COMMENTARY
Powell leads without being overbearing
By Tom Plate
The job of U.S. secretary of state requires skating on ice — sometimes thin — and dodging diplomatic bullets, even if they later are found to be blanks. From this standpoint, could the United States do any better than Colin Powell?
Associated Press
The retired four-star general was on the road yet again last week. It was an eight-day, eight-country swing through much of South and Southeast Asia that he'll probably remember as one of his finer stretches in office.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, right, meets Indonesian Foreign Minister Hasan Wirayuda in Jakarta Friday. On his eight-day Asia trip, Powell has won diplomatic victories but left out the usual U.S. triumphalism.
It started bumpily enough, though, in tension-filled South Asia, where India did not take kindly to his advice about "internationalizing" upcoming elections in disputed Kashmir and Jammu — and in Pakistan, which seemed irritated by the brevity of his visit there (five hours and on to Thailand).
But Powell was, in public at least, unruffled about the Indian rebuff. For in the court of public opinion, he had made his point: On both sides of the South Asian divide, improvement is needed: India has to practice democracy more, and Pakistan should sponsor terrorism less.
Then Powell went on to Brunei, site of a foreign-minister-level meeting hosted by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, where he produced winners. Not unexpectedly but significantly, one of the three charter members of President Bush's "axis of evil" showed up. You never know what the North Koreans will do. But when Powell made himself available for a quick chat, North Korea's foreign minister took the opportunity. The two had an "unplanned" get-together. It turned out to be the highest-level contact between Pyongyang and Washington — despite its brief, 15-minute duration — since the Bush administration took office.
The instant effect was to resurrect from the dead South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's preternaturally wise but much-maligned "sunshine policy" of positive diplomacy with the North.
All week, Powell was the main man in motion, also touching down for talks in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Singapore; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Manila in the Philippines. Even more than the president of the United States, the secretary of state in this interdependent age has to be a traveling man or woman. The job doesn't need so much a glad-handing politician as it does a credible and soft-spoken vicar for our nation's foreign policy who doesn't cause an otherwise loyal ally's hair to stand on end or prompt an edgy foe to pump up the weapons budget.
Fortunately, Powell is no blunderbuss. He has generally been careful, as to some extent has been his counterpart at the Defense Department, Donald Rumsfeld, to recognize that the American way is not necessarily the only good way to go. And so after helping put together a pair of anti-terror pacts with ASEAN in Brunei last week, he went out of his way to avoid the usual American rah-rah triumphalism.
Indeed, in Singapore, with Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong looking on approvingly, he pointedly sought to make the reassuring point that the U.S. was not about to force anti-terror troops down the throats of Asian governments. And any such deployments would be carefully crafted to fit into the local cultures and customs, rather than antagonizing or even rolling over them. Said Powell: "That's the way we go about these missions — try not to be heavy-handed, try to go to help."
With this, Powell in effect joined hands with a recent predecessor, Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton's first secretary of state — also viewed as a dove but in fact a call-'em-as-I-see-'em pragmatist. In a wide-ranging speech this year at UCLA, Christopher emphasized the urgent need for America to keeps its ego under control if it wishes to maximize its diplomatic effectiveness.
"While the United States might often be the architect of an initiative," he said of the best approach, "other nations would join in the planning and construction, their views would have weight, and their interests would be respected. We might be the leader, but not the boss."
To be sure, Powell is not the boss, and he knows who is. But he is the leader of the kinder, gentler American image abroad. Without him, the Bush administration risks losing ground internationally by seeming to want to grab too much of it. With him, it loses no ground at all simply by letting him lead.
Tom Plate, a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post, is a professor at UCLA. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu. He also has a spot on the Web.
