Victoria Penilla Angeles 17/09/2018

The U.S. Ambassador Who Crossed

Trump on Immigration
By Mike Ives

● Sept. 7, 2018
○

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — As President-elect Donald J. Trump

prepared for his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017, Ted Osius assumed he was
about to lose his dream job as the American ambassador to Vietnam.
“I thought I would be put out with the trash on Jan. 21,” said Mr. Osius, 57, a
career diplomat for nearly three decades who had once worked for former Vice
President Al Gore.
He wasn’t, but he soon fell out with the Trump administration over its effort to
deport thousands of refugees from the former South Vietnam who had fled to
the United States after the Vietnam War. Last fall, he was abruptly ordered to
leave Vietnam, a few days before President Trump arrived to give a speech at
the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
Mr. Osius later resigned from the State Department and moved to Ho Chi
Minh City, Vietnam’s commercial capital, as a private citizen. He is one of
many senior career diplomats who have worked for presidents of both parties,
but whose objections to the Trump administration’s policies have led them to
leave.

In telephone interviews, officials at the White House and the Department of

Homeland Security defended the president’s immigration policies on Vietnam.
They said that nearly all the planned deportations that Mr. Osius opposed
were for Vietnamese refugees who had been convicted of committing crimes in
the United States, and that the Trump administration was merely pressing
Vietnam and other “recalcitrant” countries to cooperate with existing United
States immigration laws.
“If the former ambassador would like the laws changed, we welcome him to go
to Congress and ask them to change the laws,” said Katie Waldman, a
spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security.
But Mr. Osius said he sees himself not as a rebel, but as a bridge builder.
He was born in Maryland, the son of a physician and a high school English
teacher, and attended high school in Vermont. He said his early interest in
foreign cultures was forged during a gap year in the Middle East he took after
graduation.

“The part that stuck was a fascination with cultures that are very different
from ours,” he said on a recent morning in his Ho Chi Minh City living room,
surrounded by furniture collected during postings in Vietnam, India and
elsewhere in Asia.

Mr. Osius joined the State Department after graduating from Harvard in 1984,
and served the first of his 10 postings in the Philippines. He said he quickly
discovered that his natural diplomatic instinct — building trust on the basis of
shared interests — was sometimes at odds with official American policy.
For example, he said, he blamed a dismissive approach to negotiations with
President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines for America’s loss of access to
important naval and air bases there in the early 1990s. “She was a woman and
she was brown,” Mr. Osius said of Ms. Aquino. “And we were smart and
arrogant and didn’t listen.”
Years later, Mr. Osius was part of a group of diplomats who quietly pleaded
with the George W. Bush administration to engage North Korea through the
so-called six-party talks. As the administration’s North Korea policy hardened,
he said, two of his colleagues resigned in frustration.

“This is the dilemma that every professional diplomat faces: What ethical lines
won’t you cross?” he said. But in that case, “I decided not to quit but to ride it
out and see if I could continue to do some good.”
Mr. Osius has spent decades building diplomatic relationships in Vietnam, a
one-party state, where he first served as a political officer in the late 1990s.
One of his early tasks there was helping to open the United States Consulate in
Ho Chi Minh City, formerly called Saigon.
The idea that he would become an ambassador in Vietnam — or anywhere else
— was once inconceivable to him, Mr. Osius said, largely because the State
Department’s conservative culture made such senior postings effectively off-
limits to openly gay American diplomats like himself.
But by 2014, when then-Secretary of State John Kerry recommended him to
President Obama as the next ambassador to Vietnam, the agency’s politics had
changed.

“For him in particular, coming here was just a joy,” said Clayton Bond, Mr.
Osius’ spouse and a fellow diplomat who also resigned from the State
Department last year. “It felt like he had won the lottery.”
Initially, Mr. Osius said, his priority as ambassador was lobbying Vietnamese
officials to agree to labor and environmental standards linked to the Trans-
Pacific Partnership trade negotiations. (President Trump would later
withdraw the United States from the agreement, a move that Mr. Osius
described as a “self-inflicted wound” to American interests.)
He also lobbied the Obama administration to host the first-ever White House
visit by a chief of Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party, in 2015 — an effort to
win over holdouts on the party’s elite Politburo who still held a deeply
antagonistic view of the United States.

“In retrospect, that turned out to be the most consequential thing I did,” he
said. Vietnam and the United States increasingly see cooperation on security
and trade as a hedge against China’s growing regional influence.
Mr. Osius’ fluency in Vietnamese and his frequent public appearances,
sometimes with Mr. Bond and their two children in tow, gave him an unusuall
y high profile among the Vietnamese.
The couple also served as a model for gay Vietnamese whose families fear that
their sexual orientation will prevent them from having children or successful
careers, said Luong Minh Ngoc, the director of iSEE, a Vietnamese research
outfit that advocates human rights.
“Ted and Clayton have broken all these stigmas,” she said.
But things changed after Mr. Trump’s election in 2016. Among other things,
the couple wondered whether to stop displaying a “gender neutral” bathroom
sign — or even photographs of themselves and their children.

“Am I a liability now because I’m black?” Mr. Bond, whose cousin was the civil
rights leader Julian Bond, said he thought at the time.
Mr. Osius said that despite his deep objections to the president’s proposed
travel ban on people from several Muslim-majority countries, among other
policies, he decided to work for the administration anyway — partly out of
loyalty to his embassy staff, he said, but also because he wanted to prevent
damage to United States-Vietnamese relations.
But that grew more difficult, he said, when he was asked to press the
Vietnamese government to accept the planned deportation of more than 8,000
Vietnamese from the United States, most of whom had fled the former South
Vietnam as refugees after the war ended in 1975. He said he feared many of
them would become human-rights cases, and that the move would anger
Hanoi and undercut Washington’s interests on trade and security in Asia.
In a statement, a senior State Department official expressed “disappointment”
over Mr. Osius’ remarks. “The State Department is seeking to ensure that all of
our foreign partners abide by their international obligation to accept the
return of their nationals who have violated our laws,” the official said.
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Mr. Osius is now the vice president of Fulbright University Vietnam, a new
university in Ho Chi Minh City. He said he planned to leave the position in
December, partly to write a book.
He said he had ended a nearly 29-year diplomatic career because he could not
bear the idea of again being President Trump’s personal representative. “I
couldn’t imagine that being consistent with who I am and what I value,” he
said.

Referencias:
Mike Ives. “The U.S. Ambassador Who Crossed Trump on Immigration”. The New York
Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/world/asia/ted-osius-trump-vietnam-
ambassador.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FVietnam
%20War&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit
&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection (Consultado: 17/09/2018).