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Letter from the Editor Print E-mail
bridges vol. 20, December 2008

Dear Reader,

In its January/February 2009 issue, Foreign Affairs magazine published an interesting essay on the state of the US Foreign Service. It is called "Where are the Civilians? How to rebuild US Foreign Service" and was authored by J. Anthony Holmes, previous president of the American Foreign Service Association and currently a fellow in diplomatic studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Holmes states:

   
During the Bush Administration's eight years in power, the military has come to dominate US foreign policy, while other arms of the US government operating abroad - such as the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) - have been ignored, underfunded, and gravely weakened. Neglect of these critical civilian national security institutions will haunt the new administration as it tries to resurrect diplomacy and repair the United States' image across the globe.






 
For the incoming Obama administration, Holmes offers the following advice:

   
Invest in the government's traditional diplomatic capacity and build the bureaucratic infrastructure needed to deal with postconflict stabilization, reconstruction, and nation building.... In order to reverse the decline of US influence in the world, the new administration will have to address the profound weaknesses that currently impede US diplomacy. If the United States is to remain a superpower, it must rebuild the once-robust civilian diplomatic and development capacity that has since disappeared.
 
Diplomacy is a nation's first line of defense, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell once said. During a recent discussion on science, technology, and security policy with the former US Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering, at the Washington, DC-based American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Powell's then-science advisor Norman Neureiter underlined his statement by adding  "when the talking stops, that's when the shooting starts." With US President-elect Barack Obama taking office in only a few weeks, there is hope among many that talks will continue - or will be resumed where they were stopped. Even more, when President-elect Obama announced just a few days ago, on December 15, his nomination of Nobel Laureate Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as Secretary of the Department of Energy, many - not only in the scientific community - sighed with relief at Obama's clear statement that the dialogue on one of the most pressing matters of our time will not only continue but (finally, again) be based upon facts, not faith or ideology.

Another with great anticipation awaited announcement was whom Obama would pick as his science advisor. Last Saturday, during his weekly radio address, Obama officially announced his choice: John P. Holdren, a Harvard physicist who is a leading authority on global warming. Holdren is also a past president of AAAS, the nation's largest organization of scientists.

So with the incoming US administration slowly but surely assuming its shape, we decided to dedicate our last bridges edition of 2008 to the question: How can science - and scientists - contribute to good policy making, especially in the international context of diplomacy and of foreign affairs?  Several interviews and expert contributions in this issue of bridges will cast light on this question from different angles, and discuss the various forms of diplomacy that exist.

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