Chapter 3 - The Senior Officials' Meetings

Summary

Senior Officials' Meetings — SOMs in the language of APEC — were and are the engine of APEC. It is at these meetings that operational decisions are made that provide momentum for the organization; it is here that Senior Officials make policy recommendations to their Ministers. The five SOMs leading up to the Seattle Ministerial Meeting were defining moments for the Secretariat. In speeches, I often described the Senior Officials as my Board of Directors, and it was at the SOMs that we received feedback on our current performance as well as instructions for the Secretariat's future course. The first SOM at Washington in December 1992 provided our original charter, but the second SOM, in February 1993, was our proving ground.

The First Senior Officials' Meeting,

Washington, D.C., 2–4 December 1992

The first SOM took place at the Department of State before I left for Singapore. Its main tasks were to approve the proposed arrangements for setting up the Secretariat and the operational and administrative budgets (about US$1 million each), and to agree to a budget cycle. The SOM approved the proposed organization plan with little debate; it was evident that the Senior Officials were pleased that the United States had assigned a senior diplomat to the Executive Director position. This set a pattern and my successors also held the title of Ambassador when they took over. In Asia, where protocol and rank are especially important, these designations helped give the new organization credibility.

There were some pleasant surprises. When I met the co-leader of the Japanese delegation, Ambassador Nobutoshi Akao, at the U.S.–Japan bilateral session, we both had the feeling that we had met before. We finally remembered that we had been on a raft together as part of a crew of diplomats and business people on a 1989 Whitewater rafting trip down the Salmon River in Idaho.