U.S. State Department civil servant cum rock star Jared Cohen gave an interesting speech June 2 on the intersection of technology and diplomatic troubleshooting. In addition to introducing me to the term “proxy/circumvention” technology, the speech traced the non-partisan growth in the U.S. State Department’s appreciation for both the IT/software/telecommunications industry/market and the role of companies such as Facebook, Google (GOOG), Twitter and others in what Cohen called diplomatic “troubleshooting.”
I say civil servant and non-partisan because -- although an Internet-era wunderkind -- Cohen is not one of Obama’s wunderkinder but a protégé of Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice out of Stanford. At the risk of building Cohen’s ego up more than his six-year rise to Silicon-Valley-meets-Foggy-Bottom-via-Oxford fame must have already done, the kid’s exploits at the State Department from 2006-2010 remind me of the history behind the importance of the State Department in the 1943 campaign by the U.S. military to free North Africa from the Nazis.
Bradley, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Patton and maybe a million American and Brit soldiers rightfully get the credit of course. But a U.S. State Department “troubleshooter” named Murphy took the pressure off them by getting the Vichy French to surrender without firing back in the Algiers invasion landing zone. Robert D. Murphy was already 20 years into a State Department career at the time and went on to be Eisenhower’s personal representative in occupied Germany, Truman’s ambassador to Japan (another non-partisan angle) and the U.S.’s first Career Ambassador.
Among other oddities in Murphy’s 40-year real-life Forrest Gump journey, Murphy lived across the street from Hitler in Vienna in the early 20’s when Murphy served at the consulate there. “Diplomat” Jared Cohen seems to have a similar knack of being in the wrong place at the right time. Although his bio says he has traveled widely already in his short life, in the 21st century, being in the wrong place at the right time can also be done virtually. That was the case, the story goes, when Cohen realized he needed to get Twitter to delay a maintenance upgrade scheduled during daylight hours in Iran during the 2009 Iranian election protests so that the protesters could keep twittering.
That’s where Cohen’s June 2010 speech about technology and diplomacy (and the January 2010 speech by his current uberlord Hillary Clinton on “internet freedom”) start to bother me. Despite the Iranian’s tweeting, neither they nor the rest of the world are any better off because of it.
I got the impression that Cohen understood that technology was just an enabler but I’m not sure he got that point across to his mostly young audience. Will they all enter the real world thinking that when it comes to world peace, “there’s an app for that?”
Unfortunately, while I favorably compare Cohen with Murphy, I unfavorably compare his connection to IT companies with the infamous U.S. government involvement of IT&T in Chile and other places during the 1960s and 1970s. I still say software (and other technology) should have no nationality.
-- Dennis Byron
(No financial interest in companies mentioned)
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