Launch of New Podcast

SoftPower/FulStories

Let me tell you about a podcast that launched recently. Let me tell you how I feel about military parades. The word bridging these disparate items is: Power. I’m writing about Power and those who have it and those who’ve given it away.

The podcast, called SoftPower/FulStories, shares the power found in stories of human connections made all around the world. Xi’s military parade, with its missiles and stiff-legged soldiers on the march, aims to convey another kind of power.

I’ll say nothing for now of the parade we witnessed in June.

Christopher Wurst’s SoftPower/FulStories podcast features a large and diverse group of teachers, artists, ambassadors, businesspeople, travelers, professors, filmmakers, poets, Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, USAID and State Department Foreign Service alumni, and people who run NGOs abroad. A former diplomat himself, with two decades’ experience in seven countries on four continents, Wurst conducted over eighty interviews to create his rich tableau.

He began collecting the stories in February, against the backdrop of America’s retreat from its role as a leader in foreign assistance and diplomacy. Our withered present reputation abroad stands in stark contrast to the good will American service earned our nation through our diplomatic and development efforts in the eight decades since World War II.

The heart of Wurst’s collection resides in the power of human connections, what happens when people from different worlds and religions and backgrounds reach beyond their comfort zone to forge real connections. He didn’t set out to trumpet a particular success story or promote a particular narrative, other than to emphasize the importance of remaining connected as citizens of the world.

“It’s a shrinking globe and it’s not feasible for one group of people in any place to try to go it alone.”

These first-person narratives, stories of connection, challenge, heartbreak, adventure, friendship, growth, frustration, by degrees humorous and scary and bizarre, are the stories of people breaking old limits to reach new capacities. As Wurst puts it, SoftPower/FulStories teaches us there are different ways to approach the world, and why we all need friends.

Power on Parade

The power that accrues from winning friends is the opposite to the kind of the power on display when troops and tanks and missiles fill the streets, be they the streets of Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, or Washington, DC.

The power of friendship is the opposite of gathering with cronies who attack their neighbors and starve their people to feed their own grandiosity.

It is the opposite of craving a military parade as some kind of birthday salute.

This couldn’t have been planned any better, but when Friday’s four episodes drop, we’ll hear from RPCV and former USAID Foreign Service Officer Carl Henn reflect on the economic and political fallout from America’s retreat as a global leader.

“If we don’t have official friendships with countries in Africa, we can be sure that China and Russia will. And they do, and they are now moving in to fill the vacuum created by the retreat of the U.S.”

It’s an auspicious week to launch SoftPower/FulStories, a ray of light to drive back the shadow of military parades and the saber rattling of strongmen.

You can listen to episode one already, and I encourage you to do so. Three additional episodes tomorrow will feature recognizable names like Elizabeth Gore, Glenn Blumhorst, and Pamela White.

Follow Chris’s journey, which is the journey of so many who’ve served the world in the name of America, often unseen and entirely unheralded.

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