Rumsfeld Fellowship program hosts a small group of competitively selected young political and business leaders from Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia.
A series of meetings in Washington in the recent weeks have indicated that the current situation in the Caucasus region not only continues to draw strong attention among the key U.S. policy makers, but the interest towards the region is clearly growing, mainly because of the upcoming Georgian parliamentary elections scheduled for 2012 and a presidential election scheduled for 2013, according to David Soumbadze, a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the Johns Hopkins University in Washington. Soumbadze is also the director of the Rumsfeld Fellowship program, a joint program of the Central Asia - Caucasus Institute (CACI) at SAIS and the Rumsfeld Foundation, a non-profit organization founded and chaired by the former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Twice a year, The Rumsfeld Fellowship program hosts a small group of competitively selected young political and business leaders from Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia as well as from several Central Asian countries, introducing them to the inner workings of the U.S. foreign policy, military and economic machinery.
"In Washington, the fellows meet high-level representatives of the U.S. government, business, media, academia, the think-tanks and NGOs, as well as attend Congressional hearings, conferences, workshops and seminars that helps them to understand how opinion making, decision making, policy making and the policy implementation processes work in the United States," Soumbadze told Silk Road Newsline in an interview.
Soumbadze, a highly experienced former top Georgian diplomat and a former charge d'affaires in the U.S and Canada who also served as executive secretary of the State Commission on Georgia's Participation in NATO Partnership for Peace Program, on the staff of the National Security Adviser to the President of Georgia and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has developed over 20 plus years of his international diplomatic career with a wide network of high level political and military contacts in Washington. As the Rumsfeld Fellowship program director, he makes sure that young leaders from the Caucasus and Central Asia get exposed to a full spectrum of opinions among those who deal with the region's issues on a daily basis.
This past spring, a group of eight Rumsfeld Fellows from the Caucasus and Central Asia met with an A-list of the U.S. policy makers, including Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central Asia Affairs Susan Elliott, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia David Sidney, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy for Policy and International Affairs Jonathan Elkind as well as regional directors for the Caucasus and Central Asia at the White House National Security Council.
Young political and business leaders from the Caucasus and Central Asia also had an opportunity to discuss their region's issues with the Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and the Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee U.S. Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) as well as with NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe Admiral James Stavridis, former prime-minister of Spain Jose Maria Aznar and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Dr. Alan Greenspan. They also met with the former U.S. Secretaries of Defense William Cohen and Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretaries of Energy and Commerce Samuel Bodman and Carlos Gutierrez, former U.S. National Security Advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Stephen Hadley, as well as the University of Chicago economist and Nobel Prize winner, professor Gary Becker, world renown political scientists Francis Fukuyama and John Mearsheimer, the Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post Company Donald Graham and others
"Here in Washington, our American counterparts who meet with the fellows, and these are high-level US Government officials or former officials, prominent scholars and successful businessmen, etc., are very impressed by the depth of knowledge and interest of the fellows," said Soumbadze, adding that the young and ambitious representatives of the national elites of Georgia as well as other countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia often leave their seasoned U.S. hosts pleasantly surprised with their advanced professional level matching that of their American and European peers.
According to Fidan Huseynli, a 2011 Rumsfeld Fellow from Azerbaijan, young leaders from the Caucasus and Central Asia were also somewhat surprised by the attention they received in Washington seeing this as a confirmation that their region is considered critically important to the U.S. national security interests and closely watched by the key U.S. policy makers and the U.S. expert community.
"People here, and we've heard this a lot, they are interested in the opinions on the ground. Yes, they can go to the region, they can ask people but not always and such an opportunity, especially for the people from think-tanks who are forming the policy which to some extend the future implementation of the policies formed on the governmental or the national level, they can get so much interesting information because we are from different background and some form the group can tell them more about the economic staff, some about the political, others about the problems with security and the rule of law," said Huseynli who works for the EU-funded nature conservation project in Azerbaijan.
She also agreed that the meeting in Washington gave the group a lot of insight into the inner world of the U.S. foreign policy making. "Even for me, and I studied the history of the United States and I was tracing the policy here, but even for me what I have seen in the Congress on the ground, what I have seen at the State Department, what I have seen in the lectures that have been provided, - I found out that I am so grateful to this program for me and it's very important for the people just to come here and to be much more proficient in what is the U.S. and what policy it pursues abroad."
"Since its inauguration in 2008, the program's credibility and popularity have enormously grown both in the region and in the United States," concurs Soumbadze, saying that as of summer of 2011, there have been 42 Rumsfeld Fellows from Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Mongolia. The program is inviting 10 more fellows this coming fall.
Rumsfeld Fellowship program in one of the four major projects developed by the Rumsfeld Foundation, a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization created by Donald Rumsfeld and his wife Joyce in 2007 and supported with their personal funds.
"My wife and I talked about what we would like to do when I left the government four years ago and we decided there were three or four areas that we wanted to focus on and Central Asia, I felt, was a very high priority for me, and the reason I felt that way is that I was one of the few senior U.S. government officials that was involved with those countries on a reasonably close basis," Rumsfeld told Silk Road Newsline in an interview in the spacious offices of his foundation in downtown Washington D.C.
When asked how the idea of inviting young leaders from the Caucasus and Central Asia to the U.S. came about, the former Pentagon chief mentions a similar program established in 1953 by a group of prominent American citizens and named after the then-U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
"I was the chairman of the Eisenhower Fellowship program, and it was a people-to-people program where fellows from overseas would come to the United States from all around the world and I felt that was a constructive thing. So, we kind of modeled our fellowship program on that where we bring over fellows, connect them with people in their disciplines, whether it's business or academic world or non-governmental organizations or the military, whatever, and try to facilitate their linkages to the people in the United States," Rumsfeld said.
"I think these are people that we've selected that are in kind of mid-career, they are in their late twenties or thirties or early forties, they are people who are going to do things in their countries and the people they meet here in the United States are people that are doing things in our country. I liked that thought that over the next 20, 30, 40 years they will have those relationships and connections and I think it benefits the United Stated and I think it benefits people from Central Asia and from the Caucasus," he concluded.
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