Diplomatic error Sir: May I comment, if belatedly, on a
recent article from Washington criticising the British ambassador for his lack of con- tact with senior Republicans (Diary, 6 June)? I do see quite a lot of what may be termed, with some charity, our foreign poli- cy elite: academics, bureaucrats, business- men, journalists, lawyers, officers and politicians. I'm unaware of anything but respect for the ambassador.
In any event, dealing with the Republi- cans isn't easy. The Chair of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Helms, is a primitive who would prefer our nuclear weapons to be aimed at Boston, New York and San Francisco. His opposite number in the House, Representative Gilman, acts as if he were serving in the Knesset. The central items on the Republi- cans' foreign policy agenda include instant assent by the peoples and nations of the world to the literal truth of the New Testa- ment (in recent English translation), as well as the immediate extension of the United States' jurisdiction to those parts of the earth now outside it.
In the circumstances, any diplomat would find the Republicans difficult interlocutors. For their part, most of them are rendered uneasy by fellow citizens who employ ideas of more than one syllable. They find edu- cated Europeans especially troubling.
There is a final difficulty. HM govern- ment does not, at the moment, conduct diplomacy in the USA by the discreet trans- fer of cash to persons of influence. A num-
LETTERS
ber of Republicans, in this respect, may indeed think themselves ignored.
Norman Birnbaum
Georgetown University Law Center, 600 New Jersey Avenue NW, Washington DC
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