NEWS & EVENTS

Former Minister-Counselor Margot Carrington – 25-year career in the foreign service

Former Minister-Counselor Margot Carrington joined Dr. Brook’s class on public diplomacy to talk about her 25-year career in the foreign service, serving both in Japan and Malaysia.

Ms. Carrington began the session with a discussion of US public diplomacy strategy in Japan. The former minister-counselor also covered some of the public diplomacy challenges US Embassy Tokyo faced during her time there, including the 1995 Okinawa rape incident and the 2016 US election of Donald Trump, and some of the great successes she was also able to be a part of, such as the 2008 deployment of the USS George Washington to Yokosuka and the May 2016 visit by President Obama to Hiroshima. Ms. Carrington then briefly went over her time in Malaysia, including the failure of the Shared Values Campaign spearheaded by former Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Charlotte Beers and funded by the US State Department.

In the latter half of the session, Ms. Carrington explained the ABCDE Strategic Communications Roadmap for the students to then apply to a past public diplomacy issue in a group exercise.