US ambassador meets Gates Cambridge Scholars

  • July 3, 2014
US ambassador meets Gates Cambridge Scholars

The US Ambassador to the UK visited Gates Cambridge Scholars last week and faced questions on issues ranging from overseas aid to Iraq to Ukraine.

The US Ambassador to the UK visited Gates Cambridge Scholars last week and faced questions about a range of issues from overseas aid to Iraq, US Middle East policy, gender diversity, Ukraine and immigration controls.

Ambassador Matthew Barzun told Gates Cambridge Scholars from countries ranging from Pakistan, Palestine and the US to Ukraine and Zimbabwe that many of the problems of the future could not be solved by military means alone and would require greater diplomatic endeavour.

He added that diplomacy was about listening rather than trying to win an argument. “No-one likes losing an argument,” he said. It was better to leave people feeling their point of view had been listened to. He added that more emphasis needed to be put on public diplomacy. He said this was too often seen as weak and about soft power compared with the traditional view of diplomacy being conducted behind closed doors.

Ambassador Barzun also spoke about his own career which has seen him move from being a business executive for CNET Networks to being Ambassador to Sweden to campaigning for President Obama’s re-election.

Latest News

Inclusive conservation

Rohini Chaturvedi finished her PhD at a difficult time for many students – in the midst of the global economic crisis of the early 2010s. But through a combination of hard work, initiative and serendipity she has found an impressive way to extend the work she did at Cambridge to promote conservation efforts in India. […]

Research impact award for Gates Cambridge Scholar

A Gates Cambridge Scholar is one of two winners of the 2023 Sandra Dawson Research Impact Award for his work on the economics of climate change earlier this month. The annual award was established through a generous donation from Professor Dame Sandra Dawson, a former Director of Cambridge’s Judge Business School. Winners are chosen based […]

AI system self-organises to resemble brains of complex organisms

A team of Cambridge scientists, co-led by a Gates Cambridge Scholar, have shown that placing physical constraints on an artificially-intelligent system – in much the same way that the human brain has to develop and operate within physical and biological constraints – allows it to develop features of the brains of complex organisms in order […]

Scholar wins history of science & medicine essay prize

A Gates Cambridge Scholar has won a prestigious essay competition about the history of early science with a treatise on evidence of knowledge exchange between the Ming-Chinese and Iberian conventions in the 16th century. The essay competition was run by the Early Sciences Forum of the History of Science Society and the Early Science and Medicine journal […]