"To make up for the diplomatic damage done by the Iraq war [3] and to try and leave the U.S. better positioned to respond to -- and possibly even pre-empt -- conflagrations of the future," the Bush administration [4] is trying to make foreign-service officers "more agile and less hemmed in by the high walls and bureaucracies of the traditional embassy." Currently, "a fifth of all U.S. diplomats are in Europe, which contains about a tenth of the world's population." As part of the new push, "100 or so positions [are] being moved from European capitals to China [5], India [6] and a few other developing countries." In Afghanistan [7], "senior-ranking diplomats ... work on democracy projects among U.S. military forces." In Indonesia [8], Egypt and southern Sudan [9], the U.S. has "low-infrastructure, one-man 'presence posts'"; similar posts are planned in Venezuela [10], India and China.