One of the more welcomed outcomes of the paring back of the US State Department bureaucracy is the elimination of scores of "status quo enthusiasts." Since the end of World War II, the State Department's ranks have been populated by foreign service officers and career diplomats who have championed the international status quo. These minions of Foggy Bottom received encouragement for their protective stance on post-World War II and Cold War in President George H. W. Bush's speech on September 11, 1990, which was titled, "Toward a New World Order." Under the "new world order," regional and global security concerns would supplant democratic independence movements. The immediate effect of this "order" was brutal crackdowns on secession in the periphery of the former Soviet Union, including Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, as well as in Somalia, the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Turkey, Sudan, and Ethiopia. However, in Yugoslavia, which the United States and European Union wanted to see dissolved, secessionists in seven constituent states were encouraged to secede from the federation. That resulted in the bloodiest military conflicts in Europe since World War II.
Leaders of secessionist groups visiting Washington were traditionally shunned by the State Department. These hapless would-be presidents and prime ministers would be lucky to meet with a low-ranking State Department employee. However, if their independence movements were championed by the Central Intelligence Agency, they would get red carpet treatment. Such was the case with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's favorite Balkans "toy boy," Hashim Thaci, the leader of the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army and now President of the Republic of Kosovo, which was carved out of Serbia but is still unrecognized by many of the world's most important nations, including China and Russia.
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