Diplomacy drowning in chaos

U.S. State Department in need of rescue

When a U.S. president thinks most positions at the State Department are unnecessary, it’s a safe bet that professional diplomacy will get short shrift.

It’s important to understand the State Department was falling on hard times even before the Trump administration accelerated the trend. The United States has had a rather casual attitude about diplomacy for much of its history, even though some of its greatest foreign-policy successes were achieved by diplomacy rather than by force of arms.

Initiatives such as the Louisiana Purchase, the Marshall Plan, the Camp David Accords, and the negotiated end of the Cold War were remarkable foreign-policy achievements won not on the battlefield but across the negotiating table. Add to that countless other agreements and arrangements that advanced U.S. interests at remarkably little cost, because skilled diplomats were able to discern other parties’ interests, resolve, and sensitivities and fashion accords that their foreign counterparts accepted, implemented, and preserved.

Yet even as benefits of effective diplomacy are manifest, Americans have long viewed it with suspicion and disdain. Instead of thinking of foreign policy as the art of pursuing arrangements of mutual benefit and adjustment, Americans prefer the moral clarity of unconditional surrender. That approach is usually short-sighted because it encourages others to fight harder and longer and because losers who are not reconciled to their defeat (such as Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War or the Confederate states after the Civil War) will try to renege on whatever the United States forced them to accept.

A belief that diplomacy requires no special training or skill is evident in the U.S. policy of reserving more than 30 percent of its ambassadorial appointments for untrained amateurs (often big campaign donors), a practice no other great power has seen fit to imitate.

The Founding Fathers did not neglect diplomacy during the War of Independence (Benjamin Franklin helped persuade France to come to the colonists’ aid, and John Jay negotiated the treaty that ended the war), but their successors mostly tried to remain aloof from foreign entanglements.

Even after the United States became a great power, its providential position in the Western hemisphere gave it a level of security that made skillful diplomacy seem a luxury rather than a necessity. U.S. leaders began to take diplomacy more seriously during World War II and afterward, but by then the United States could get its way without having to be very knowledgeable, subtle, or skillful.

With some noteworthy exceptions, U.S. leaders tended to rely on brute force, arm-twisting, and coercion rather than more subtle arts of persuasion. And when they failed, the consequences were mostly visited upon unfortunate populations far away.

The United States is trying to counter China’s rising influence in Asia and deal with a continuing confrontation with North Korea, and still has no ambassador in South Korea and no assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. The department’s top expert on North Korea recently announced his retirement.

This situation is reminiscent of challenges the U.S. military faced between the two world wars. The United States put more than 4 million men and women under arms in World War I and would have mobilized even more had the war

not ended in 1918. Yet this force was demobilized immediately afterward, and the U.S. military endured on a starvation diet until the late 1930s. In 1932, the U.S. army had only 136,000 enlisted.

Yet military leaders did not sit idle. Instead, they worked to preserve the institution and prepare for the moment when the nation would require their services and expertise again. In particular, senior military leaders identified a cadre of talented officers who would eventually lead it when World War II came and prepared detailed mobilization strategies that would prove invaluable when the country began to rearm in the late 1930s and went on a war footing after Pearl Harbor.

Today, the demobilization of the State Department and the disdain for diplomacy that it reflects creates a similar imperative. Those who recognize the value of diplomacy should use the present period to lay the groundwork for a revitalized and reformed set of diplomatic institutions and a broader appreciation of diplomacy’s role in U.S. foreign policy.

We’re going to need it. The Trump era is looking more and more like a foreign-policy train wreck, and his successors will have a lot of repair work to do. Moreover, the unipolar moment is clearly over, and it’s going to be harder for the United States to run a foreign policy based mostly on blowing things up, issuing threats, imposing sanctions, and twisting arms.

The need for sophisticated and adroit diplomacy is increasing. The long-term competition with China is an obvious example. Much of this rivalry will be a competition for influence—especially in Asia—and preserving America’s current position will require a subtle and sophisticated understanding of the region and a lot of nuanced and convincing conversations with our Asian partners.

If this forecast is correct, what steps could be taken now to facilitate rebuilding America’s diplomatic capacity later? The Trump administration is hardly going to spearhead this effort, so it will have to be led by private foundations, think tanks, universities, and other institutions in civil society.

First, a reform movement should launch a well-organized campaign to educate the American people about the importance of diplomacy. Few people question that military weakness could imperil the nation, and most people recognize that preserving a strong economy is essential even if they disagree on how to do it. But relatively few appreciate the risks we face from a half-hearted and inept approach to our official dealings with other countries, or understand the benefits that effective diplomacy can bring.

In addition to documenting diplomacy’s success stories, such an effort could also identify episodes

when poor diplomatic capacity or preparation had costly consequences. Americans understand what happens when a country goes to war with inferior weapons or inadequate training, so we spend billions of dollars to preserve military superiority. Americans also need to grasp what can go wrong when you send unskilled emissaries off to do the nation’s business overseas and expect them to out-perform better-prepared counterparts.

U.S. leaders are constantly drowning in information, but what they often lack are smart and knowledgeable people who can tell them what it means. Diplomats with intimate knowledge of other societies

and governments provide the indispensable capacity to explain how problems look to others. This empathy is essential to crafting successful international agreements; unless one knows how the other side is thinking, it’s hard to put forward proposals that will achieve our aims and that the other side will accept.

A blueprint for American diplomacy in the 21st century, emphasizing the need to develop a professional diplomatic service, is needed. Like the U.S. military, it should design and seek funding for a program of career-long education. Senior military officers are routinely sent back to school, but State Department officials and foreign service

officers rarely enjoy similar opportunities to enhance their training as their careers advance.

Like the U.S. military, America’s diplomats should routinely conduct after-action reports of major diplomatic initiatives, seeking to draw lessons from past performance with an eye toward constant institutional improvement. And like the military, a revitalized State Department should employ both scholars and practitioners to create a formal “diplomatic doctrine” derived from its past experience—akin to the Army’s Field Manuals—that would guide training and practice and be improved over time.

The United States is still trying to manage an impossible array of international problems, still engaged in several endless wars, largely bereft of a clear and compelling strategy, and under the leadership of the least competent president in modern memory. Yet the present crisis of American diplomacy is also an opportunity to design a new set of diplomatic institutions, build a broader consensus on the value of diplomacy itself, and eventually forge a new approach toward dealing with other nations. There’s nowhere to go but up.