And beyond that, the next issue is how do we guarantee one of these weapons, not necessarily this missile, but nuclear weapons ends up in the hands of Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group.
Any Ambassador or Foreign Service Officer who has his or her head screwed on right knows that the U.S. position in the world is far more dependent on our ability to compete in world markets.
Embassy officers need to understand how business works, something that is not necessarily guaranteed by a PhD in economics.
I think what he's - what he believes, and he may be correct, I don't know, that we have some intelligence information that leads us to know some things about what's going on in Iraq that we haven't revealed to others.
If George Bush decided he was going to turn the troops loose on Syria and Iran after that he would last in office for about 15 minutes. In fact if President Bush were to try that now even I would think that he ought to be impeached. You can't get away with that sort of thing in this democracy.
In a time of constrained resources we will have to shift emphasis. but not necessarily from the traditional Political Officer to the traditional Economic Officer.
In the best of all worlds everyone in the Embassy is doing something to assist U.S. exports.
Most Ambassadors and most Senior Foreign Service Officers understand, and the younger generation of Foreign Service Officers clearly understands, the importance of export promotion. We are much better off now, but it is too early to tell if the export priority is institutionalized.
My point here is I think international pressures of our acting unilaterally again are going to be such that the administration will say, well, we just can't take this on now.
Now there is a cultural change under way in the Foreign Service.
Small- and medium-sized companies do not know what we have to offer and that needs to be changed. We must react just as strenuously on their behalf as we do for larger companies.
Some day, somebody is going to have to start talking about what happens to us all a decade from now if we let these North Koreans and the Iranians go forward with their nuclear weapons program.
That said, there is a tendency to help the large industrial conglomerate more quickly than the small company you have never heard of. That is something in the culture we are trying to change.
The Foreign Service has spent 50 years concentrating on political and military affairs at a time when the U.S. economy was preeminent.
The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union was more mature about this whole thing than I think the North Koreans will be.
The question is not really about a shift to the economic cone where officers are writing about the balance of payments and the need for economic stabilization.
The question really is how do we get Embassy Officers into the minds of the American business community. That is a much more difficult task than understanding a statistical matrix.
The whole nuclear thing is a terrible mess and it's hard for me to understand why it is that we, the United States, seem to be the only ones that are really particularly concerned about it and prepared to do something.
There has been a major improvement in the way U.S. Ambassadors and the Foreign Service establishment try to assist U.S. business overall.
There is a natural partnership between State and Commerce, and the American business community to work together to educate the United States about marketing overseas.
We have to spend a lot more time training people to be good advocates of U.S. business.
We must advertise to U.S. business that we are there, that our attitude has changed, and that we care. When we are asked to help, we have to perform and provide the right advice.
We must institute more training to give Foreign Service Officers the skills to do what they must do in this new world of commercial competition.
What I can't quite see at this stage is that the evidence, even to the president, seems to be that clear. And if it is that clear, I can't understand why we are not capable of convincing our closest allies that given that evidence, they ought to join us in this effort.
What is more important is that Foreign Service Officers understand business, about the needs of U.S. business and how to help U.S. companies make the right connections abroad.
What we need is to develop in all Foreign Service Officers a better instinct for understanding the needs of U.S. business abroad.
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