Speaking at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in January 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice observed that modern technologies "were collapsing the distance that once clearly separated right here from over there." As a result, she said, security interests, democratic ideals, and development efforts increasingly blended together. No longer could diplomacy be, as historians used to assert, "what one clerk wrote another," or as the Austrian writer Karl Krauss once deemed it, "a game of chess."

Secretary Rice called for a new "transformational diplomacy," one in which assistance to other peoples and nations would play a prominent role. Under her leadership, the goal of the new strategic framework for U.S. foreign assistance is "to help build and sustain democratic, well-governed states that respond to the needs of their people, reduce widespread poverty, and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system."

The Secretary's address sparked a transformation of this nation's diplomatic and foreign assistance institutions. Localized "presence posts" bring American diplomats to key regional population centers, and in contact with more people. Within the Department of State, a new Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization coordinates efforts to help societies recover from conflict or civil strife. Rapid response teams assist nations combating avian flu and other diseases. Agencies have been consolidated to better deliver aid where and when it is needed. The Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) now serves also as the State Department's Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance, and is charged with coordinating overall U.S. foreign aid strategy.

New and creative initiatives like the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and others described in this journal further transformational diplomacy by crafting carefully tailored relief programs and by helping nations create the conditions in which those programs can work.

Of course, people-to-people contact can be the most transformative diplomacy of all. "Citizen diplomats," Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes has said, are among the nation's greatest diplomatic assets.

The pages that follow depict a cross-section of public, private, and public-private partnership efforts to assist peoples in need-transformational diplomacy at work, throughout the world, every day.