1898 



extent to which these contacts conform with U.S. foreign pohcy 

 depends on the influence exerted by the Department of State both in 

 Washington and over U.S. offices abroad. The scope of technological 

 subject matter encompassed by these 11 agencies is enormous: miUtary 

 hardware, health and medicine, patents, standards, industrial trends, 

 air transportation, geological surveys, mining and processing of ores, 

 production of food and fiber, problems of cities, atomic energy and 

 safeguards, aerospace, weather, technology transfer, scientific research 

 and information exchange, environmental quality, ocean science and 

 industry, and many more. Most of these technological subjects have 

 significant impacts, present or prospective, on U.S. international 

 relations. An abundant literature attests to the incapacity and dis- 

 inclination of the Department of State as now constituted to monitor 

 the policies of the mission agencies governing this range of subject 

 matter. Periodic efforts at coordination through interdepartmental 

 contacts, through the medium of the Federal Council for Science and 

 Technology, and through the State Department's own Interagency 

 Committee for International Science and Technology, have not even 

 begun to bound the problem. 



Institutional complexities. — Several agencies may be involved in a 

 shared program with a single country. Bilateral and multilateral 

 programs may overlap substantively. The approach to concerted 

 technological diplomacy that involves all of these separate programs 

 may be bilateral or multilateral; multilateral programs may be global 

 or regional. The question that remains is how best to orchestrate the 

 overseas technological programs of mission agencies to maximize 

 their collective contribution to U.S. foreign policy objectives in ways 

 most acceptable to the other countries involved, and at least cost to 

 the United States. It is at least possible that the kind of regional 

 approach described in the case study of the Mekong Project, and 

 touched on further in the essay on bilateral versus multilateral 

 diplomacy, might offer insights on ways to resolve this problem of 

 coordination. Regionalism might provide the necessary combination 

 of coherence in programing and economy of operation, in the non- 

 controversial support of mutually acceptable activities. 



As matters stand now, it is difficult to know what coherent and 

 purposeful U.S. policies are being pursued in Africa or Latin America, 

 in the export or import of technology, in the support of world health, 

 in the export of U.S. surplus grains, in the control of multinational 

 corporations, in the allocation of world resources of petroleum and 

 minerals, in the United Nations and associated institutions, in the 

 expansion of nuclear power with or without reference to conflict with 

 control of nuclear proliferation, in the encouragement of the world 

 science community, in the use of survey satellites, in global communica- 

 tions, and generally in defining the significance of the overused word 

 "interdependence" as a principle of U.S. diplomacy. 



The need for multi-agency policy planning. — In the brief section up- 

 dating the study o| Science and Technology in the Department o/ State 

 (Vol. Ill, Chap. 17) reference was made to 19 initiatives proposed by 

 the Secretary of State in his address of September 1, 1975, to the 

 U.N. General Assembly. These 19 proposals covered a wide range 

 of technological matters on which policy was proposed. For example: 

 an International Energy Institute, an International Industrialization 

 Institute, an International Center for the Exchange of Technologic fil 



