A chef, Sharon Stone, and good foreign policy

The main activity in which the United States government currently engages around the world, apart from fighting two wars, is an attempt to export its brand of politics and economics — such as supporting the formation and training of political parties, paying for agricultural development, and helping women entrepreneurs. These are fine ideas, but do they succeed — for example, can one draw a straight line between the Arab Spring and U.S. foreign policy? The most one can conclude at this point is that a lot of people would like to know.

One reason U.S. approaches don’t work is that in almost no case anywhere in history has democracy been brought in from the outside and unpacked like an Ikea bunkbed. The other reason is that the U.S. sends few of its chefs as emissaries of good will. But it should. Consider Kelly Macdonald, executive chef for a California vineyard-tour company called the Napa Valley Wine Train, who spent the last week providing gourmet cooking demonstrations to the chefs of Georgia.

Georgia has been a pillar of U.S. foreign policy since an ultra-strategic 1-million-barrel-a-day oil pipeline was built across its territory to the Mediterranean Sea. The U.S. worries about the democracy credentials of President Mikhail Saakashvili, whose police last week beat participants in a protest against the government in which there were four deaths including a policeman, but Macdonald seems a more effective way of spreading the message than finger-wagging.

Georgian television broadcast Macdonald and his son, Ryan, visiting the home of U.S. Ambassador John Bass, who with his fiancé, a U.S. diplomat named Holly Holzer, got to show a smiling, apron-wearing, in-kitchen image of the United States. Here is Macdonald fixing up a shrimp dish for some chefs in the capital of Tbilisi.

He went over pretty well.

That was especially the case during a toast at a Georgian home that evening.

Even better, send Sharon Stone. The actress happens to be in Tbilisi for a premier of "5 Days of August," a film about the 2008 Georgian war with Russia. The movie features Andy Garcia, who was also in town, but Stone, who isn’t in the film, flew to Tbilisi, too, and commanded besotted attention. Some Moscow-based foreign correspondents, such as Andrew Osborn of the Daily Telegraph in London, write that the film is likely to worsen tensions between Russia and Georgia. But in Tbilisi, it has been welcomed.

The U.S. Embassy had no role in Stone being here, but it should have. Stone would possibly not be a choice in all countries where the U.S. has image problems, but she would be in a lot of them. Mark Mullen, the local representative of Transparency International, ran into Stone sipping coffee at a downtown Tbilisi café yesterday.

This is how U.S. diplomacy was formerly conducted, before two groups captured U.S. foreign policy — a wing of politics unversed in the crucial importance of image abroad and how it is created; and a phalanx of security fanatics who, years before 9/11, made so many rules that Americans look like scared rabbits abroad.