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led the way or overtaken their U.S. counterparts. Both high and low 

 technology play important roles in diplomacy, a fact which would 

 seem to dictate building corresponding structural and staff capabili- 

 ties in the Department of State. Moreover, Government support for 

 the development of some elements of both high- and low-technology, 

 on the basis of their prospective contributions to U.S. foreign policy 

 goals, would appear to be an appropriate strategy for the United 

 States. 



The thesis of "Roles and Interactions of Public and Private Insti- 

 tutions in International Technology" (ch. 21) is that the dynamic 

 growth of technology, especially since World War II, has fostered a 

 new and more sophisticated relationship between industry and diplo- 

 macy. Much of the transfer of technology to developing countries in 

 recent decades has been planned as part of the foreign policy process, 

 but carried out by private industry. Industry has provided weapons 

 systems and trained indigenous personnel in their use. Multinational 

 corporations have been a major and growing force in the spread of 

 U.S. technology and management skills. The State Department is 

 inescapably drawn into the picture and must undertake to exert in- 

 fluence for diplomatic purposes on the foreign and domestic manage- 

 ment of technology by U.S. private industry. But the Department 

 is not organized and staffed for this purpose, nor does it appear to 

 have a ready grasp of the large international problems growing out of 

 technological change which already confront it. As onerous as it may 

 be to add the burden of understandmg technology to the many varieties 

 of political, economic, international law and relations, cultural, linguis- 

 tic, and other expertise required of the Department, as technology plays 

 a more and more prominent role in diplomacy the Department must 

 equip itself to appreciate and react to such matters as the needs of 

 other countries for U.S. technology, the needs and receptivity of U.S. 

 industry with respect to foreign technological advances and refine- 

 ments, and the progress of technology with special significance in in- 

 ternational relations (e.g., satellite communications, deep seabed 

 mining) to cite only a few. 



Interdependence is an increasingly universal and compelling fact of 

 life in today's world, closely tied to the processes of technological in- 

 novation, change, and growth. The essay on "Independence Versus 

 Interdependence" (ch. 22) seeks to define these opposing forces 

 in contemporary terms, focusing attention on the role of diplomacy 

 in reconciling the opposition of the two forces and on the role of tech- 

 nology in both reconciling and fueling that opposition. In a fundamen- 

 tal sense it was technology that created interdependence: the Age of 

 Interdependence, ushered in by a fateful achievement of high tech- 

 nology — the atom bomb — is a new and explosive phase of the Age of 

 Technology that began with the Industrial Revolution. (As early as 

 1948, former Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson observed in a letter 

 to Herbert Hoover that "The progress of science and invention 

 brought with it a vastly increased interdependence among the nations 

 of the world.") Among the factors that complicate the process of 

 working out a constructive balance between the impulses of national 

 independence and the imperatives of global interdependence are 

 virulent nationalism, entrenched cultural bias, failures of communi- 

 cation, and antagonism between the aggressive demands of growth 



