We must institute more training to give Foreign Service Officers the skills to do what they must do in this new world of commercial competition.

Small- and medium-sized companies do not know what we have to offer and that needs to be changed. We must react just as strenuously on their behalf as we do for larger companies.

What I can’t quite see at this stage is that the evidence, even to the president, seems to be that clear. And if it is that clear, I can’t understand why we are not capable...

Some day, somebody is going to have to start talking about what happens to us all a decade from now if we let these North Koreans and the Iranians go forward with their nuclear weapons...

What is more important is that Foreign Service Officers understand business, about the needs of U.S. business and how to help U.S. companies make the right connections abroad.

That said, there is a tendency to help the large industrial conglomerate more quickly than the small company you have never heard of. That is something in the culture we are trying to change.

What we need is to develop in all Foreign Service Officers a better instinct for understanding the needs of U.S. business abroad.

The question is not really about a shift to the economic cone where officers are writing about the balance of payments and the need for economic stabilization.

The Foreign Service has spent 50 years concentrating on political and military affairs at a time when the U.S. economy was preeminent.

And beyond that, the next issue is how do we guarantee one of these weapons, not necessarily this missile, but nuclear weapons ends up in the hands of Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group.

The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet...

Any Ambassador or Foreign Service Officer who has his or her head screwed on right knows that the U.S. position in the world is far more dependent on our ability to compete in world markets.

The question really is how do we get Embassy Officers into the minds of the American business community. That is a much more difficult task than understanding a statistical matrix.

I think what he’s – what he believes, and he may be correct, I don’t know, that we have some intelligence information that leads us to know some things about what’s going on in Iraq...

The whole nuclear thing is a terrible mess and it’s hard for me to understand why it is that we, the United States, seem to be the only ones that are really particularly concerned about...

In a time of constrained resources we will have to shift emphasis. but not necessarily from the traditional Political Officer to the traditional Economic Officer.

There has been a major improvement in the way U.S. Ambassadors and the Foreign Service establishment try to assist U.S. business overall.

In the best of all worlds everyone in the Embassy is doing something to assist U.S. exports.

There is a natural partnership between State and Commerce, and the American business community to work together to educate the United States about marketing overseas.

My point here is I think international pressures of our acting unilaterally again are going to be such that the administration will say, well, we just can’t take this on now.

We have to spend a lot more time training people to be good advocates of U.S. business.

Now there is a cultural change under way in the Foreign Service.