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These days, however, considerations of the diplomat's professional frustration and his changing job description tend to pale beside the crucial and complex questions posed by the terrorist threat. The underlying quandary, of course, is the question of diplomacy's sheer survival, of how long it can continue to function at all with its embassies under constant siege and its practitioners under constant threat. Rand's Jenkins points out that, with the glaring exception of Tehran, the terrorists have shrewdly concentrated on "soft" embassy targets belonging to smaller countries and avoided the fortresses belonging to larger ones. That might appear to be an argument for ever more stringent and restrictive security measures. But how can an American ambassador even begin to do his job if he never leaves his bunker?
The dilemma posed by such embassy takeovers is a grim classic: to reject the terrorist demands outright could result in the death of the hostages on the spot, but to accede to them might only encourage terrorism elsewhere. At week's end a rumor was circulating that the Colombian government would fly the entire embassy throng—hostages, guerrillas and possibly a number of freed political prisoners—to Panama City. There, on neutral ground, the guerrillas would release their captives and make their separate ways to prearranged countries of asylum. And what if no negotiated solution could be reached? The answer, at least from the Austrian Ambassador who had been released as a hostage, was stark: "Catastrophic massacre."