Fletcher Features
Winston Lord extols balanced approach to international relations at Convocation
Former ambassador Winston Lord, F60, held forth on U.S.-China relations and the beyond-the-classroom lessons of a Fletcher education in his keynote address the School’s 2009 Convocation on September 11.
Lord worked with former secretary of state Henry Kissinger for eight years and participated in the secret mission that led to the opening of relations between Washington and Beijing. Lord, who called himself a “rabid centrist,” went on to serve as U.S. ambassador to China from 1985-1989 under Presidents Bush and Reagan and as assistant secretary of state from 1993-1997 under President Clinton.
Lord addressed an ASEAN auditorium packed with students, faculty, staff and fellow alums on hand at Convocation, the formal start to Fletcher’s school year. Lord said that he learned much from his Fletcher classmates, lessons that shaped his bipartisan disposition.
“The most valuable lessons I learned here were outside the classroom: The rich diversity of views and hues, foreign and domestic, the uncensored debates and guileless laughter strengthened my penchant for tolerance and aversion to extremes instilled by my parents,” he said. “Since graduation, I’ve been a rabid centrist: I’ve voted and worked in government for Republican and Democratic presidents in equal measure, and I enlisted in bipartisan causes and groups outside of government.”
Lord met his wife, bestselling author Bette Bao Lord, while both were studying at Fletcher; he recounted that one of his early discoveries was that she took “neat and nifty notes in economics,” a subject that he found mysterious.
Lord, who started his career as a Foreign Service Officer, called himself a proponent of both realpolitik and the promotion of freedom, which, he said, must be balanced in American foreign policy.
“With a Burma or Sudan, our values can be our dominant preoccupation,” he said. “With a China or Saudi Arabia, brutal in its own spheres, we pursue a more nuanced course.”
He offered his take on China policy, taking time to point out that the nation is so complex that the idea of a China expert is an “oxymoron or just a plain moron.” In his case, “my roommate from Shanghai serves me humble pie at least once a week.”
Lord said he found flaws in what he sees as the two extreme camps on China – those who see China as a “dragon to slay” and those who view the country as a “panda to hug.”
Neither group, Lord said, has the right tack. On military issues, for example, he said dragon-slayers neglect to notice that China is “too consumed by its huge domestic problems to mount military adventures” – but on the hand, panda-huggers fail to take into account the “opaqueness” of the nation’s military surge.
For his part, the former ambassador laid out what he called “Lord’s ten commitments” for dealing with China, calling on the United States to engage and collaborate with China on international issues while keeping its powder dry. The “foundation for a constructive relationship,” Lord said, begins at home, and he called on the United States to “clean house.”
“When pressing China or other countries to be more enlightened, the United States must fix its own economy, spruce up its own environment and practice what it preaches,” he said.
During the ceremony, Lord received The Class of 1947 Distinguished Alumni Award, presented by William B. Dale, F47.
Also accepting an award at Convocation was Rebecca Feathers, Class of 2010, who received the Alfred P. Rubin Prize in International Law.
Faculty speaker Michael Klein, the William L. Clayton Professor of International Affairs, reflected on the ongoing relevance of academic training to deeper understanding of complex issues of facing the world.
Klein pointed to U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s academic focus on the Great Depression as providing an unexpected grounding for his work at the helm of the economy.
Student speaker Ndeye Sesay, Class of 2010, reflected on the value she’d already found for her Fletcher studies on topics like complex emergencies during her summer internship in Freetown, Sierra Leone. “For all intents and purposes, my internship was a complex emergency,” she joked.
Lauren Dorgan, MALD11