Pacific Island Times September 2017 Vol 2 Issue No. 12 | Page 5

Brief Chat
Two decades in foreign service
By Bruce Lloyd
I
t’s hard to imagine a more disheartening time
to be a career diplomat or foreign service offi-
cer for the United States. President Trump has
made clear his disdain for diplomatic niceties
or the traditions and understandings that
underlie the work of the U.S. State De-
partment. In what was later and unper-
suasively described as a joke, but then
reiterated by the president, Trump
actually thanked Russia’s Vladimir
Putin for kicking out more than 700
American diplomatic person-
nel there, saying, untruthfully,
that it would save the govern-
ment payroll money.
Yuri Kim, a foreign service
officer, who grew up on Guam,
maintained a stiff diplomatic
upper lip as she spoke to a group
of University of Guam students
about potential foreign service
careers, noting that she’s one
of three foreign service
officers officially from
Guam. She wants to
encourage more Guam
young persons to take
the foreign service
exam.
Kim, a graduate of
Academy of Our Lady
said: “I felt that the
exposure I had to various
cultures here, including
Korea where I was born,
Japan, where we have
so many of our tourists
and our business con-
nections, Taiwan, China and
Australia were important to
me. Guam has become in-
creasingly cosmopolitan and
important over the years. So
I think this is a great plat-
form to jump off of.”
In over 20 years as an
FSO, Kim has served tours in China, Japan and
Turkey, acquiring the language skills
and cultural knowledge required
to function in these nations.
Daily attire during her
stint in Iraq was a flak
jacket. She also worked
for President George W.
Bush Secretary of State
Colin Powell.
More recently, Kim had
to develop expertise on
the North Korean nuclear
program.
“I tell people, if you’re a
quitter, then the Foreign
Service is for you because
the quitting is built in.
Every two to three years
you get a new assignment
and I find that exhila-
rating. You gotta learn
a new country, a new
set of subjects every
two or three years.
And having had
zero back-
ground
in
(North
Korean)
nuclear issues, I
had to make myself an
expert on this set of
issues.”
Ever the diplomat,
Kim ducked a question
about morale at the
State Department under the current administra-
tion:
“We go through phases and very few things
are permanent. Some presidents will emphasize
the military aspect of national power. Others
will emphasize the economic aspect, others the
diplomacy. What gets emphasized is, in a fun-
damental way, a choice that the American pub-
lic authorizes the president to make. We have
elections every four years and I think the Amer-
ican public decides, delivers their judgment on
whether the person in the White House has done
the right thing or the wrong thing. For us in the
Foreign Service, we are apolitical. We can belong
to parties in a personal capacity, but when we’re
outside, representing the United States of Amer-
ica, we’re not Democrats, we’re not Republicans,
we’re Americans. And that’s my roundabout way
of not answering your question.”
“The program is set by the musical director—
the president—elected by the American people.
And so while you may not like every single piece
of music that you’re asked to play, that’s your job.
You chose it and you gotta do it. On the other
hand, there are going to be situations when you
hit your limit and that’s a very personal matter.
When you say, ‘I can’t do this. I don’t agree with
this policy.’ And I have friends who have quit,
not just in this new administration but in
administrations past. For example, there
was a whole slew of people who quit in
the 1990s, during the Balkan wars when the
United States, the Clinton administration, did
not take military action soon enough, in the view
of these people. And they found that morally
reprehensible, found they could not associate
themselves with that sort of policy and they left.
So we’ll always have that sort of thing. It’s very
tough to pass judgment, very tough. Only you can
decide where your lines are.”
It’s not a 9 to 5 job, Kim warned the students,
but for her, it’s been “a very fulfilling two de-
cades.”
On her return to Washington, Kim will be direc-
tor of the Center for the Study of the Conduct of
Diplomacy.
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