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What are the qualities of a good diplomat? (5.07)
https://ru.coursera.org/lecture/global-diplomacy/what-are-the-qualities-of-a-good-diplomat-isveJ
What are some of the qualities mentioned in the video?
Which of these qualities are the most important for a diplomat in your opinion?
What Diplomats Really Do | Alexander Karagiannis | TEDxIndianaUniversity (13.12)
What are some of the misconceptions about diplomats?
What do diplomats really do?
What does the speaker’s example of humanitarian effort in Turkey illustrate?
What is the message of this video?
Diplomatic Immunity Explained | Lex Animata | Hesham Elrafei (2.46)
Is inviolability of diplomats a new or an old concept?
How is diplomatic immunity explained?
What example of inviolability of embassies is given in the video?
Can a diplomat’s baggage be inspected?
Wilton Park: What is public diplomacy? (2.32)
What are some definitions of public diplomacy?
Which of these definitions resonate with you the most?
What exactly did the father of yellow journalism introduce?
Multilateral Diplomacy: A Personal Story (up to 10.22)
What does the speaker see as her parents’ goal?
Who was the speaker’s role model as a teenager?
What does the speaker usually say to her colleagues? Why?
What does the speaker say about the UN?
Why is climate change an important issue?
In what way is diplomacy changing today?
What is the message of the video?
Text A
The Thucydides Trap
When one great power threatens to displace another, war is almost always the result— but it doesn’t have to be.
by Graham Allison, Foreign Policy, May/June 2017
In April, chocolate cake had just been served at the Mar-a-Lago summit when President Donald Trump leaned over to tell Chinese President Xi Jinping that American missiles had been launched at Syrian air bases, according to Trump’s account of the evening. What the attack on Syria signaled about Trump’s readiness to attack North Korea was left to Xi’s imagination. Welcome to dinner with the leaders who are now attempting to manage the world’s most dangerous geopolitical relationship. The story is a small one. But as China challenges America’s predominance, misunderstandings about each other’s actions and intentions could lead them into a deadly trap first identified by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. As he explained, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made the war inevitable”. The past 500 years have seen 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. Twelve of these ended in war.
Of the cases in which war was averted—Spain outstripping Portugal in the late 15th century, the United States overtaking the United Kingdom at the turn of the 20th century, and Germany’s rise in Europe since 1990—the ascent of the Soviet Union is uniquely instructive today. Despite moments when a violent clash seemed certain, a surge of strategic imagination helped both sides develop ways to compete without a catastrophic conflict. In the end, the Soviet Union imploded and the Cold War ended with a whimper rather than a bang.
Although China’s rise presents particular challenges, Washington policymakers should heed five Cold War lessons.
Lesson 1: War between nuclear superpowers is MADness.
The United States and the Soviet Union built nuclear arsenals so substantial that neither could be sure of disarming the other in a first strike. Nuclear strategists described this condition as “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD. Technology, in effect, made the United States and Soviet Union conjoined twins—neither able to kill the other.
Today, China has developed its own robust nuclear arsenal. From confrontations in the South and East China Sea, to the gathering storm over the Korean Peninsula, leaders must recognize that war would be suicidal.
Lesson 2: Leaders must be prepared to risk a war they cannot win.
Although neither nation can win a nuclear war, both, paradoxically, must demonstrate a willingness to risk losing one to compete.
Consider each clause of this nuclear paradox. On the one hand, if war occurs, both nations lose and millions die—an option no rational leader could choose. But, on the other hand, if a nation is unwilling to risk war, its opponent can win any objective by forcing the more responsible power to yield. To preserve vital interests, therefore, leaders must be willing to select paths that risk destruction. Washington must think the unthinkable to credibly deter potential adversaries such as China.
Lesson 3: Define the new “precarious rules of the status quo.”
The Cold War rivals wove an intricate web of mutual constraints around their competition that President John F. Kennedy called “precarious rules of the status quo.” These included arms-control treaties and precise rules of the road for air and sea. Such tacit guidelines for the United States and China today might involve limits on cyberattacks or surveillance operations.
By reaching agreements on contentious issues, the United States and China can create space to cooperate on challenges—such as global terrorism and climate change— in which the national interests the two powers share are much greater than those that divide them. Overall, leaders should understand that survival depends on caution, communication, constraints, compromise, and cooperation.
Lesson 4: Domestic performance is decisive.
What nations do inside their borders matters at least as much as what they do abroad. Had the Soviet economy overtaken that of the United States by the 1980s, as some economists predicted, Moscow could have consolidated a position of hegemony. Instead, free markets and free societies won out. The vital question for the U.S.-China rivalry today is whether Xi’s Leninist-Mandarin authoritarian government and economy proves superior to American capitalism and democracy.
Maintaining China’s extraordinary economic growth, which provides legitimacy for sweeping party rule, is a high-wire act that will only get harder. Meanwhile, in the United States, sluggish growth is the new normal. And American democracy is exhibiting worrisome symptoms: declining civic engagement, institutionalized corruption, and widespread lack of trust in politics. Leaders in both nations would do well to prioritize their domestic challenges.
Lesson 5: Hope is not a strategy.
Over a four-year period from George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram,” which identified the Soviet threat, to Paul Nitze’s NSC-68, which provided the road map for countering this threat, U.S. officials developed a winning Cold War strategy: contain Soviet expansion, deter the Soviets from acting against vital American interests, and undermine both the idea and the practice of communism. In contrast, America’s China policy today consists of grand, politically appealing aspirations that serious strategists know are unachievable. In attempting to maintain the post-World War II Pax Americana during a fundamental shift in the economic balance of power toward China, the United States’ real strategy, truth be told, is hope.
In today’s Washington, strategic thinking is often marginalized. Even Barack Obama, one of America’s smartest presidents, told the New Yorker that, given the pace of change today, “I don’t really even need George Kennan.” Coherent strategy does not guarantee success, but its absence is a reliable route to failure.
Thucydides’s Trap teaches us that on the historical record, war is more likely than not. From Trump’s campaign claims that China is “ripping us off” to recent announcements about his “great chemistry” with Xi, he has accelerated the harrowing roller coaster of U.S.-China relations. If the president and his national security team hope to avoid catastrophic war with China while protecting and advancing American national interests, they must closely study the lessons of the Cold War. (1011 words)
Words:
Displace – вытеснять, заменять
Instil – внушать, вселять, прививать
Avert – предотвращать
Outstrip – опережать, превосходить
Ascent – подъём
Heed – принимать во внимание, учитывать
Gathering storm – надвигающаяся буря
Deter – сдерживать
Constraint – принуждение, давление, ограничение
Contentious – спорный, дискуссионный
High-wire act – «проход по канату без страховки», трудное и/или опасное дело
Sluggish – медленный, вялый \
NSC-68 – United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, better known as NSC-68, was a 66-page top secret National Security Council (NSC) policy paper drafted by the Department of State and Department of Defense and presented to President Harry S. Truman on 7 April 1950. It was one of the most important American policy statements of the Cold War. In the words of scholar Ernest R. May, NSC-68 “provided the blueprint for the militarization of the Cold War from 1950 to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s.” NSC 68 and its subsequent amplifications advocated a large expansion in the military budget of the United States, the development of a hydrogen bomb, and increased military aid to allies of the United States. It made the rollback of global Communist expansion a high priority. NSC-68 rejected the alternative policies of friendly détente (разрядка, ослабление напряженности) and containment of the Soviet Union.
Contain – сдерживать, осуществлять политику сдерживания (агрессора, экспансии)
Pax Americana – с лат. «Американский мир» (a term applied to the concept of relative peace in the Western Hemisphere and later the world beginning around the middle of the 20th century, thought to be caused by the preponderance of power enjoyed by the United States)
Marginalize – изолировать; признавать несущественным
Rip off – разг. грабить, запрашивать слишком высокую цену, вымогать деньги
Chemistry – разг. спонтанная взаимная симпатия; взаимопонимание
Roller coaster – «американские горки», резкий перепад, мгновенное изменение
Text B
What America Hath Wrought
The Obama administration can’t wash its hands of the drones’ ruinous impacts—or responsibility for terrorists’ pursuit of those weapons.
by James Bamford, Foreign Policy May/June 2016
Hanging in an atrium of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, home to the Wright brothers’ plane and the Mercury capsule that first carried an American into space, is a Predator drone with the tail number 3034. Like the other vehicles on display, it made history by launching a revolution: Nearly one month after 9/11, in the skies above Afghanistan, 3034 became the first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to kill humans with a remotely fired missile. Once little more than novelties, militarized drones are now buzzing around the globe like locusts. According to New America, “the virtual monopoly on drones that the States once enjoyed is long gone.” Eighty-six countries have some drone capability, with 19 either possessing armed drones or acquiring the technology. At least six countries other than America have used drones in combat, and in 2015, defense consulting firm Teal Group estimated that drone production would total $93 billion over the next decade—reaching more than three times the current market value.
Experts fear that sinister actors may be obtaining the technology as well. In a report issued this January, the Oxford Research Group’s Remote Control Project, which analyzes developments in military technology, warned that the Islamic State “is reportedly obsessed with launching a synchronized multi-drone attack on large numbers of people in order to re-create the horrors of 9/11.” The report’s lead author has said, “Drones are a game-changer in the wrong hands.”
Are there any safe hands, though? The United States is the motivating force behind UAVs’ increasing sophistication and deadliness. Since taking office, President Barack Obama has attacked more countries than any president since World War II, launching drone strikes against at least seven nations and killing thousands of people, many of them innocent civilians. According to a February report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Pentagon makes little effort to determine whom UAVs are slaying: “Just 10 of the scores killed by U.S. drones in Pakistan last year have so far been identified.”
It may be too late to stuff the drone genie back into the bottle. Yet the Obama administration has six months before leaving office to at least do some damage control. It could start by telling the truth—not just cautioning people about the dangers drones could pose when deployed by terrorists, but also admitting to the toll that unmanned weapons have exacted under U.S. command.
Anxiety about the Islamic State’s access to drones has increased over the past few years. In 2014, the group employed UAVs to shoot propaganda video of fierce fighting in Kobane, Syria. In March 2015, coalition forces said they witnessed the Islamic State using a drone for reconnaissance near Fallujah. Then, in December, Kurdish fighters shared pictures purporting to show the wreckage of UAVs; the Kurds claimed terrorists may have begun experimenting with explosives to weaponize drones.
Fear has also hit U.S. soil. In 2014, the RAND Corporation reported, “[I]t is possible that a terrorist group could launch an expendable armed UAV attack from within the United States or a neighboring country.” Last July, as the number of domestic arrests of Islamic State sympathizers was growing, the Department of Homeland Security warned police units nationwide about drones being “used by adversaries… as part of an attack.”
Ironically, there is evidence that America’s own drone program is compelling terrorists to adopt unmanned tools. It’s not just that the Islamic State is watching and learning the tricks of the drone game from the country that invented it. The organization is also angry about the lives claimed in American strikes.
That was the conclusion of four former U.S. Air Force servicemen, with decades of experience among them operating drones, who wrote an impassioned letter to Obama last November. “[T]he innocent civilians we were killing only fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool,” they argued. “The administration and its predecessors have built a drone program that is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.”
The government has deliberately kept Americans in the dark about this cause and effect. Victims of strikes die in obscurity; their broken bodies are buried in remote towns in the Middle East and South Asia. Whistleblowers have leaked documents to the Intercept showing that upward of 90 percent of victims may be unintended yet labeled “enemies killed in action,” making it easy for the government (if asked at all) to deny responsibility for civilian deaths.
Last summer, Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a 57-year-old Yemeni engineer whose family members (including an anti-al Qaeda cleric) were killed in a 2012 U.S. drone attack, sued the Obama administration to establish that the strike had been unlawful. In September, his lawyers proposed to settle in exchange for “an apology and an explanation as to why a strike that killed two innocent civilians was authorized.” The Justice Department refused, however, because “the government could not confirm or deny” that the attack had even occurred.
When America launched its drone wars, it doubtless did not anticipate that terrorists might want to strike the United States with a weapon of its own making. Nor did the government likely expect veteran drone operators would assert that the White House is “lying publicly about the effectiveness of the drone program.” Yet here we are.
The only move the Obama administration can make to set things right is to remove its cloak of secrecy. At a minimum, it owes apologies to the families of guiltless victims. But only by providing the public with long-overdue answers— about deaths caused by UAV strikes, their impact on terrorist recruitment, and other salient issues—can there at last be a serious debate about whether the benefits of unmanned warfare outweigh its detriments. For how can America hope to quell the threat of an Islamic State armed with drones if it cannot first admit the role it may have played in landing the weapons in terrorists’ hands? (1031 words)
Words:
Hath – уст. = has
Wrought – уст. прич. прош. вр. от work
Locusts – саранча
Sinister – зловещий, плохой, злой
Game-changer – то, что меняет правила игры
Slay (slew, slain) – убивать, уничтожать, лишать жизни
Scores – множество
Toll – потери, жертвы
Reconnaissance – разведка
Wreckage – обломки крушения
Weaponize – использовать в военных целях, в качестве оружия или полигона военных действий
Obscurity – неизвестность, безвестность
Whistleblower – информатор (человек, который сообщает собственному руководству, властям или СМИ о недостатках либо злоупотреблениях в деятельности своей организации)
Salient – бросающийся в глаза