Ambassadors don’t get much respect. Too often they are caricatured as rich campaign donors in search of another resume line or ineffectual suck-ups in striped pants–or simply as an irrelevancy in the age of the telephone and email when officials in faraway capitals can keep in touch with no need for intermediaries. There is some truth to these caricatures, but there is another truth as well: that at their best, ambassadors can serve as influential representatives who enhance relations between two countries because of their personal skill.
By all accounts Mark Lippert, who arrived late last year to become the U.S. ambassador to South Korea after a lengthy run as an aide to senator and President Obama and to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, is an exemplary ambassador. As one account notes, he “has endeared himself to many South Koreans by regularly walking his basset hound around his compound in downtown Seoul and giving his newborn son a Korean middle name.” More than that, he has thrown himself into Korean culture and society with an unaffected curiosity and folksiness, which have endeared him to many Koreans who are used to seeing their own government diplomats act in a far more aloof and reserved manner.
Lippert, who is also a reserve naval officer, has further enhanced his reputation with the sang-froid with which he handled a vicious attack on him by a knife-wielding assailant with fanatical anti-American views. Lippert required 80 stitches to his face but has now left the hospital, saying he felt “pretty darned good, all things considered.”
He has vowed to stay engaged in people-to-people diplomacy, and I believe him: Thanks to his personal connection to the president, it’s doubtful that cautious diplomatic security types can shut him down even if they try. But in too many other cases ambassadors and lower-ranking American diplomats isolate themselves from the local population because of security concerns.
The attack on Lippert–to say nothing of the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens, another practitioner of personal diplomacy, in Libya–shows that the danger is real. But what Lippert and other good diplomats understand is that they need to be willing to run some risk in order to accomplish their jobs. His example shows how diplomats, too, serve on the front lines and deserve respect for the risks they run and what they can accomplish to advance our country’s interests.
