the biometric signatures will create spellbinding sequences of soundscapes, lights and animations. HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN
THROUGH SEPTEMBER 2019
Shaping Clay in Ancient Iran
Potters in ancient Iran were fascinated by the long-beaked waterfowl and rams with curled horns around them. This exhibition of ceramics produced in northwestern Iran highlights animal-shaped vessels as well as jars and bowls decorated with animal figures. ARTHUR M. SACKLER GALLERY
THROUGH SEPT. 29
Good as Gold: Fashioning Senegalese Women
In the cities of the West African nation of Senegal, stylish women have often used jewelry as part of an overall strategy of exhibiting their elegance and prestige. Rooted in the Wolof concept of sañse (dressing up, looking and feeling good), “Good as Gold” examines the production, display, and circulation of gold in Senegal as it celebrates a significant gift of gold jewelry to the National Museum of African Art’s collection.
JAN. 11 TO 13
gram from IDEA (Indian Dance Educators Association) showcasing a variety of dazzling Indian dance. Tickets are $25 to $27.
American Opera Initiative Festival
The Washington National Opera presents the seventh season of its acclaimed American Opera Initiative with four world premieres, including “Taking Up Serpents,” based on faith, family and patriarchy in the deep South. A comprehensive commissioning program that originates and develops new works, the American Opera Initiative provides rare opportunities for emerging composers and librettists to partner and write for the opera stage. Tickets are $19 to $45.
WOLF TRAP
MUSIC SAT., JAN. 5, 6 P.M.
Orquesta Akokán
Straight out of Havana comes Orquesta Akokán, a mambo ensemble reminiscent of Benny Moré, Pérez Prado, and the Banda Gigante of the 1940s and 1950s. Their original songs were recorded at the Estudios Areito with Cuba’s finest players, led by singer José “Pepito” Gómez.
KENNEDY CENTER TERRACE THEATER
KENNEDY CENTER MILLENNIUM STAGE
THROUGH JAN. 13
Miss Saigon
TUE., JAN. 8, 6 P.M.
Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness
South African seven-piece band Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness has mesmerized audiences worldwide with its indigenous funk and high-energy performances. These artistic heirs to Philip “Malombo” Tabane and Batsumi give a contemporary voice to ancestral traditions. KENNEDY CENTER MILLENNIUM STAGE
MON., JAN. 14, 6 P.M.
Cante Alentejano
Cante Alentejano is a genre of traditional two-part singing performed by amateur choral groups in southern Portugal, characterized by distinctive melodies, lyrics and vocal styles, and performed without instrumentation. KENNEDY CENTER MILLENNIUM STAGE
SUN., JAN. 20, 7:30 P.M.
Pan American Symphony Orchestra Presents Passion and Fire: The Music of Spain
Pan American Symphony Orchestra brings you a thrilling evening of evocative and passionate music by Spain’s foremost composers — Isaac Albeniz, Manuel de Falla, and Joaquin Turina — music infused with the
PHOTO: JOHNNY SHRYOCK
“My Father’s Dragon” at Synetic Theater follows the adventures of a young child who stows away to Wild Island with a new cat companion in an attempt to rescue a captive baby dragon. rhythms of Spanish folk dances, and reflecting the traditions of the Gypsy, Jewish, Arab, African and Greek peoples. Tickets are $50 to $65.
KENNEDY CENTER TERRACE THEATER
WED., JAN. 23, 7:30 P.M.
Cultural Fusion: The Gamelan Experience
PostClassical Ensemble (PCE) explores the traditional percussive ensemble music of Indonesia known as gamelan, which has by far been the non-Western musical genre that has most impacted the Western classical music tradition. The concert surveys gamelan’s influence on classical music across 120 years, beginning with the 1889 Paris Exposition, where Claude Debussy first experienced the allure of Indonesian music and dance — an introduction that transformed Western music via Debussy and countless other composers. From there, PCE explores other celebrated composers who have incorporated the sound and spirit of gamelan into their work. The immersive concert will transform the Washington National Cathedral with dancers, archival
JAN. 5 TO 20
From U Street to the Cotton Club
In commemoration of the seminal events of 1968, the In Series honors the community where it resides with a revival of the acclaimed 2009 production “From U Street to the Cotton Club,” along with an array of unique audience experiences meant to deepen the impact. This original work, written by local playwright Sybil Williams and directed by KenYatta Rogers, uses D.C. music from gospel to jazz (Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller) to tell the story of the rich cultural heritage and the importance of music in the life of Black Broadway, and of D.C.’s role in shaping the sound and soul of the Harlem Renaissance. Tickets are $45.
Billy Elliot the Musical
Portraits of the World: Korea
Pioneering feminist artist Yun Suknam (born 1939) uses portraiture to gain insights into the lives of women, past and present. A wood assemblage portrait of her mother is the centerpiece of this exhibition, which includes portraits of American artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, Marisol, Kiki Smith and Nancy Spero.
ILLUSTRATION: JON BERKELEY
The power struggle between wealthy oligarchs and Vladimir Putin following the collapse of the Soviet Union is examined in “Kleptocracy” at Arena Stage.
THE STUDIO THEATRE
THROUGH JAN. 6
My Father’s Dragon
Synetic’s wordless Family Theater Production presents the adventures of a young child who stows away to Wild Island with a new cat companion in an attempt to rescue a captive baby dragon. Tickets are $20. SYNETIC THEATER
THROUGH JAN. 6
The Panties, the Partner and the Profit: Scenes from the Heroic Life of the Middle Class
David Ives returns to the Shakespeare Theatre Company to collaborate with artistic director Michael Kahn during his final season at STC for this tale inspired by the epic pre-World War I trilogy of German playwright Carl Sternheim. Ives sharpens his celebrated wit to razor-like social commentary to devise this contemporary version that transports the audience from Boston in 1950 to Wall Street in 1986 to lavish Malibu today, filling the evening with panties falling, dueling pistols going off, brunch being eaten and other signs of near-apocalypse. Please call for ticket information. SHAKESPEARE THEATRE COMPANY
THROUGH JAN. 6
THROUGH JAN. 6
KENNEDY CENTER EISENHOWER THEATER
Representative Sydney Millsap rode a Blue Wave into D.C. She arrives armed with her ideals and sense of duty, and refuses to play by the rules of special interests. Kate’s a lobbyist who backs winners. So when she crosses paths with Millsap, she dismisses her as a one-term neophyte, but ends up hearing a call to conscience she thought she’d left outside of the
THROUGH JAN. 6
Kings
DANCE
Beltway. Please call for ticket information.
Based on the powerful and acclaimed film, all 11-year-old Billy wants to do is dance. Initially facing opposition from society and his father, Billy’s passion instead unites the community and changes his life in extraordinary ways. Please call for ticket information. SIGNATURE THEATRE
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
Enjoy a rich and innovative pro-
THEATER
THROUGH JAN. 6
THROUGH NOV. 17, 2019
Evening of Indian Dance
WASHINGTON NATIONAL CATHEDRAL
CULTURAL DC’S SOURCE THEATRE
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN ART
SAT., JAN. 19, 8 P.M.
films and more, with a gamelan and accompanying musicians assembled in the middle of the nave and the audience seated around it for a 360-degree viewing experience. Tickets are $45 to $65; for information, visit www. postclassical.com.
The Play That Goes Wrong
What would happen if Sherlock Holmes and Monty Python had an illegitimate Broadway baby? You’d get Broadway and London’s award-winning smash comedy that is chock-full of mishaps and madcap mania. Tickets are $49 to $149.
She the People
An all-female, all-star team of The Second City’s most fearless, tuned-in sketch comics roasts the patriarchy and reclaims at least two hours of absolutely hilarious time. Tickets start at $51. WOOLLY MAMMOTH THEATRE COMPANY
In a bar run by a notorious character called The Engineer, a young Vietnamese woman named Kim meets an American G.I. in an encounter that will change their lives forever in this stunning musical. Tickets are $49 to $175. KENNEDY CENTER OPERA HOUSE
JAN. 15 TO 20
Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures: Cinderella
Set in London during World War II, a chance meeting results in a magical night for Cinderella and her dashing young RAF pilot, together just long enough to fall in love before being parted by the Blitz. Matthew Bourne’s vivid storytelling has never been more heart-stopping. Tickets are $29 to $129. KENNEDY CENTER OPERA HOUSE
JAN. 18 TO FEB. 24
Kleptocracy
Inspired by the power struggle between the richest of the oligarchs and an ambitious Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this timely cautionary tale of capitalism run amok by Kenneth Lin (“House of Cards”) explores U.S.-Russia relations, then and now. Tickets are $41 to $95. ARENA STAGE
JAN. 25 TO 27
CPAA Productions Presents Image China: Xuanzang’s Pilgrimage
China’s first traditional concert drama performed by the China National Traditional Orchestra tells the story of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang (602-664) who traveled the length of the Silk Road across China on a pilgrimage to India. Xuanzang documented his experiences of the differences within Buddhism that he encountered along the way. Tickets are $70 to $200. KENNEDY CENTER OPERA HOUSE
JAN. 29 TO MARCH 10
Nell Gwynn
A humble orange seller from the streets of Drury Lane steps onto the stage and becomes the darling of the Restoration theater. Nell discovers one of her biggest fans is none other than Charles II. Smitten with Nell’s spirit, the king brings her to court as a favorite mistress. Tickets are $42 to $79. FOLGER THEATRE
JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 39
WD | Culture | Spotlight
Diplomatic Spotlight
January 2019
Peru Ambassador Insider Series Peru, cradle of the ancient Inca civilization, is also a modern developing country. Its 32 million people currently enjoy Latin America’s most dynamic economy. Yet wealth is not equally distributed, and the country has become ensnared in the web of corruption scandals spreading across Latin America. In fact, Peru’s last four presidents before the current one are all being investigated for wrongdoing in connection with Odebrecht, a giant Brazilian conglomerate that has admitted to paying close to $800 million in bribes to politicians in a dozen countries (also see cover story on page 15). Peruvian Ambassador Carlos Pareja talked about Peru’s efforts to tackle the scourge of corruption along with other challenges at The Washington Diplomat’s Ambassador Insider Series (AIS) on Oct. 30. Nearly 100 people turned out for the in-depth discussion along with traditional pisco sours at the Peruvian Embassy in Dupont Circle. Guests also viewed the exhibit “Peruvian Beauty,” a series of portraits by photographer Yayo López that capture women from different social and geographical backgrounds throughout Peru in an effort to re-examine and redefine concepts of beauty.
AMBASSADOR INSIDER SERIES
— Photos by Tim Tilert —
Moderator Larry Luxner, news editor of The Washington Diplomat, welcomes guests.
Peruvian Ambassador Carlos Pareja shares a laugh with moderator Larry Luxner.
Peruvian Ambassador Carlos Pareja.
Marjorie Daily of the office of Rep. Trey Hollingsworth (R-Ind.); Amy Timmerman of the office of Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.); and Leslie Bent of the Embassy of Switzerland.
Puru Trivedi of the Meridian International Center, Kriti Doval of the US-India Strategic Partnership and Matt Westling.
Victor Hugo Nuñoz and Patricio Lindeman of the Embassy of Peru.
The Washington Diplomat sales manager Rod Carrasco, Ambassador of Peru Carlos Pareja, news editor Larry Luxner and publisher Victor Shiblie.
40 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
Natalia Romanova and Ashlee Brady of The Ritz-Carlton, Tysons Corner.
Luis Chang and Omar Reyes, both of the Peru Trade, Tourism and Investment Office.
Portraits on display as part of “Peruvian Beauty by Yayo López.”
Haonan Feng and Yuehong Wang, both of the Embassy of China.
Karen Grossberg, David Grossberg and Hannah Grossberg.
Spotlight | Culture | WD
Cassandra Campbell of Progress Humanity and Shaundra Allen of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Guests view photographs by Yayo López.
Ambassador of Nicaragua Francisco Obadiah Campbell Hooker, Ali Khan and John Rosenberg.
Larry Shearin enjoys a pisco sour.
Journalist Ben Bangoura and Kimberly Fogg of Global Sustainable Partnerships.
Maricar Donato talks to guests.
Moderator Larry Luxner.
Mike Shea and Stefan Gudjohnsen of GlobeScope talk to Steve Mukherjee of the State Department.
Portraits on display as part of “Peruvian Beauty by Yayo López.”
Edona Dervisholli of U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, sales manager of The Washington Diplomat Rod Carrasco and Claudia Koerbler of the International Finance Corp.
Peruvian Ambassador Carlos Pareja.
LaJeune Marburg and Sandi Windorfer, both of The Fairfax at Embassy Row.
Edgard Izaguirre, brand director for The Doyle Collection, and Kathrin Seiler of the Embassy of Switzerland.
Claudia Koerbler of the International Finance Corp. asks a question.
Ashlee Brady of The Ritz-Carlton, Tysons Corner.
Daniel Erikson of Blue Star Strategies LLC asks a question.
Debbie Drell of the National Organization for Rare Disorders.
JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 41
WD | Culture | Spotlight
Diplomatic Spotlight
January 2019
German Unity Day
IFE Thanksgiving Kick-Off
The German Embassy went all out to commemorate the country’s Unity Day in October, with over 2,500 guests filling the expansive residence gardens to mark Germany’s reunification on Oct. 3, 1990. Emily Haber, who became Germany’s ambassador last June, welcomed guests such as German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to help launch “Wunderbar Together,” a yearlong campaign celebrating German-American friendship with over 1,000 events in all 50 U.S. states. In addition to traditional Bavarian cuisine, guests were treated to a lightshow projected onto the façade of the German Residence, courtesy of Urbanscreen, along with performances by the German Army and U.S. Air Force bands.
Institute for Education (IFE) founders coach Kathy Kemper and Jim Valentine welcomed neighbors and friends to their home for their Fifth Annual Champagne Holiday Kick-Off on Thanksgiving Day. Guests toasted with Veuve Clicquot before heading off for afternoon celebrations with family.
Dieter Kempf, president of the Federation of German Industries (BDI).
PHOTOS: NICOLE GLASS / GERMAN EMBASSY
Ambassador of Latvia Andris Teikmanis and his wife Inguna Peniķe greet Ambassador of Germany Emily Haber and her husband Hansjörg Haber.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas welcomes guests.
Ambassador of Japan Shinsuke Sugiyama, coach Kathy Kemper, Yoko Sugiyama, Naoki Fukuzawa of Kureha Corp. and Kelsey Kemper Valentine.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Ambassador of Germany Emily Haber watch a lightshow projection promoting “Wunderbar Together.”
Guests fill the main hall of the German Residence. Jim Valentine, European Union Ambassador David O’Sullivan and Ambassador of Ireland Daniel Mulhall.
Cuisine from different parts of Germany was served, including bratwurst with sauerkraut, above.
VIP guests, including U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, second from right, officially launch “Wunderbar Together,” a yearlong campaign celebrating German-American friendship from culture to business to education.
Guests enjoy beer in the traditional Bavarian Beer Garden.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan said that “the United States and Germany form the bedrock of the transatlantic relationship and the NATO alliance — a relationship built on shared values of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.”
The Germany Army Band performs.
Ambassador of Lithuania Rolandas Krisciunas, center, talks to guests.
Monica Enqvist, press and communication counselor at the Swedish Embassy, talks to German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.
42 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
Christina Kemper Valentine, Danara Kazykhanov and Ambassador of Finland Kirsti Kauppi.
European Union Ambassador David O’Sullivan, Agnes O’Hare and Ambassador of Portugal Domingos Fezas Vital
Ambassador of Ethiopia Kassa Tekleberhan Gebrehiwot, Mrs. Tekleberhan, Yoko Sugiyama and Ambassador of Japan Shinsuke Sugiyama.
Spotlight | Culture | WD
Polish Centennial
Oneness-Family School U.N. Day
The Embassy of Poland celebrated the centennial of Poland regaining its independence with a reception at the U.S. Institute of Peace on Nov. 13. “History has shown that we are stronger together than separate, that when we act in solidarity the world listens,” Polish Ambassador Piotr Wilczek told the 800 guests in attendance. “And as new times bring new challenges, the strong and enduring Polish-American alliance will respond with effective and innovative solutions.” PHOTOS: EMBASSY OF POLAND
Over 80 embassies participated in Oneness-Family School’s United Nations Day on Oct. 26 to celebrate international unity. PHOTOS: YASSINE EL MANSOURI
Ambassador of Poland Piotr Wilczek.
Guests pose with performers in traditional Polish dress.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs A. Wess Mitchell.
Acclaimed American pianist Brian Ganz performs pieces by Chopin, including the famous “Heroic Polonaise, opus 53.”
Journalist Luiza Chwiałkowska-Savage of Politico served as moderator.
Czech Philharmonic Washington Performing Arts presented the Czech Philharmonic at the Kennedy Center on Oct. 29 under its new music director, Semyon Bychkov. The signature program featured Dvorák’s triumphant Seventh Symphony and a rarely heard work by the 20th-century composer Luboš Fišer. During a pre-concert reception, the Karel Komarek Family Foundation presented the Antonin Dvorak Prize to the orchestra for its contributions to Czech culture. PHOTOS: YASSINE EL MANSOURI Czech billionaire Karel Komarek, former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic Andrew Schapiro, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Ambassador of the Czech Republic Hynek Kmoníček and Czech Minister of Culture Antonín Staněk.
Founder and Head of OnenessFamily School Andrew Kutt; Deputy Director of the U.N. Department of Programs Yasim Oruc; Ambassador of Lesotho Sankatana Gabriel Maja; Ambassador of Mauritania Mohamedoun Daddah; Ambassador of Chad Ngote Gali Koutou; Ambassador of Swaziland Njabuliso B. Gwebu; Consul General of the Bahamas Theo Neilly; and Isha Sillah, chargé d’affaires of the Embassy of Sierra Leone.
Madonna John Lazarus of the Embassy of Malaysia participates in the procession of nations.
Lyra Puišytė-Bostroem, deputy chief of mission at the Embassy of Lithuania, carries her nation’s flag.
Kgomotso Lenah Madisa of the Embassy of Botswana and Ambassador of Swaziland Njabuliso B. Gwebu visit a classroom to view student projects portraying the countries of the world.
At left, Semyon Bychkov leads the Czech Philharmonic.
At left, Czech entrepreneur Karel Komarek, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Stepanka Komarek.
Hiba Wisam Abdulkhaliq of the Embassy of Oman carries the Omani flag.
Head of Oneness-Family School Andrew Kutt, embassy liaison Jan Du Plain and Chris Brown of the Oneness-Family Board.
Pam Korbel, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Indira Gumarova and John Korbel.
U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic Stephen B. King; financial advisor Peter Kolar; former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; and Czech Ambassador Hynek Kmoníček.
JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 43
WD | Culture | Spotlight
Diplomatic Spotlight
January 2019
International Student House Global Leadership Awards Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) were honored with the 2018 Global Leadership Awards by the International Student House of Washington, D.C. (ISH-DC) on Nov. 14 at the group’s historic building in the heart of Dupont Circle. ISH-DC is home to a diverse array of international graduate students, interns and visiting scholars, with over 15,000 residents representing more than 140 nations having lived at ISH-DC since its founding in 1936. PHOTOS: SKEWED PATELLA PHOTO BY DEREK PARKS
ISH-DC scholar Varsha Thebo of Georgetown University, right, introduces honoree Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who noted that over 60 million girls around the world are not in school and two-thirds are illiterate. “This is an enormous amount of wasted potential,” she said. “Girls’ education is fundamental to the health and well being of a nation.”
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) takes a seat.
Dinner co-chair Rear Adm. Susan Blumenthal; ISH-DC resident Ján Langle of The George Washington University; ISH-DC Board of Directors President Cynthia Bunton; ISH-DC scholar Varsha Thebo of Georgetown University; Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine); and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) lamented that we live in an era of xenophobia. “We cannot build fortress America,” he said. “We need ISH-DC, we need international exchange now more than ever.”
Inga Jona Thordardottir and her husband, Ambassador of Iceland Geir H. Haarde, an ISH-DC alumnus.
Greta Mulhall, Hani Masri, Cheryl Masri and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).
PHOTO: THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT
Frank Islam, Ambassador of Ireland Daniel Mulhall and Adam Shapiro.
Eileen Shields-West; Robin West; Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine); Jane Cafritz; President of the ISH-DC Board of Directors Cynthia Bunton; and Lisa Barry of the ISH-DC Board of Directors.
The Georgetown Phantoms perform for the crowd.
Former Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.) shares a laugh with Ray Mahmood.
PHOTO: THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT
Linda Harper and Ambassador of Luxembourg Sylvie Lucas.
Staff at the Latvian Embassy
Nearly 100 guests listened to a performance by the Latvian Radio Choir.
44 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
Robert Abernethy and Eric Melby of the ISH-DC Board of Directors.
Ambassador of Latvia Andris Teikmanis, right, honors Alexander Vershbow, former deputy secretary general of NATO and U.S. ambassador to Russia, for his work in the region.
On Nov. 16, Latvia marked 100 years since the proclamation of its independence with a reception at the Library of Congress. The event also featured a performance by the 80-year-old Latvian Radio Choir.
PHOTOS: PETER ALUNANS
Lorraine Hawley, Ambassador of Germany Emily Haber and Cynthia Bunton.
Lawrence Dunham of Protocol Partners; Jan Du Plain of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center; Laurette Jaeger; and Deborah Dunham.
Latvian Centennial
Ambassador of Latvia Andris Teikmanis and his wife Inguna Peniķe.
ISH-DC Executive Director Tom O’Coin, ISH-DC Board of Directors President Cynthia Bunton and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.).
PHOTO: THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT
PHOTO: THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT
Ambassador of Liechtenstein Kurt Jaeger, Katrin Van Bragt and Ambassador of Belgium Dirk Wouters.
Ambassador of Portugal Domingos Fezas Vital, Isabel Vital, Lubka Stoytcheva, Walter Cutler and Ambassador of Bulgaria Tihomir Stoytchev.
The 24member Latvian Radio Choir has performed at the BBC Proms and Lincoln Center’s White Lights Festival.
Security Committee, he was a powerful advocate for the Gulf region in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, pressing for accountability of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. CONTINUED • PAGE 9 Thompson has also pressed for more transparency in government and, along with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), introduced a bill in 2014 to limit the classification of documents and overhaul the security clearance system. The 150-page report claimed to have found no evidence of While Thompson is a progressive on Democratcollusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. ic priority issues but a moderate on matters of naDemocrats on the committee, who were not able to contional security, Mike Rogers is a staunch consertribute to the report, cried foul and went to work drafting vative who has supported some of Trump’s most their own memo. controversial moves, such as the anticipated U.S. Then-ranking member Adam Schiff told Olivia Victoria withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Gazis of CBS News about the GOP report that “sadly, it is Forces (INF) Treaty. little more than another Nunes memo in long form.” Following Britain’s vote to leave the European “I can certainly say with confidence that there is signifiUnion in June 2016, Rogers even called for the Rep. Mike Rogers cant evidence of collusion between the campaign and RusUnited States to withdraw from the United Nasia. What I cannot say — because I don’t know what Bob (R-AL3) tions and, in January 2017, introduced the AmeriMueller knows — is whether that evidence rises to the level can Sovereignty Act of 2017 to formally begin that quixotic of proof beyond a reasonable doubt of conspiracy to violate U.S. quest. He’s also sponsored legislation to abolish the Environmenelection laws,” Schiff said at the time. tal Protection Agency. A former U.S. assistant attorney in Los Angeles, Schiff has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration and an early leading voice in claims that Trump’s team colluded with Russia — going House Armed Services Committee so far as to call the president “compromised” because of his ties to Russia in a Dec. 4 op-ed in USA Today. He raised the pos- LIKELY CHAIR: sibility that Russian money was laundered through the Trump REP. ADAM SMITH (D-WA9) Organization and even suggested that Trump’s business links may have influenced his refusal to condemn Saudi Arabia for the RANKING MEMBER: killing of Jamal Khashoggi. Schiff has also said that Trump’s use of REP. MAC THORNBERRY (R-TX13) Twitter to praise one witness who did not testify against him is “evidence” of obstrucThe current ranking member, Adam tion of justice, which could be a hint as to Smith, and the current chairman, Mac Rep. Adam Smith how Schiff, and possibly other House Dem- Thornberry, are expected to switch roles. (D-WA9) ocrats, would pursue impeachment charges Smith, a former prosecutor who served in against Trump — via the president’s influ- the Washington State Senate before running for Congress, is acential tweets. tive in centrist “New Democrats” organizations. He believes that All of this has resulted in another Twit- fighting global poverty and reforming foreign assistance are key Rep. Devin Nunes ter tirade from Trump, in which he taunted to improving national security. (R-CA22) Schiff as “little Adam Schitt.” Observers can A fifth-generation Texan, Thornberry served as deputy assisexpect the Trump-Schiff feud to continue heating up as the new tant secretary of state for legislative affairs under Ronald Reagan chairman opens new investigations and begins calling witnesses. before being elected to the House in 1994. Six months before House Intelligence Committee membership is one of the last to 9/11 terrorist attacks, Thornberry introduced a bill to create a be decided. It is unclear if Nunes will stay on the committee as new Department of Homeland Security that formed the basis of ranking member. There are grumblings from both Democratic legislation signed into law by President Bush 20 months later. and Republican officials that he has been the cause of the partisan rancor on the committee. One Democrat went so far as to say that because of his release of classified information, Nunes has “no credibility” with the intelligence community he is tasked with overseeing. A staunch Trump ally, Nunes is also a senior Republican on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. Whether or not he stays or moves to another role, he seeks to be an antagonist to the new Democratic majority, according to a Nov. 14 report by Kate Irby in McClatchy. Three other Republican committee members — Reps. Trey Gowdy (R-SC4), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL27) and Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ2) — have retired from Congress, leaving several seats on this committee in play.
Committees
The pair could be in for some clashes over military policy in the coming session. The Armed Services Committee has broad oversight of the military, meaning it could weigh in on Trump’s decision to send troops to the Mexican border. While Thornberry generally supports Trump’s immigration crackdown, he has suggested that he does not want the military to get stuck with the multimillion-dollar tab to secure the border, arguing that the funding should instead go to beef up U.S. Border Patrol. Funding for the military will also be a point of contention. Smith has said he wants to curb military spending, in part by eliminating waste and abuse, and his calls for an audit of the Pentagon echo those of Trump. Smith told McLatchy’s Kellen Browning on Nov. 11 that “it is my firm belief that, given the $22 trillion debt and trillion-dollar deficit Rep. Mac produced by the Republicans’ tax cuts, the Thornberry (R-TX13) Pentagon is going to have less money in the future. We need to scrub the defense budget to better reflect that reality.” Thornberry takes the opposite view. As committee chairman, he pushed to restore military readiness and beef up defense spending. Meanwhile, in the wake of a report finding that the Pentagon cannot account for $800 million in previous budget disbursements, Thornberry met with Trump, alongside incoming Senate Armed Services Chairman Inhofe, to urge the president not to cut $33 billion from the Pentagon’s fiscal 2020 budget that the White House Budget Office has proposed. There is much Congress can do to initiate and influence foreign policy, from curtailing U.S. support of Saudi Arabia to slapping more sanctions on Russia to setting cybersecurity norms and rules of engagement. In addition to its traditional oversight role, Congress also controls the government’s purse strings, meaning it could cut off funding to military operations on the U.S.-Mexico border, for example, and play a bigger role in deciding arms deals, to Trump’s chagrin. It remains to be seen, though, how the House will use its oversight powers — and whether the Republican-controlled Senate will act as a check on the House’s newfound ability to check the president. WD Ryan R. Migeed (@RyanMigeed) is a freelance writer based in Boston.
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This committee has oversight of some of Trump’s most controversial policies, including immigration. Under Democratic leadership, that oversight is expected to become a lot more aggressive. “We will do rigorous oversight” of the Department of Homeland Security, including the decision to use tear gas on migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, Bennie Thompson told The Washington Post in November. “As a nation of immigrants ourselves, we want to make sure that our process of immigration that includes asylum-seekers is constitutional and represents American values,” he said. Thompson is a longtime member of the committee, having been chair from 2007 to 2011 and ranking member since then. He is the dean of Mississippi’s congressional delegation, whose district includes the Mississippi Delta. From the Homeland
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Vacancies CONTINUED • PAGE 14
U.S. post in their countries sits empty for too long,” Gramer added. But that may be intentional, according to former U.S. Ambassador Peter Romero, now host of the “American Diplomat” podcast. E6FZM0026 He said Trump’s foreign policy approach via 0026_BW_ads brinksmanship diminishes the importance of Newspaper on-the-ground voices. Instead, Trump relies on a small inner circle to formulate policy (Obama was accusedColor/Space: of the sameBW thing). This Live:must look to a limited means that governments Trim: 1.812" the (w) president’s x 5.187" (h) group of individuals to interpret Bleed: agenda. PA ambassadors, Notes: Page 3 as of 7opBut on-the-ground posed to officials huddled in the White House, are able to address problems in real time with CE APPROVALS As is W/C the advantage of extensive background knowlCD edge that isExecutive often critical in confronting complex problems. Creative Director From internal strife in countries such as Director Colombia Design and Venezuela, to ongoing proxy battles between rivals Associate CD -Saudi Art Arabia and Iran, to the threat of a rising China and a volatile Associate CD - Copy North Korea, a steady and stable U.S. diplomatic presence is sorely needed. Art Director Khashoggi’s murder amplified the diminished U.S. Writer global footprint, and in one of the most explosive regions in the world. In this Copy Edit / diplomatic vacuum, Trump and Pompeo must Cold Read
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policies. Closer to home, in America’s backrelyArtonBuyer information from actors whose agenAccount Supervisor das might not always align with that of the yard, seismic shifts are occurring throughout (Art /Copy) Product Info (as Account theExecutive Western Hemisphere. Latin America is United States evidenced by the Saudi royal undergoing tremendous change with new family, whose Program HQ stories on the Khashoggi murMgt. Supervisor leaders taking the helm in Mexico, Brazil and der seesawed day by day). Postal Supervisor Legal Colombia; an economic meltdown in VenezuTh e Middle East is not the only region simela; and an exploding refugee crisis stemming mering — and in some cases burning — under Coordinator QA Review the weight of decades-longChanges feuds Only and failed from the instability in Venezuela as well as Full Read OKAY TO SHIP Second Read Proof Stage
46 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | JANUARY 2019
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gang violence in Central America that has sent a flood of asylum-seekers to the U.S.-Mexican border. As in the Middle East, Trump’s White House is confronting multiple challenges without the benefit of seasoned and experienced diplomats. The assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs post has only recently been filled. Meanwhile, the president is looking for a replacement in America’s Mexican Embassy after the departure of Roberta Jacobson in May. Diplomacy is often seen as the first response of international engagement and U.S. force projection. Embassies and the ambassadors that lead them are integral to communicating a narrative direct from Washington. In the absence of a powerful steward speaking on behalf of the president, embassies run the risk of messaging getting lost in translation. In the absence of face-to-face contact with a presidential emissary to assuage and unravel cultural and coded language or actions, nations run the risk of misinterpreting or, perhaps worse, filling in the U.S. narrative with their own assumptions. If many key diplomatic positions remain vacant amid looming crises and an undercurrent of uncertainty, the world will interpret the United States as MIA on the world stage. WD Anna Gawel (@diplomatnews) is managing editor of The Washington Diplomat. Eric Ham is a national security/political analyst on BBC, SkyNews and SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel and the creator of “The PJs! a.k.a. The Political Junkies” digital political show.
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An expansive new sport facility capitalized on the fervor surrounding the World Cup to introduce Washingtonians to a version of soccer with a twist. The St. James Sports and Active Entertainment Center hosted a diplomatic futsal tournament in late August. The St. James, which held its grand opening in September, is a 450,000-squarefoot facility in Springfield, Va., focusing on sports and wellness. The building houses a pool, hockey rink, bouldering hall, soccer field, basketball courts, restaurant, health club and a kids’ discovery center. Futsal is a sport that is played on a hard-court surface with five players on each time. Douglas Homer, director of soccer and futsal at The St. James, calls the sport a fast-paced technical form of soccer.
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Angola and Italy faced off in the tournament’s final match, with Italy claiming the top prize after a 3-3 tie sent the match into a penalty-kick shootout. Everyone who participated in the tournament received a medal and jersey, while the top three teams were presented with a trophy. The tournament was such a success that Homer and The St. James hope to have another, most likely next spring.
CONTINUED • PAGE 33
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Sports
Other Sports Take on Traditional American Athletics” in the October 2012 issue). “Sport is a universal language,” Philip Barton, then-deputy head of mission at the British Embassy, told us for the March 2013 article “The Right Moves: Exercise and Sports Define and Transcend Cultures.” “Yes, it’s competitive, but each game is structured around universal rules and principles that apply equally whatever your linguistic or cultural heritage,” Barton said. “Talking about sports can break the ice in conversations between people from very different backgrounds.” Perhaps the most universal sport around the world is, of course, soccer (i.e. football to pretty much everyone outside of the United States). The FIFA World Cup, held every four years and founded in 1930, is the most-watched sporting event on the planet. A microcosm of this year’s World Cup played out in D.C., where embassies such as Argentina and Great Britain held local viewing parties, while the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation organized the D.C. Embassy World Cup, a local soccer tournament among 16 of the 32 nations competing in this year’s FIFA Cup (also see “D.C.’s Diplomatic Community Celebrates World Cup” in the Diplomatic Pouch). A variant of soccer called futsal also drew diplomatic fans when it made its debut in the nation’s capital this fall. We took a closer look at the burgeoning sport of futsal, along with a beloved classic that show the enduring appeal of sports diplomacy.
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At a futsal diplomatic tournament held at The St. James in Virginia, Angola and Italy faced off in the tournament’s final match, with Italy claiming the top prize.
“However, if you ask a purist they’ll say it’s not soccer, it’s futsal,” he told us. “The goals are smaller than outdoor soccer goals but still big enough for a person.” Courts can be wooden or made of artificial material with a plastic gripping surface. There is typically a referee and a timekeeper, and games are 40 minutes long with two halves of 20 minutes each. Sometimes, at the youth level, games are shortened. “Futsal is fun, fast-paced and growing quickly around the world,” Homer said. “The U.S. is behind in terms of development of the sport.” Countries where futsal is popular include Brazil, Uruguay, Spain, Portugal and parts of Eastern Europe. According to Homer, there’s also a growing popularity in the Asian market, with countries like China, Japan, Vietnam and Korea taking up futsal. “It really doesn’t require much space [and is] played without limitation other than a climate-controlled environment,” Homer said. With soccer, around 22 people are needed to play — 11 playing and 11 on the bench. Futsal only needs about half that. At the diplomatic tournament held earlier this year, 10 nations signed up to play, including France, Chile, Zambia, Haiti, Angola, the U.S., Croatia and Spain. There was also a team from the World Bank that represented Italy and another team included employees from the Inter-American Development Bank. “It was exciting to see all the countries in one place,” Homer said. “It really felt like it brought people together in the spirit of sport and community.”
Australian Ambassador Joe Hockey held an exhibition tennis match in late October to launch the refurbished grass tennis court at his residence, known as White Oaks. The court is the only one of its kind in Washington, D.C., and was refurbished with a donation from the Lowy family. Two of the world’s tennis greats, Rod Laver and Fred Stolle, joined others at the ambassador’s residence at the Mateship Charity Tennis Event, which raised funds for the American Australian Associations’ Veterans Scholarship Fund. The re-launch featured a mixed doubles match that included former American professional tennis player Richey Reneberg; Andrea Rice, ranked first in the U.S. women’s 50s category; Zoe Howard, ranked first in girls 18s in the Mid-Atlantic region; and Michael Scherer, who was previously ranked among the top 50 juniors in the U.S. Today, big-name tennis stars like Serena Williams, Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova have kept the sport relevant for younger generations. The game, in fact, can be traced to 12thcentury France, where a ball was struck with the palm of a hand. It took another four centuries for people to figure out that rackets are more effective than hands. The modern iteration of tennis had its roots in late 19th-century England. Tens of millions of people continue to take up tennis around the world, and the sport’s Grand Slam tournaments attract legions of fans from Australia to the U.S. “I think sports is a universal language,” Ambassador Hockey said. “The values of sports — competition, teamwork and fair play — help build trust and friendship between countries, bringing people together by setting aside differences and connecting people in ways they may not have been able to connect before.” In addition to the October tennis match, the Embassy of Australia also hosted the 8th Annual Celebration of Rugby on Nov. 7. The event benefited Washington DC Youth Rugby, a nonprofit that uses rugby to promote health and physical fitness for underprivileged children in D.C. WD Kate Oczypok (@OczyKate) is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat. Anna Gawel (@diplomatnews) is managing editor of The Washington Diplomat. JANUARY 2019 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | 47
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