Dave Rank ’86
State Department
Diplomat – Afghanistan, China, Taiwan, Greece, D.C., and Mauritius
In late 2009 Brother Rank wrote to the alumni association, “I am finishing six years of overseas assignments (Athens, Beijing and now Taiwan) with the US State Department next summer and will return to the Washington area. I’ll study Dari for a year, getting ready for a job as head of the political affairs section at the US Embassy in Kabul. My family will stay behind, including my oldest kid, who starts college next fall. Unlikely she’ll be a Psi U, though, unless she ends up at a school in the northeast”
Prior to this note, he earlier reported: “I have been through a couple of jobs at State since I updated my entry. From 2004 until this past summer, I was the head of the Political/Military Affairs office at our embassy in Athens, Greece. We (my wife, three kids, and I) left at the start of the summer to return to Beijing. I’ll be here until 2008, working to establish a series of one-officer foreign service posts in major Chinese cities where we now have no presence. Since there are more than 200 cities in China with more than 1 million people, we have a lot of work ahead of us. In 2008 (likely right after the Olympics), we leave Beijing for Taiwan, where I will head the Political Affairs section at our unofficial liaison office there. (Since we do not have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, we use this informal channel to manage our ties.) When we finish there, my family will have spent more than a decade in China – and 15 years overseas – will be ready for a bit of time back in the States.”
Brother Rank was highlighted in the News-Gazette in 2002 in the following article:
Incidents involving China kept UI graduate busy
By J. Philip Bloomer, The News-Gazette – Published online March 29, 2002
URBANA – After three tumultuous years as a diplomat in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, David Rank returned to Washington last summer expecting something of a respite.
But 12 years in the State Department has taught him not to get too comfortable.
“We came back to the States thinking things would be a little slower. I had an office overlooking the Mall in Washington. Things were going well,” Rank said. “I was there a little over a month when I watched a plane crash into the Pentagon. Things haven’t been the same since.”
Rank, a 1986 liberal arts graduate of the University of Illinois, returned to campus this week in between assignments to visit family and his alma mater. A native of South Bend, Ind., Rank and his wife Dana, also a UI graduate and Indiana native, haven’t done too much of that in recent years.
His State Department postings began in Shanghai in 1990, then took him to Port Louis, Mauritius, then to Washington in the State Department Office of Korean Affairs, then to Beijing.
In China, he helped coordinate President Clinton’s visit in 1998. He also participated in negotiations between the United States and Beijing after the accidental NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.
Rank was holed up with his wife and three children for two days in their apartment a block away from the embassy during two days of heavy rioting.
“It was a horrible set of circumstances,” Rank said. “The bottom line is, it was our fault.” Three Chinese journalists were killed and 20 embassy staffers wounded. NATO said outdated intelligence information sent missiles to a building mistakenly believed to be a Yugoslavian army supply facility.
The aftertaste of that incident didn’t make it any easier to deal with the collision of a Chinese jet fighter with a U.S. surveillance plane last spring. Rank credits the presence of Joseph Prueher, the U.S. ambassador to China, a four-star admiral and former commander-in-chief of the Pacific, with resolving the standoff between the countries.
The U.S. plane’s 24-man crew was held in China for 11 days. Once they were home, the United States released a videotape of the Chinese fighter pilot’s actions and blamed his aggressive tactics for causing the crash.
“He was the best we could have had there,” Rank said. “It’s hard to argue with someone who flew fighter jets.”
Rank emphasized that the bulk of his job isn’t always reactionary. In the case of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he said the groundwork laid in establishing relationships with countries around the world allowed for a swift military and diplomatic response from allies.
“Sept. 12 the NATO charter was invoked. It wasn’t an issue of getting people to sign on but organizing in the nuts and bolts of support,” Rank said.
His own job involved organizing fly routes, overfly zones, refueling and landing logistics.
“There’s an awful lot of grunt work done by the State Department and the FBI and many others that pays off in attacks not executed,” Rank said. “How much harm has been avoided because they didn’t have the money because of the millions in terrorist assets we were able to freeze? It’s hard to quantify, but it’s substantial.”
Rank, 37, said that while he is a strong believer in the value of the foreign service, it’s not a career he deliberately pursued. A history major at the UI, he received his undergraduate degree but had little idea of what he would do immediately.
“I needed a marketable skill. China was the up-and-coming country, so I went there to study. It was a fairly mercenary decision. I thought I’d find a job with a company hoping to expand markets in China,” Rank said.
He returned to the United States in May 1989, just after the Tiananmen Square massacre. U.S. business interest in China quickly took a nose dive. Fortunately, Rank said he had taken the foreign service exam while in Taiwan. With his knowledge of Chinese, the State Department offered him a job a few months later.
Rank is currently special adviser in the Office of the Undersecretary for Political Affairs, where he is responsible for Asian and Pacific political/military affairs. He also will be teaching at Georgetown University next school year and is scheduled to move to Singapore in 2004.
“It’s a real blessing to live in a place where freedoms are rights,” Rank said. “In China, more and more political freedoms are being allowed. But the key word is allowed.
“It was tough watching some of the clearly misguided protests here after Sept. 11. So many of our freedoms are taken for granted.” |
