The Washington Diplomat’s Ambassador Insider Series resumed after a two-year hiatus with our March 30 event featuring Koji Tomita, Japan’s ambassador to the United States—just as the Japanese cherry blossoms bloomed in the nation’s capital.
David Mirejovsky and Jan Kaliba have covered it all—from the chaotic US presidential election of 2020 to the 17-year life cycle of cicadas. Both journalists spoke at a March 22 event titled “America Through the Eyes of Czech Foreign Correspondents.”
Moldova, which for years has vied with Ukraine for the unenviable title of “poorest country in Europe,” now has a more urgent concern: the potentially horror of a Russian invasion if Vladimir Putin gets his way in Ukraine.
Lianys Torres Rivera, Cuba’s ambassador in Washington, rails against the US trade embargo, which turned 60 last month.
On March 1, the Center for European Policy Analysis asked the ambassadors of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia how they’re helping Ukraine confront the Kremlin threat while ensuring that their own countries won’t be next on Putin’s hit list.
While historians are comparing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to the Nazi’s land grab in Czechoslovakia in 1939, and some U.S. politicians are doing their best to play this generation’s Neville Chamberlain, others are not going gentle into that good night.
Diplomacy works best when there are two rational actors negotiating at the same table, with the same set of rules and guiding principles. This was not the case here and it is wrong to glibly proclaim that what we are witnessing today is a failure of diplomacy.
St. Kitts & Nevis—barely twice the size of the District of Columbia—is the smallest independent sovereign nation in the Western Hemisphere. Representing this tiny twin-island Caribbean federation in Washington is Ambassador Thelma Phillip-Browne, a doctor by profession who’s also an evangelist preacher and one of her country’s all-time champions in netball.
The new local capacity development policy of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) will very likely set the tone for how its partners and other development institutions begin to re-imagine local capacity building. At both national and subnational levels, one actor will be crucial to the success of these efforts: the government.
As much as Turkey would like to stay out of the current Russian bloodbath engulfing Ukraine, it can no longer remain neutral—a geopolitical reality acknowledged by Ankara’s ambassador in Washington, Hasan Murat Mercan.
Even if his invasion succeeds in toppling Ukraine’s government, Russian President Vladimir Putin has already lost.
When Nureldin Mohamed Hamed Satti arrived in Washington back in July 2020, he was welcomed as Khartoum’s first ambassador to the United States in 23 years. Yet Satti’s mission proved to be short-lived. On Jan. 31, the 75-year-old former UN official was forced to resign after a military coup back home plunged Sudan into a political and humanitarian crisis.
The current state of US-China relations is the worst since Nixon’s landmark trip to Beijing 50 years ago, says a prominent China scholar.
The United States has stepped up pressure on Bangladesh to join its Indo-Pacific military pact to contain China, but it is using a false pretext that may rile up the Bengali nation that carries the bitter memory of America’s opposition to its birth.