When I read of the decision of American University Alumni Association members to call into question the fairness of American policy towards Thailand and the quality of the analysis which supported such a policy, I felt aggrieved.
US Ambassador Kristie Kenney has been a high-profile envoy, including appearances such as this YouTube video. (Photo by US State Department)
Khunying Songsuda Yodmani of the AUAA said the US government and the US State Department should respect its allies and treat them as equals rather than as its colonies.
I was not at all aggrieved over the action of AAUA members — but rather over the actions and inactions of my government that had led to that unprecedented expression of Thai opposition to the United States.
Especially as the son of a very successful and beloved American ambassador — Kenneth Todd Young — who served in Bangkok for President John Kennedy, I took very personally and almost bitterly the recent fall-off in the quality of American support for a better Thailand.
This turn for the worse in Thai-US relations could have been avoided had American officials been doing their jobs according to higher professional standards followed in the past.
I’d like to share what happened when I tried to inform two American ambassadors about what was going on in Thailand. I shared my views with one ambassador on how “Thaksinism” operated where anyone could be bought for a price. I was told instead I was being too extreme and one-sided.
Later when I would come to Thailand to teach at Sasin I would respond to some inner sense of responsibility to my father’s legacy of concern for the Thai people, so I called my ambassador’s office to ask to meet the ambassador. I was told to send an email to the ambassador’s personal account. Which I did. No reply.
Two other Americans long resident in Thailand who speak much better Thai than I do and who know Thais from all levels of society told me they were never consulted to gather information on Thai politics.
I was put out over this for it never would have happened when my father was ambassador. For example, he studied Thai and had all his children learn to speak Thai.
His door was always open to those who could contribute to his understanding of what was going on in every part of the country and at every level of society.
But he belonged to an older generation of American public servants, now gone. Today the making of American foreign policy has passed into the hands of the baby boomers and younger.
Consider the foreign policy successes, if any, of Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama in contrast to those of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George HW Bush.
Mr Clinton and Mr Bush sought, and Mr Obama seeks, foreign policies that are dictated by domestic political opportunism. Their foreign policies therefore seek to impose American provincialisms and narrow-minded misunderstandings on others. These presidents, for the most part, did not try very hard to work with others in other cultures to make a better world.
They thought in unilateral terms of “hard” power or “soft” power.
Consider Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the recent prisoner exchange of one hardly heroic American soldier for a five-man, high-quality Taliban leadership team. The last done apparently in a rush and without consultations with the Afghans to shift US media attention away from the scandal at the Veteran’s Administration over care for our veterans.
It is a worry but not a surprise that the current American government has failed to properly understand Thaksinism. Too many American officials, from the ambassador on down, work in a weird office environment of high security, literally walled off from Thailand by the physical structure of our embassy and its defensive requirements. American officials in Bangkok — as with our embassies all over the world now — just don’t get out to get the true feel of a country and its people. Their ability to judge has been crippled by these self-imposed limitations.
Over the past five years maybe only two or three of Thais whom I know well noted that they had more than a cursory social or formal contact with an American official. Our embassy cut itself off from learning the wider truth about Thailand.
But outside of official circles, there are many Americans who know Thailand well, who understand the dangers it has faced and still faces, and who care very much for its future.
Stephen B Young is global executive director of Caux Round Table.