Confederate Yankee ("Because liberalism is a persistent vegetative state.") relays an old story.
Money quote(s):
“ITEM: Shouldn’t America’s Ambassador to the United Nations represent...America? Not so much these days. When George Schultz was Secretary of State, he often invited new foreign service officers to his office and asked them to point out, on a map, the country they would be representing. They would invariably point to the nation to which they had been posted. Mr. Schultz would then point to America and tell them that it was the nation they represented. According to Fox News (here) British Prime Minister David Cameron is defunding four U.N agencies at the end of next year. They are: The UN International Development Organization, UN-Habitat, The International Labor Organization, and the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. Mr. Cameron, faced with his own budget crunch, has concluded that the agencies don’t accomplish squat, and don’t accomplish it at a very high cost indeed, so England is no longer playing. In the meantime, American Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice has been criss-crossing the nation trying to raise money for the UN. Uh, wasn’t she supposed to represent American interests at the UN, not fundraise for it? I get so confused by these high-level issues. Rather a shame we don’t have a Secretary of State like Mr. Schultz anymore, isn’t it? Discuss.“
Funny, but that very story is told to new FSOs during their initial training orientation.
So the professional diplomats out there have already had this explained to them.
The way I heard it, was the SecState would ask new ambassadors to show him, on a map, "their" country.
Which is a little more ambiguous, in terms of the ambassadors' actual duties (and a lot less insulting) that asking what country they "represent."
And it got the essential point across without being stupidly nasty about it.
Still, I did rather wonder what Amb. Rice was trying to accomplish, when I'd earlier heard the same news report.
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