John Christian Kornblum (born February 6, 1943, Detroit, Michigan) is an American diplomat and businessman.[1] He entered the American Foreign Service in 1964. Over the next thirty five years, he served in Europe and at the State Department in Washington. Since 2001, he has established himself as an investment banker and international business consultant. He lives in Berlin.
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During his foreign service career, Kornblum specialized in European and East-West relations and played a defining role in many of the important events leading up to the end of the Cold War. These included the Quadripartite negotiations on Berlin (1970–1973), the Helsinki Final Act (1973–1975), the Belgrade Conference of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) from 1977 to 1978, the stationing of [intermediate] nuclear weapons in Europe (INF) in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan's historic 1987 appearance at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, German reunification (1990), the Helsinki Summit Conference of the OSCE (1992), the Dayton Agreement on the Balkans (1995), enlargement of NATO (1997), and the agreement on compensation of slave laborers and establishment of the Reconciliation Foundation of German Industry (2000). Kornblum also directed two dramatic prisoner and spy exchanges on the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin in 1985 and 1986. The latter featured the release of Soviet dissident Anatoli Scharanskiy.
Kornblum was a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff under Henry Kissinger (1973–1975), Director of the State Department's Office of Central European Affairs (1981–1985), United States Minister and Deputy Commandant in Berlin (1985–1987), Deputy Ambassador to NATO (1987–1991), Ambassador and head of the U.S. Mission to the OSCE in Vienna (1991–1994) and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs and Special Envoy to the Balkans (1995–1997). He served as the Ambassador to Germany from 1997 to 2001.
Kornblum's tenure as Ambassador to Germany was highlighted by the move of the German government from the West German capital in Bonn on the Rhine to reunified Berlin. In 1999, he reopened the Embassy of the United States in Berlin for the first time since December 8, 1941. The embassy was first housed in the building formerly used as the American Embassy to the German Democratic Republic. Constructing a new chancery on the site of the prewar building at the Brandenburg Gate turned out to be a difficult undertaking. Heightened United States security requirements led to a long and at times bitter dispute with Berlin authorities during which Kornblum became the target of repeated political and public criticism. Shortly before leaving office in 2001, Kornblum negotiated a settlement which was ultimately confirmed by Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2003. The new embassy opened on July 4, 2008.
Kornblum's more than forty years of active presence in Europe have made him one of the most experienced and effective American practitioners on Europe and Atlantic relations. Sometimes by chance, often by design, he was often at the center of dramatic events. A highpont of his efforts was the June 1987,speech by President Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Kornblum conceived and organized the event and worked for more than a year to gain acceptance for political intitiatives which included the famous "tear down this wall" phrase in the President's speech. His service at NATO included helping prepare the new Alliance strategy after 1990 and negotiation of NATO's position for the conventional forces negotiations with the Soviet Union. Kornblum was present from the beginning of negotiation of the Helsinki Final Act in 1973 and contributed several times to its implementation in the following years. He played a lead role in negotiating the Helsinki Summit Declaration, the "Challenges of Change" which devised a new operational role for the then Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and from 1992 to 1994 opened and headed the first American Mission to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Returning to Washington in 1994, he oversaw development of a post-Cold War Atlantic security strategy, including the enlargement of NATO in 1997, the NATO-Russia Council, the NATO-Ukraine Council and the expansion, renaming and reorganization of the CSCE to OSCE. In 1995 Kornblum was one of the main architects of the Dayton Peace Agreement, and later served for two years as United States Special Envoy to the Balkans.
Kornblum described the complex diplomacy which preceded President Reagan's speech at the Brandenburg Gate in an article entitled "Reagan's Brandenburg Concerto" (an allusion to the complex work of the Brandenburg concertos by Bach), which appeared in the May/June, 2007 issue of The American Interest and was reprinted in the German newspaper Die Welt on June 12, 2007. In the article, he describes how the decision to stage the speech at the most dramatic point on the Berlin Wall was planned for more than a year in advance by US diplomats in Germany and Washington as a counterweight to the growing sentiment within Germany for an arrangement with the new, liberal Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Many began to hope that in return for legal acceptance of the sovereignty of East Germany, the West could obtain the inclusion of West Berlin into West Germany and a gradual opening of the wall. Any such deal with Gorbachev would have undermined hopes for reunification of Germany and the liberation of Eastern Europe. Reagan's dramatic call for Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," was not an isolated event, but was conceived by Kornblum and his team as the logical focal point for the detailed American initiative to remind both East and West that the United States was not willing to accept an undemocratic status quo in the center of Europe. The speech highlighted a number of proposals to accelerate democratic change by making the wall more porous, and thus helping Gorbachev to open it. Kornblum describes the many political pressures exerted in Germany and Washington as this concept was being implemented and concludes with an analysis of the meaning of the speech 20 years later.
Since leaving diplomatic service, Kornblum has followed parallel careers in business, consulting and public commentary in Europe and the United States. From 2001 to 2009, Kornblum served as Chairman of the investment bank Lazard Freres Germany, which he helped build to one of the leading investment banks in Central Europe. He has also been a member of the supervisory boards of Bayer AG, Thyssen-Krupp Technologies, and Motorola Europe. He is a member of the advisory councils of Russell Reynolds[2] and Consultum AG,[3] and an advisor to the Finnish Innovation Fund SITRA, and to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Kornblum serves on numerous non-profit boards including the American Academy in Berlin, the German Institute for Community Organizing (DICO)[4] and the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. He currently serves as adviser to a number of transatlantic companies including the international law firm Noerr,[5] and Pfizer.[6]. Since July 2010, Kornblum has also been a member of the German Government Council for Immigration and Integration.
During the past ten years, Kornblum has established a strong public voice defining the implications for Europe and the United States of the new era in global politics which followed the end of the Cold War. He has built on both his diplomatic and business experience to focus particularly on the issues connected with the rapidly changing relationships between government and the private sector in a globally integrated world. He speaks and writes regularly in Europe and the United States on economic, security and political issues. Kornblum does regular commentary for several European and American networks on American politics and foreign policy.
Looking to the future of the Atlantic world, Kornblum presents an alternative vision for the evolution of Germany and Europe in an article published in the November/December 2009 issue of the political journal The American Interest. He argues that the end of Cold War confrontation and spread of free market systems has made possible the establishment of a tight web of open sourced networks which are overcoming traditional geography and creating new patterns of culture and trade. Kornblum suggests that increasing global integration will gradually reduce Germany's fear of being caught in the middle of big power confrontation and give it a new sense of confidence. He concludes, "With its deepening sense of being at the center of a newly integrated world will come a growing sense of responsibility that will cause the ghosts of the past to gradually recede. Germany will not answer lingering questions about its normalcy; it will transcend them. By our lights today, Germany will not be normal, but nothing else will be either." A German translation of this article appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on November 6, 2009.
Kornblum expanded his commentary on the Obama era in a recent book, Mission Amerika written in German together with well-known television commentator Dieter Kronzucker. In the book, the authors describe the groundwork for the vision of change proclaimed by President Obama created by the wide-reaching social and demographic changes which have taken place in the United States during the past thirty years. They suggest that Obama's victory was a result both of a skillful campaign and a dramatic evolution of American society which provided a ready audience for Obama's ideas. They warn, however, that Obama's program of transformation is likely to encounter heavy resistance in the wake of the economic crisis.
In 2000, Kornblum added the highest honor presented to an American foreign service officer, the Secretary's Award, to the many distinctions he earned during his Foreign Service Career. He has also been awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the Österreichischer Verdienstorden, the Silver Medal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Germany and Honorary Citizenship of Sarajevo. Kornblum was awarded the Knighthood of the Aachen, Germany Karnevalsverein in January 1999, which makes him a member of the prestigious "Orden Wider den Tierischen Ernst" (Order Against Deadly Seriousness), and was named Distinguished Alumnus of Michigan State University in June 1999.
John Kornblum has been married to Helen Sen Kornblum since 1987. They have two sons: Alexander (born 1988) and Stephen (born 1990).
Media related to [//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:John_C._Kornblum John C. Kornblum] at Wikimedia Commons
| Government offices | ||
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| Preceded by Richard Holbrooke |
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs July 3, 1996 – July 1, 1997 |
Succeeded by Marc Grossman |