US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (Photo: Wiki commons)

And its been getting advice from the Obama administration on how to deal with the uncertainty.

Israel should do more to mend fences with some of its neighbors.

That was part of a message sent by secretary of defense Leon Panetta in a recent speech. Panetta was careful not to blame Israel alone for its increasing diplomatic isolation.

But it’s a problem, Panetta explained. And he urged the Israelis to take bold action to fix it.

When he was asked what Israel should do about the long-stalled peace process with the Palestinians, Panetta said, “get to the damn table.” Panetta repeated the mantra about an unshakable US commitment to Israel’s security. But he also seemed to be asking Israel for more diplomatic effort.

Not just with the Palestinians. But with other regional players, starting with Turkey and Egypt. Israel’s relations with both countries have suffered big setbacks this year.

“I think Israelis are scratching their heads in terms of Panetta’s no doubt well-intentioned but hopelessly naïve and irrelevant admonishment,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, a foreign policy expert at the Shalom Hartman Center in Jerusalem.

He said the Obama administration is failing to grasp what the so-called Arab Spring means for Israel.

“There is nothing more frightening for Israelis when we look around the region and see the rise of Islamist regimes, which may or may not be all kinds of things,” Halevi said. “They may be pro-democratic or anti-democratic, but one thing they all are is hostile, not just to Israel’s policies, but Israel’s existence.”

These are confusing times in the Middle East. And the Obama administration appears to be in a state of confusion itself, said Jonathan Rynhold of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv.

In the case of Turkey, for example, Rynhold said the big reasons why its relationship with Israel has changed so much is mostly due to Turkey’s internal dynamics.

“And the same really goes for Egypt,” he added. “I mean, at the end of the day, this is a very deep change in Egyptian politics and there’s not really much that Israel can do on the strategic level.”

On the tactical level, Rynhold said Israel could use carrots and sticks with its potential partners and rivals as the region works through this period of transition. But that’s a long-term process, he said. Most of what develops in the Arab world will not be determined by outside influences.

One former Israeli diplomat has a very different view. He welcomed the speech by Panetta, because he said Israel’s current government is guilty of sitting on its hands at a critical time. The government should not be taking a wait and see approach, he said. Things are not likely to get any easier as time goes on.

Paul Hirschson, spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, said he’s heard this criticism before. He said there is an ongoing debate inside Israeli policy circles over whether to reach out or to pull back. At the same time, Hirschon said this might not be the time for Israel to be taking big risks.

“What’s going on in the Arab world right now, what we are calling the ‘Arab Spring’, is not about us. It’s about them,” Hirschon said. “And it’s the Arab populations taking responsibility for themselves. And the truth is that we really do need to sit on the sidelines a little bit and see how it develops.”

Maybe this will turn out to be a time for Israel to engage to its neighbors diplomatically. But if it that does happen, it’s likely to take place carefully and quietly.

Marco Werman (left) interviewed Ambassador Holbrooke in March (Photo: Mike Wilkins)

Nearly two years ago he became President Obama’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. There were some sceptics at the time.

Holbrooke was known for banging heads together and speaking bluntly to war criminals. This new job was about coordinating and corralling US policy in a region even more complicated than the Balkans. But Holbrooke sank his teeth into it as only he could.

Caroline Wadhams, Director of South Asia Security Studies at the Center for American Progress said Holbrooke made tremendous contributions to the civilian side of US efforts in both countries.

He tripled the number of civilians working in Afghanistan on behalf of the US government. He shifted the counter-narcotics strategy away from aerial spraying of poppy fields toward something more comprehensive and he stepped up regional diplomatic efforts.

Holbrooke also broke down bureaucratic barriers in Washington. Vali Nasr, a senior advisor to Holbrooke, said that will be one of his legacies.

“The idea of having a whole-of-government approach within one unit in order to make the US government much more effective in reaching its objectives,” Nasr said.

The interagency group Holbrooke put together for Afghanistan and Pakistan was legendary. It included outside experts, handpicked Foreign Service officers and representatives of key agencies and departments such as the FBI, the CIA, the Treasury, Homeland Security, and USAID.

Peter Bergen, Director of the National Security Studies program at the New America Foundation in Washington called Richard Holbrooke an extraordinary human being.

“If you walked into his office in the State Department for a meeting, he would turn it into a freewheeling discussion about what was going on in Afghanistan with anybody and everybody who walked in,” Bergen said. “He was very democratic in the way he ran things in his office. Anybody could offer an opinion. He encouraged dissension and argumentation and he hired some extraordinary people to work with him.”

Holbrooke needed those extraordinary people. He had taken on the most complicated and onerous assignment available with the knowledge that time was of the essence if anything was to be accomplished. And now he has left the stage at a critical moment. Bergen thinks the job will continue but it won’t be the same.

“No one’s going to fill Ambassador Holbrooke’s shoes,” Bergen said. “By sheer dint of personality he’s one of the most unusual Foreign Service officers, diplomats the United States has ever seen. They will find someone else to do the job but it won’t be done with quite his passion and ability to get things done.”

Bergen said the only person who comes to mind who might fit the bill going forward is the three-star general and current US ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry.

“This is not a job where you just put in somebody who’s very bright,” Bergen said. “The learning curve is enormously steep to understand the complexities. You’d need someone who doesn’t need 6 months to get up to speed. “

It’s not just Holbrooke’s experience and stature that are gone; it’s his advocacy of civilian issues as a route to peace. Caroline Wadhams worries about that loss.

“He was really a force within the administration for pushing these issues forward. It’s very sad, both personally, for his family and for his friends and colleagues, but also for the strategy,” Wadhams said.

That strategy is now under review and a report from the Obama Administration is imminent. It’s expected to say there’s been some significant progress, but there’s still a long way to go. Holbrooke always knew it would be a long road but he relished the challenge.
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Marco Werman’s interview with Ambassador Holbrooke (Mar 2010)
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• Ambassador Holbrooke’s life in pictures
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Liberian English and its cousin Liberian Kreyol are littered with pithy sayings. Most of them, though, are as incomprehensible as badly translated Chinese fortunes. For example: Your child cannot poo poo on your lap, and you cut your legs off, you just have to clean them off. Or: If one keeps pressing a young bird in his palms, the bird may one day stooled in his hands. So, on the face of it, lots of toilet humor. But the meanings of many of these sayings aren’t intended to be funny. Several include refererences to Liberia’s civil war and refugee camps. Jason’s report centers around the night when he and his fellow Jason — with plenty of help from local experts — picked the best proverb.

Is this script a language? Yes and no. The writing system is Arabic. But the language isn’t. In this case, it’s Mandinka, one of many African languages that often use Arabic script. In fact, these languages have borrowed Arabic script for more than a thousand years. What’s interesting though, is that Ajami has been overlooked by most historians; African history has been told through the lens of English, French or Arabic documents. Also, because Ajami isn’t a language, Africans who used it were often classified as illiterate, even though they were quite capable of writing sentences of Mandinka or Hausa or Wolof. Now Ajami is getting a bit more respect, thanks to people like Fallou Ngom of Boston University and Dmitry Bondarev of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Every year, 4,000 staffers at the United Nations in New York sign up for language classes. There, they learn not just how to say things in other languages but how to say them diplomatically. Which can mean being clear, or being extremely unclear, depending on what’s required. That takes practise, as does learning how to interrupt and assert yourself without being rude. Most of us have trouble with that in our mother tongues.
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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World.  Here’s a daydream for you.

You’ve quit your job, but you’re actively encouraged to write down your thoughts about the whole thing, and then send them off to your former colleagues. Well, that was long standard practice for British diplomats, as The World’s Alex Gallafent reports.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  For centuries, British ambassadors wrote “valedictory dispatches,” final thoughts on their overseas postings.  The reports were then fed through the veins of the British government.  The tradition ended in 2006, but the dispatches still make for good reading.

VOICE OVER: Sir David Hunt, Lagos, 1969.

GALLAFENT:  All the excerpts, by the way, are read by fruity British actors.

VOICE OVER:  The Nigerians certainly deserve a happy and united future after all they have gone through.  I have a great affection for them, because they’re generally cheerful and friendly, in  spite of their maddening habit of always choosing the course of action which will do the maximum damage to their own interest.  They’re not singular in this.  Africans as a whole are not only not averse to cutting off their nose to spite their face.  They regard such an operation as a triumph of cosmetic surgery.

GALLAFENT:  If it’s not clear by now, the private tone of British diplomats hasn’t always been, well, politically correct.  Their parting shots were confidential.  That allowed the authors to write freely.  But now the dispatches are coming to light.  Sir Christopher Meyer is a former British ambassador to the United States.  For him, the quality of valedictory dispatches varied as much as the quality of those who wrote them.

SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: What I think one looked for was not only profound analysis, but you looked for wit, and you also looked for a person touch, which necessarily meant a reflection of the ambassador’s personality.  Now some ambassadors are incredibly pompous and boring, and that would come through.

GALLAFENT:  For instance: Ambassador Roger Pinsent, on leaving Nicaragua in 1967.

VOICE OVER: There is, I fear, no question but that the average Nicaraguan is one of the most dishonest, unreliable, and alcoholic of the Latin Americans. Their version of Spanish is quite the least attractive I have come across.

GALLAFENT:  Today, the British valedictory dispatch is no more.  Email made confidentiality harder to preserve, and recent freedom of information laws allowed the public access to the documents.  Some say British lawmakers are losing a source of candid opinions from their departing diplomats. For instance, Dame Glynne-Evans wrote this on leaving Portugal in 2004.

VOICE OVER: The more we stand by principle the better. Expediency does not pay. Departing from international humanitarian law, even just a little bit, is like being just a little bit pregnant

GALLAFENT:  But maybe some opinions won’t be missed.

VOICE OVER: Sir Anthony Rumbold, Bangkok, 1967.  I have very much enjoyed living for a while in Thailand.  It is true they have no literature, no painting, and only a very odd kind of music.  Nobody can deny that gambling and golf are the chief pleasures of the rich, and that licentiousness is the main pleasure of them all.  But it does a faded European good to spend some time among such a jolly, extrovert and anti-intellectual people.

GALLAFENT:  Britain’s current ambassador to Thailand has already reacted to the release of that missive from 1967.  Quinton Quayle praised ”the richness of Thai culture, and the charm and warmth of the Thai people.”  For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.

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• Obama’s Nobel win: Full citation
• World leaders react to Obama’s win
• Global editorial cartoonists react to Obama’s prize
• Jeb Sharp’s weekly history podcast

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark.  This is The World.  Surprised and deeply humbled.  That’s how President Obama described how he felt when he heard he’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  Here’s more of what the president had to say this morning at the White House.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Throughout history the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement.  It’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes, and that is why I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st Century.

CLARK: Only two other U.S. presidents were awarded the Peace Prize while in office.  They were Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919.  Jimmy Carter won it when he was already a former president.  The World’s Jeb Sharp begins our coverage.

JEB SHARP: Even those who support President Obama’s policies were skeptical. Charles Grant directs the Center for European Reform in London. He was chairing a conference this morning with experts and dignitaries from all over Europe. He said when the news broke people were stunned.

CHARLES GRANT: This is in a room of people who are generally sympathetic to Obama. They like his multilateralism.  They like the fact that he doesn’t talk in a unilateralist way as George Bush did, and yet the feeling was, and it’s my feeling too, how strange to award a prize to someone before they have achieved anything.  It has to be said, in terms of peace Obama has great ambitions, but has not achieved anything yet as far as we can see.

SHARP: President Obama seemed to acknowledge as much himself.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize. Men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.  But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women and all Americans want to build.

THOMAS KNOCK: This does seem to be a prize that is more prospective than retrospective.

SHARP: That’s historian Thomas Knock, an authority on Woodrow Wilson, the last sitting U.S. president to win the prize.

KNOCK: I think to encourage a certain kind of initiative and a certain kind of thinking about international relations and I think that’s a good idea.  I think a lot of people will debate whether or not this was a deserved prize, and I think Obama deserves tremendous credit, should get credit, for saying that he himself wonders whether or not he deserved this.

SHARP: The prize usually, but not always, goes to someone with a considerable peace-related achievement under their belt.  Someone like Woodrow Wilson.

KNOCK: Well, Woodrow Wilson is regarded as the father of internationalism in a sense, the founder and creator of the League of Nations, which was established at the end of the First World War to lessen the possibility of another catastrophe like the First World War.

SHARP: The League was a failure in the end, not least because Congress balked and the United States never joined.  But in the sense that it was a precursor to the United Nations, the idea eventually prevailed. Theodore Roosevelt was the other president who won a Nobel Peace Prize while in office; in his case for mediating an end to the Russian-Japanese war of 1905.  Roosevelt, of course, is famous for his line “speak softly and carry a big stick.”  For all the talk of peace, President Obama finds himself using a big stick, not least in Afghanistan. The irony of giving a Peace Prize to a man prosecuting two wars was not lost today.   For The World, I’m Jeb Sharp

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

To get what you want in foreign policy, according to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, you’ve got military force at one end of the spectrum. And at the other end are words of reason. Somewhere in the middle is diplomacy, economic sanctions, foreign aid, and…pins. Brooches. Madeleine Albright’s extensive collection of brooches. Some are delicate, some are gaudy. And the messages they carry are as terse as a State Department cable. You can hear what those pins have said in “Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat’s Jewel Box.” Secretary Albright stopped by our studios to chat with Marco Werman.

• More about the book
• New Yorker Magazine Slideshow

Madeleine Albright discusses a different piece of jewelry she owns:

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, and this is The World.  To get what you want in foreign policy, according to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, you’ve got military force at one end of the spectrum.  And at the other end are words of reason.  Somewhere in the middle is diplomacy, economic sanctions, foreign aid, and…pins.  Brooches.  Madeleine Albright’s extensive collection of brooches, in fact.  Some delicate, some gaudy.  And the messages they carry are as terse as a State Department cable.  You can hear what those pins have said in “Read My Pins:  Stories from a Diplomat’s Jewel Box.”  Madame Secretary, thank you for coming in.  They’re on display right now at the Museum of Arts and Design?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: They are.  And Marco, it’s great to be with you.  And I have to say, the show is fabulous and surprised me a little bit….  Since I, at home, keep these things in hanging plastic bags.  It all started because Saddam Hussein, I was ambassador at the UN.  We had a lot of sanctions, resolutions after the Gulf War.  There was a poem in their controlled press in which he called me an “unparalleled serpent.”  And I happened to have a snake pin.  So I wore that.  And then I thought, ‘Well this is fun.’  So, I then bought a bunch of other mostly costume jewelry, just to declare what my mood was.

WERMAN: Right, and it’s about messages, sending messages out to the public and other diplomats.  Did people get the snake pin?  Did they understand what it meant?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I think they did.  And finally they all got it, to some extent or another.  And they would look to see what I was wearing.  And then of course, I think people remember the first President Bush said, “Read my lips, no new taxes.”  So that’s why, when they said, “What are we doing today?”  I’d say “Read my pins.”

WERMAN: [LAUGHS]  Men are relatively limited in what they can use, dress wise, to express themselves.  We’ve got a suit and tie.  You must have discovered pretty early on that you had a whole arsenal of tools that men didn’t.  Was that empowering?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I think it was.  You know, there was a whole question mark about whether a woman could be Secretary of State.  And as you’ve probably noticed, there are more comments about what women wear, their haircuts, or whatever, than ever happens to a man. So I decided, I love being a woman, and decided I would wear bright colors and get some good clothes.  And so the pins were just an addition to that.

WERMAN: You know, you point out in your book men do wear pins, too, and we see them all the time.  Generals:  their power is kind of encoded with silk color pins on their chests in North Korea, loyalty to the leader, and the Communist Party via pins.  And of course, here in the US, we can’t forget the little flag pins.  And this was brought to bear on President Obama during the campaign when he was pestered about not wearing a flag pin, then he put one on.  It seems like there’s almost a small amount of pressure to wear the flag pin. What are your thoughts?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I think, I love to wear my Americana.  But I do it by choice.  And it’s really only in countries with dictatorships where people have to wear the face of the dictator, [PH] Kim Chanyo for instance, or Mao Zedong.  And I thought it was really silly.  I mean, President Obama was a patriotic candidate, he’s definitely a patriotic president.  And so to have that be some kind of a test of loyalty…. It’s one thing to wear things by choice, it’s another to force people to do it.

WERMAN: Let’s put you in the present, briefly.  If you had been in the room yesterday in Geneva with the Iranians, what pin would you have worn?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I have a great pin.  It is a dove and an eagle. And it really would in fact…I think, symbolize what’s supposed to be going on there, which is incentives and disincentives.  Of really offering some way the Iranians can come into the system, but making very clear that there is the strength of international unity to push them on some of these issues.  So that’s what I would have worn.  But we don’t know where this is headed.  Yesterday was actually a pretty good day in terms of what the Iranians had agreed to…inspections, and the possibility of bringing fuel in from outside and shipping some of their fuel out.  But as President Obama said, this is the beginning of the long road.

WERMAN: You were critical of foreign policy under President George W. Bush.  President Obama had promised, basically, a 180 degree turn from that, vowing to engage with people described previously as enemies.  Presumably, you support him in that?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Very much so. Because I think the issue here is, you have to talk to your enemies.  And there’s this misconception that talking is just “happy talk.”  I mean, I was in a lot of tough meetings where you’d deliver a very hard message.  You can’t do that if you do not have some kind of a relationship.  And so I fully agree.

WERMAN: There’s also the perception that if President Obama does engage with “so called enemies,” he’d appear weak.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I so disagree.  I know there’s this thing that “talking is appeasement, if you take responsibility for some bad action you’re apologizing…” I think that’s ridiculous.  What President Obama has done is really restore credibility to the American word.  To American character.  And so I think that you have to show the desire to at least listen and never forget your own national interests.  And I think that’s been happening, very much so.

WERMAN: Let me ask you, briefly, about Afghanistan.  What does Mister Obama do about this?  Because it has been, and is still arguably a haven for terrorists.  And yet can Mister Obama afford to put in   more troops to shut down that haven, especially when Afghanistan doesn’t take well to foreign occupation.  When Al-Qaida can and is training in other places?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: What is happening now, which I have to say is very good decision making, is President Obama is gathering his National Security advisors to go over the situation there and what General [PH] McCrystal has suggested.  And for me, he is the epitome of what I called for in my previous book, “A Memo to the President,” in which I said we needed a “confident” president rather than a “certain” president.  Because confidence allows him to hear all these different views.  And I think he will be looking at various parts.  But it is hard.  Because I think if we pull out, then I think there is that vacuum that was there before.  If we have a massive force, then as you point out, we become an occupation force.  And NATO has a very large role in this.  So there are a lot of questions.  And I think President Obama’s going about this in the right way.

WERMAN: As I look through certain pictures in this book, it seems like a more innocent time.  Here’s a picture of you with the Egyptian president, [PH] Hasseim Hubarrec at the signing of an interim agreement between Israeli Prime Minister [PH] Ahoud Bereck and Palestinian Chairman [PH] Yassir Arafat.  Now if we look at what’s happening in the Middle East today, President Obama lost round one, if you will, when he failed to get a freeze on settlements.  How big of a setback was this, do you think?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I think that he, in many ways, had a good round by bringing Prime Minister [PH] Netanyahu and [PH] Malamud Abas, the President of the Palestinians together in New York.  But again, I think this is one of the most difficult issues out there.  Senator Mitchell, as the envoy, has been on the ground.  And I think it’s very important to have somebody that does it on a day to day basis…. There, I think, will be some forward movement and more talks.  But it is very, very hard.  And I do think that the US has to be in a position where we are the party, the only party, actually, that can bring the Palestinians and Israelis together.  But this is a long slog.

WERMAN: While we’re talking about the Middle East, tell us about the pins you’re wearing today.  You have matching earrings to go with it.  Were these the gifts from [PH] Laya Ravin?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Yes!  What happened was, [PH] Laya Ravin gave me a gift…the widow of [PH] Itzak Ravin…she gave me a dove pin in order to show, obviously, that peace was very important.  And I wore it whenever we had a Middle East speech.   I like it a lot, and it is on the cover of my book I wrote about God and religion in foreign police, “The Mighty and the Almighty.”  And Archbishop Tutu, really one of the remarkable people, said, “Religion is like a knife.  You can either shove it into somebody’s back, or cut bread with it.”  And religion is like that.  And so that’s why I wrote about it in terms of foreign policy and the dove seemed like an appropriate symbol for that.

WERMAN: Former Secretary of Sate, Madeleine Albright’s new book is called “Read My Pins:  Stories from a Diplomat’s Jewel Box.”  Madame Secretary, thank you so much for coming in.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Thanks, Marco.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.