Alec Ross came to visit our class last Monday, but because my weekend flight had been canceled due to mechanical failure, I could not get into town until Monday evening so I missed the class. The readings focused on the intersection of foreign policy and the internet
SUMMARY: Many of the readings examined the role of Twitter in the Iranian Revolts as a case study. While all of the articles agreed that social media played a role in mobilizing English-speaking Diaspora Iranians and international observers, the effect social networking had on the ground is contested. See here. Moreover, in January of 2009 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed Alec Ross as her Senior Advisor on Innovation to incorporate foreign policy with technology. Last month she spoke on Innovation and American Leadership to the Commonwealth Club. In her remarks she spoke about the government’s role in investing in research and development, cultivating students to become experts in science and technology, partnering with business enterprises to maximize value.
ANALYSIS: Like Matt Weaver, I am somewhat skeptical of the role of social networking in both the Iranian Revolts and in foreign diplomacy by the U.S. Statement. Last year I participated in a study group with Professor Trager and a common theme is that when public and private organizations do not have the same goals, private organizations tend to extract value to themselves at the expense of taxpayer dollars. Just like Facebook and Twitter use the auspice of personalizing the web experience in order to convince individuals to share more data about themselves, I am suspicious of private networking companies who are trying to become cozy with the U.S. government in the name of modernizing foreign diplomacy. Evgeny Morozov had concerns that Washington would take advantage of social networking websites to achieve political ends; I am more concerned about the opposite. I don’t mean to sound overly skeptical, but I thought that Sec. Clinton’s address was overly simple. I didn’t fully understand how the State Department was specifically using technology and innovation in advancing technology.
SYNTHESIS: I’m sure diplomats take tremendous pride in knowing that they a part of a bureaucratic, but elite group of individuals who are privy to foreign policy. The very nature of the U.S. State Department and other Foreign Ministries requires a top-down command and control approach where trade agreements and war policies are brainstormed and communicated by the highest officials and then implemented by lower-level bureaucrats. Digital social networking is indeed contributing to a change in this model, but I believe bottom-up foreign policy was already long underway. In my Public International Law course at the Law School we read about ordinary consumers affecting foreign policy. The case is famously known as the “Dolphin Tuna-Case”. In short, the United States has a law that protects dolphins from becoming endangered. Many fishermen use nets to capture tuna in waters where dolphin live and sometimes these dolphins are a by-catch. This was a major problem because fishermen needed to make money for a living, but they could not violate the law. A device, called the trap-door, allows fishermen to still use nets to capture tuna while releasing dolphins. However, this was device was expensive and fisherman outside of the U.S. could not afford to purchase it. As a result, tuna from Mexico, Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, and the tiny Pacific island of Vanuatu were banned in 1990. Some of these countries sued claiming a violation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) because countries in multilateral treaties have to treat each other just as well as their “most favored nation[s]” to avoid discrimination in world trade. The U.S. lost, however, a consumer campaign developed into federal statute, the Dolphin Protection Consumer Information Act, which allowed tuna sold in the U.S. to place a “Dolphin Safe” label on their can. Using the principles of a free market, consumers were left to choose to purchase only those tuna cans that were dolphin safe and allow other products to lose in its market share. It is a pretty brilliant strategy, but it still required institutions to produce the “Dolphin Safe” labels. Perhaps to a certain extent, traditional institutions like governments and corporations will be necessary in foreign policy, but platforms like Twitter allow consumers to have greater ability to organize.
