us state department

March 22, 2017

When it comes to taking on the world, the two words the Trump administration swears by are “America First.” [...] For Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who until now spent the entirety of his career at ExxonMobil, the challenge he faced on a headline-grabbing trip to Asia was how to translate President Donald Trump’s mandate into a workable foreign policy.

When we think of diplomacy, we may think of talking — people in a room, face to face. But that world of diplomacy is changing and the connected world is playing a much greater role, according to Anne-Marie Slaughter, who worked for the State Department during the Obama administration. Slaughter's new book is called "The Chessboard & the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World." She spoke with us about what it means to be a diplomat in the digital age.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrives in Asia on Wednesday for his first foreign trip with almost no fanfare. He’s travelling on a “small plane” with “a modest footprint,” says a spokesman. He’s bringing along just one reporter and will hold only one brief press conference during his planned stops in Japan, South Korea and China. It’s a far cry from the splash Hillary Clinton made in February 2009 on her first trip abroad as secretary of state, following a similar itinerary through Asia. 

If America can be said to have a public diplomacy — that is, government-directed outreach to international publics — then someone needs to throw it a lifeline. In only the last few weeks, we have seen evidence of a coming crisis for defenders of America’s international image: The State Department budget, as previewed by the President in his speech to Congress this week, is set to take a serious hit. 

These professionals need Tillerson just as Tillerson will need these professionals to conduct America’s foreign relations and to repair the damage done to relationships in the past several weeks. America’s newest face to the world will need to present a more reassuring diplomacy than that conducted most recently. In banning visas for all citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, Trump played to the fears of his nativist political base.

January 4, 2017

When he leaves the Oval Office this month, he will have safeguarded more of the ocean than any other president, and increased the amount of protected waters around the U.S. by 20 times. His administration has also worked to improve American fisheries, clamp down on illegal fishing, and create national policies for protecting the oceans. Such measures are vital at a time when the oceans are imperiled by many threats.

They're some of the brightest students in the country – a group of wunderkinds known for hacking their way through any problem thrown at them. So what could possibly stump a Stanford University student? [...] dozens of engineering, science and arts students were put through the bureaucratic wringer this year when they took Hacking 4 Defence and Hacking 4 Diplomacy. 

The number of international students at U.S. colleges and universities topped 1 million for the first time, paced by a surge of graduate students in sciences, engineering and math from India. China still sends the most students — 328,500 or nearly a third — but enrollments from India climbed 25 percent to almost 166,000 in 2015–2016.

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