Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke about the need to recruit more American diplomats and strengthen the State Department on Tuesday in Gaston Hall. Rice emphasized the role institutions like Georgetown can play in the future of diplomacy.
Following a speech made two years ago at Georgetown on transformational diplomacy, a new State Department policy that seeks to work with international partners to build and maintain democratic states around the world, Rice returned to address the new challenges facing the future of diplomacy in an increasingly globalized world.
“The landscape of international politics is becoming more decentralized,” she said. “Globalization reshape[s] geopolitics.”
Rice said that a greater number of diplomats are needed to extend the United States’ reach around the world. She believes that the vision of transformational diplomacy will be realized through the association of people, not governments.
“We must not only continue to recruit America’s best and brightest into our ranks,” Rice said. “We must make them even better and even brighter. And that means training in languages like Chinese and Urdu and Arabic and Farsi. And it means greater opportunity for all of our diplomats to spend more time during their careers working in other agencies or doing exchanges with private companies or studying at places like Georgetown.”
Rice reiterated her belief that America’s top foreign policy goal should be the development of well-governed democratic states around the world.
She said that she saw the embodiment of America in the Georgetown students in front of her, the proof that multi-ethnic democracy can work.
She insisted that America needed more diplomats like them, to show the rest of the world that a democratic government is possible even in diverse countries.
Rice repeatedly brought up the need for increased funding to the State Department in order to achieve peace, prosperity and security abroad.
The draft budget for fiscal year 2008-2009, which the Bush Administration sent to Congress for approval early this month, included the creation of 1100 new State Department positions and an addition of $250 million to the annual budget. Since 2005, the annual budget of the State Department for international operations has increased by a total of $8 billion.
“As we continue to use our resources wisely and continue to transform the practice, posture and purpose of our diplomacy, we will need greater capacity,” Rice said. “How can it be, for example, that the Pentagon has nearly twice as many lawyers as America has Foreign Service officers? How can it be that the United Kingdom, with one-fifth of our population, has a diplomatic service nearly as large as America’s?”
During Rice’s speech, two protestors voiced their disagreement with the State Department’s policies and the proposed increase in its funding on the corner of 37th and O St. outside Healy gates.
Members of a grassroots lobbying group ConstituentPAC, the pair carried posters condemning the Bush administration’s funding of Palestinian Authority, an organization allegedly linked to Al-Queda, according to Joe Orlow, the director of ConstituentPAC.
The pair began their protest at 10:00 a.m.; according to the protestors, the Department of Public Safety asked them to leave because their protests could be heard from inside Gaston Hall.
When the protestors refused, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) was alerted to the situation, but MPD determined that the sound level was not above the legal limit.
The protestors left of their own accord at 12:00 p.m. so that they would not exceed their two-hour parking limit.
