U.S. Embassy Tokyo Role in the Establishment of U.S.-Mongolia Relations.

• Author: Campi, Alicia J.
• Position: Essay

Editor's note: The U.S. and Mongolia established diplomatic relations in 1987, after earlier failed attempts and many years of Cold War frostiness. In this account, Dr. Campi describes the negotiations leading up to relations with the Mongolian People's Republic, at the time a communist country closely allied to the Soviet Union, and her own role in the process. Many outstanding personalities were involved in the question of opening diplomatic relations with Mongolia. In 1985, when former Senator Mike Mansfield was serving as Ambassador to Japan, the Mongolian Government in Ulaanbaatar sought out the Japanese Ambassador to Mongolia to ask him to be an intermediary to the United States. The Mongols remembered that Mansfield during his time in Congress had been sympathetic to Mongolia and worked with President John F. Kennedy to allow the accession of Mongolia to the United Nations in 1961. Since Japanese Ambassador Ota was a good friend of Mike Mansfield, he agreed to pass the Mongolian offer to open negotiations on mutual recognition. Ambassador Mansfield thereupon delegated responsibility for exploring the issue to the Political Section chief Donald Keyser. Keyser and his wife, who also was an officer in the embassy, arranged a dinner meeting with Mongolian Embassy official Ravdan Bold, his embassy's China specialist and an English-speaking intelligence officer. Unimpressed by Bold, Keyser reported to Mansfield that the approach by the Mongols was not serious so further discussions were not necessary.

Several months later, Ambassador Ota again approached Ambassador Mansfield to encourage him to reach out to the Mongols. Having heard that I, a consular officer working in the Embassy's Visa Section, was involved in dissertation research on U.S. contacts with Mongolia in the 1920s for my Ph.D. in Mongolian Studies at Indiana University, Mansfield assigned me to recontact the Mongolian Embassy in Japan. To prepare for the meeting with Bold, I first asked Keyser why the dinner meeting was unsatisfactory. He responded that the Mongols had insulted him by sending a junior official of lower rank who was only a Second Secretary and that this man had unbearable table manners. (This latter comment struck me as quite peculiar, having dined with many Mongolian officials working at their U.N. Mission in New York. During many meals with Bold over the subsequent 30 years, I never witnessed any bad manners or strange mannerisms.)

At our first meeting in the fall of 1985, Bold and I found that we shared a deep academic interest in Chinese and Mongolian history and were strongly motivated to assist in the establishment of diplomatic relations between our countries. I told Bold that the two of us must succeed where previous attempts in the 1960s and 1970s had not, because failure was not an option.

Because of the lack of bilateral relations, all of our meetings, perhaps some 15 in total over 18 months, took place outside embassy offices. One time in the winter I invited Bold to dinner in my Tokyo apartment with American, Swiss, and Pakistani diplomats also present. The Mongolian-style live charcoal-fired hot pot...