American Diplomat

Margaret Riccardelli, an airline employee in her 40s, stumbled into the foreign service thinking it would be great to serve in Italy. But where did she end up? Bangladesh, where nothing ever happens. What? Instead, she was met with revolution, poverty, an 8,000 person attack on the embassy, tornadoes, a cyclone that washed 100,000 people out into the bay of Bengal, and the fun didn't stop there. It's scary and it's lonely, Margaret explains, but you step up. So what about Rome? For the whole story, read Margaret's book, Assignment Dhaka: A Foreign Service Memoir.

The Central African Republic: a vulnerable democracy with a weak president, failed by the West. Wagner mercenaries arrive in flip flops offering military support and quickly set up lucrative mineral businesses that depend on control of public information, intimidation and sustained conflict, resulting in the highest mortality rate of any country in the world. Why do we care? This is a model for operations anywhere that democracies and the West falter. Ambassador Larry Wohlers tells the story of the CAR.

Alan Eaton helps us appreciate exactly where high level policy meets the work of diplomats on the ground as he works from a Saudi military vessel to evacuate Americans from the war in Sudan.

Why don't the Panamanians hate us? We sliced their country in two to build the Panama Canal, owned and controlled the Canal Zone, disallowed Panamanians from visiting the Canal Zone, and even attacked Panama in 1989, drawing condemnation from the UN and the Organization of American States. So how is it a good thing to throw our July 4th party on a gunboat right smack in the Canal? We ask Amb. John Feeley, who did exactly that.

Pedro Castillo, recently ousted in Peru, is the latest of a succession of Peruvian presidents to be jailed or disgraced. Could this apparent chaos be in fact a sign that the judicial system is working? The devil's in the details.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group, opened hot dog stands upon his release from Russian prison as a young man. Now he leads the rapidly growing Kremlin-affiliated private military contractor, the Wagner Group. Mercenaries? Yes. Lethal? Yes. Incredibly rich and working for dictators and unstable regimes on (so far) three continents? Also, yes. Dealing in gold, diamonds, troll farms, shocking brutality, as well as political influence, Wagner's rise has been as fast as it has been unknown by most of us in the West. Tibor Nagy, former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, knows more than we thought there was to know.

Who coined that term anyway? It's true, there have been insults and lots of them. Why? Secretary of State Tony Blinken will visit China this weekend and Susan Thornton, Senior Fellow at Yale University Law School's Paul Tsai China Center and former US diplomat, joins us with her perspective on the complexities of China's diplomacy today.

All of us belong, even at State. In honor of Pride Month, we again offer the generously told story of Austin Richey-Allen, who recounts his story of gender transition while serving as a US diplomat. From his gender transition to his leadership of GLIFA, Austin shares his experience for the benefit not only of the LGBTQ community, but for all of us who value a more inclusive world.

24 hours news TV totally changed the State Department comms staple, the cable. Pete hopped on the "wireless" to save a democracy and Amb. John Feeley connected with Panamanians using ridiculous (but very sweet) Facebook videos. Disruptive technologies including AI will never replace human trust, but they create opportunity for better diplomacy.

By listener request, Pete and Laura have binged the Netflix show The Diplomat. Pete answers: How real is it? Laura answers (even though no one actually asked): How good is it? But importantly, how easy is it to make a story that mirrors real-life complexity and still moves and rolls and satisfies purely from the standpoint of story craft?