Posted: 1:35 am EDT
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Excerpt from D/Secretary Antony J. Blinken on “American Diplomacy: Preparing for the Challenges of Tomorrow,” February 2, 2016:
Every day, our team here at State works towards big goals like this that benefit from the leadership and creativity of the innovation community.
And every day, our team tackles issues at the intersection of technology and foreign policy—from modernizing arms control agreements to negotiating norms of behavior in cyberspace or outer space.
Despite this focus, we need to create more bridges that allow our diplomats to tap into the energy and ingenuity of American education, innovation, and entrepreneurship—and enable our foreign policy priorities to spark or accelerate new ideas.
Developed under Deputy Secretary Burns’ leadership, the Foreign Service Institute’s Center for the Study of the Conduct of Diplomacy is one such bridge—ensuring that we apply the lessons of the past to our conduct and actions in the future.
We are also developing a new core curriculum at FSI, to ensure that everyone starts their careers with foundational knowledge and skills relevant to this century. Through new and experiential training, we will prepare our officers to better understand unstated assumptions that shape conflict and collaboration, apply future forecasting to the geopolitical world of tomorrow, and tap into unconscious drivers of behavior that will help us effectively conduct and advance our foreign policy.
To help build another of these bridges, Secretary Kerry recently established the Innovation Forum in order to enable our foreign policy leaders to be able to see around the innovation corner—to ask important questions like: “What does the revolution in robotics mean for warfighting? What do advances in artificial intelligence mean for our labor markets? What does the advent of digital currency mean for the dollar?”
Read in full here.
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Oh, George Orwell, where are you now that you are so desperately needed!
Translation of this: “We are also developing a new core curriculum at FSI, to ensure that everyone starts their careers with foundational knowledge and skills relevant to this century. Through new and experiential training, we will prepare our officers to better understand unstated assumptions that shape conflict and collaboration, apply future forecasting to the geopolitical world of tomorrow, and tap into unconscious drivers of behavior that will help us effectively conduct and advance our foreign policy.”
More gender-sensitivity training, more role-playing for enhanced cultural understanding and less reading of history of a nation or region in area studies; repudiate Western civilization as it is filled with prejudices and racism (unstated assumptions); ignore u.s. national security interests for creating a narrative of our future (future forecasting); emote and speculate on why people behave in favor of their interests instead of seeing it our enlightened way (tap into unconscious drivers of behavior).