Although visits by small delegations from a single country or two to individual states are common, Grassley and others say there are very few trips that approach the scope of the biennial Iowa visit.
The Senate Finance Committee’s top Democrat, Max Baucus of Montana, has continued to nurture his state’s relationships with Asian nations, a trend begun by his predecessor, former Senate Majority Leader and longtime Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield. Baucus hosted a four-day tour to his giant, sparsely populated state in 2004 for ambassadors and senior diplomats from Australia, New Zealand, and seven East Asian nations. That group visited farms, ranches and businesses and met with local leaders, including then-Gov. Judy Martz.
Rep. Joe Pitts, a Republican from Pennsylvania, has hosted large-scale trips for several years, taking about 30 or 40 diplomats and spouses on a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Washington to his relatively small congressional district west of Philadelphia. His three-day tour can be squeezed into a long weekend.
Pitts said the guests see some videos about the district on the way up and get to know one another. They too stay with host families.
Like Grassley, Pitts noted that building personal relationships is a major purpose of the trips: Once the personal relationships are made, commercial relations often follow.
Among the highlights are visits to Amish and Mennonite communities, whose strict adherence to tradition is surprising to some diplomats and even to t
heir fellow Americans. Host families, diplomats and foreign students from local universities also meet and mingle at a large banquet. On the last trip, in October 2004, about 270 people attended.
Pitts makes sure his constituents understand that the diplomats are enormously important, successful people in their home nations who are close to their local political and business leaders and can open doors for Americans. The diplomats frequently end up inviting their hosts to events at their embassies in Washington. And so the relationships grow.
“Out of these relationships and friendships—and the friendships last a long time—they’ll continue to go to the embassies, to be engaged, to do humanitarian projects,” Pitts said. “That’s what we’re trying to do—get our constituents engaged with people they know in other countries, build friendships and just turn them loose. The American people are very entrepreneurial and creative—if you open the doors for them, they can go through the doors and make things happen. So we have a lot of spin-offs from this.”
Pitts helps with the follow-up, organizing a “reunion” of the diplomats and host families at an embassy in Washington about six months after each trip. At those events, diplomats have returned the hospitality with culinary specialties from their home countries.
Pitts and Grassley said a handful of other congressman have expressed interest in this type of trip. Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, made an appearance on Grassley’s tour, and congressional aides have tagged along to pick up pointers. Grassley said, perhaps only slightly in jest, that he hopes other states don’t catch on to the notion. Iowa has enough of a challenge competing with larger, better-known states in the international trade arena and is constantly fighting its reputation as American “flyover country” with little to offer the world.
Pitts said he has encouraged his colleagues in Congress to nurture such relationships, specifically with smaller, less powerful nations that have small budgets for outreach and get less attention from the federal government and large corporations.
“If anybody shows an interest in them, they’re very, very open,” he said. “So I’m trying to get members to adopt countries and engage with the ambassadors, with the foreign officials, travel to the countries, and then open the doors for constituents.”
Pitts also hosts a luncheon each month with ambassadors, usually representing about 20 countries, bringing in guest speakers on topics of interest to the diplomats. “I try to develop a friendship, a trust, between those ambassadors and myself,” he said. “I think it’s a way of helping win hearts and minds.”
Pitts also pointed out that personal relationships can often develop into economic relationships. “A lot of the countries, that’s the way they operate—relational politics,” he said. “You get to know somebody, you have a friend, they trust you, [and then] you get something done in five minutes it takes a lobbyist months to do.
“They’re very, very interested in that because there’s a genuineness to that that doesn’t go away.”
Sanjay Talwani is a freelance writer living Alexandria, Va.
