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On Thursday, April 4, Carnegie Mellon’s chapter of the Alexander Hamilton Society hosted a talk by Derek Mitchell, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Myanmar from 2012 to 2016. The Alexander Hamilton Society is a national organization which operates on U.S. college campuses for students interested in foreign affairs and national security.
Mitchell has also worked at the Pentagon and nonprofits such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Mitchell’s career has been centered around helping to strengthen the democracies of foreign nations, especially in Asia.
The former ambassador began by explaining how he found an interest in foreign relations at a young age. In college during the Cold War, he concentrated in Soviet studies. Toward the end of his undergraduate degree, he became more interested in China.
After graduating, Mitchell worked on foreign policy for Massachessetts Senator Ted Kennedy. Mitchell grew up admiring the Kennedys. “My father couldn’t talk about John Kennedy and his assassination without weeping,” he said in his lecture.
Giving up the glamor of attending Kennedy family parties, Mitchell eventually left for Taiwan, which he said at that time “was a human rights issue, because they were coming out of authoritarian martial law into something hopefully more democratic.”
Mitchell visited Beijing on May 31, 1989 — a visit that happened to coincide with the height of China’s famous liberal youth protest movement. He said that the protesters were delighted to see him there, saying, “You’re American! Oh my God, this is great! Are we doing this right?” They kept talking about democracy, but Mitchell said, “when I talked to them, I asked, ‘What do you mean by democracy?’ They said, ‘Free speech!’ I said, ‘That’s civil liberty.’”
The people he interacted with in China had a democratic spirit, Mitchell said, and he was inspired by the experience.
“There’s no substitute for firsthand experience,” Mitchell said. “In international affairs, you learn a lot in the classroom. It’s very, very important to study hard to understand countries, but there is no substitute for being somewhere.”
Mitchell said he believes that while different cultures tend towards different forms of democracy, there is a universal human urge towards democracy.
He went on to work at the National Democratic Institute (NDI), assisting post-Cold War transitions to democracy. However, the NDI “wasn’t lecturing [these countries]. It wasn’t saying ‘be America, we’re Americans and you have to be just like us.’”
The NDI showed these countries — including Armenia, Pakistan, Georgia, and Jordan — examples of successful democracies from various cultures. Democracy, he said, “isn’t just about the institutions, it’s about the culture, the interactions, the expectations that take a long time.” At the NDI, he said, most staff and many managers are non-Americans.
Mitchell emphasized the importance of personal relationships in his work. Personal trust, far more than ideas, was what made or broke an NDI project. People decided whether to listen based upon whether he was a trustworthy person and whether he seemed to understand their culture.
When Mitchell moved from the NDI to the Pentagon, he said that many of his coworkers — in both organizations — were confused. Those in the Pentagon didn’t see why an “NDI-values squishy guy [would] come and work in the hard power realist Department of Defense,” whereas NDI colleagues asked why he was going to the “death dome.”
However, Mitchell sees a mutual relationship between democracy-building and defense. On the one hand, “democracies tend not to go to war.” However, because illiberal, warlike states still exist, he is glad that “the United States is a security guarantor that is unparalleled.”
While he doesn’t think our foreign policy is perfect, he does think that “U.S. alliances are welcomed by countries in most parts of the world.” As Americans, he thinks that we should consider our importance to democracy all around the world.
To his chagrin, Mitchell has noticed that “lots of people these days are down on democracy.” He doesn’t think that is reasonable because he sees democracy as “transparent, accountable, inclusive, representative government” with equal representation under law.
Mitchell said he thinks that what many people see as flaws in democracy would actually be solved with more democracy. Either way, he doesn’t think democracy is going away anytime soon — people have seen what good it can do, and they won’t go back.