Jazz Played a Unique Role in Cold War Diplomacy. What Can the U.S. Learn From That in 2024? – By Fred Kaplan (Slate) / Dec 28, 2023
It was three months ago—though it feels like three years—when Secretary of State Antony Blinken strapped on a Fender Stratocaster, stepped to a mic in the State Department’s august Benjamin Franklin Room, and led a band of musician-friends through a more-than-passable cover of Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man.”
Blinken was kicking off the Global Music Diplomacy Initiative, which, as he put it to the festive crowd of officials and artists, aimed to leverage the power of music to “transcend the borders of geography and … language” and to “foster collaboration between America and people around the world.”
He had no idea that, 10 days later, Hamas would mount a savage attack from Gaza, murdering 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 250 more, or that Israel would retaliate with an invasion and air strikes that have killed 20,000 Palestinians so far, triggering massive waves of antisemitic and anti-American protests worldwide.
Nor did he have a clue that, two months into this “gut-wrenching” crisis, as he came to call it, Senate Republicans would block further military aid for Ukraine, holding it hostage to contentious domestic politics—passage of a bill that would pretty much close the U.S.–Mexico border to asylum-seekers—and thus calling into question not only Ukraine’s ability to continue staving off Russian aggression but also America’s reliability as an ally.
