Rebuilding the State
Department from the Ground Up
America’s
standing in the world can now be improved in quite a number of ways from the
top down. The government can be made to work. The State Department can be
renewed. But this transition should begin from the ground up; it should start
with the human element.
It’s always a challenge for those
who lead a
great power like the United States to see the big picture.
At the same time, they require access to in-depth, granular knowledge of every
country in the world. It is a matter of looking up-and-out and at the same time
down-and-in.
The down-and-in sort of knowledge
is often taken for granted because in the digital age of social media there is
the illusion of knowledge in far-flung places where little actually exists.
Many people assume they know what is going on, for example, in Ethiopia’s
war-torn Tigre province, or in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in
the Caucasus, just because they can read the episodic dispatches and the posts
on Twitter from those places. But most people actually have little idea. And
yet, someone like a high policymaker must always be aware of the ground-level
reality in every place. That is, he or she must be all-knowing. As I painfully
saw in the Iraq War, the most catastrophic decisions at the top can be avoided
if only those in power had access to what the lowliest freelance journalist
knows about a distant place from firsthand experience.
Obviously, policymakers
can’t know the whole world from their own firsthand experience.
But they can know it through the experience of others: through foreign service
officers stationed at U.S. embassies around the world. For the State Department
doesn’t only conduct diplomacy. It also has a vital reporting function, similar
to the great newspapers of the print-and-typewriter age with their vast cadre
of foreign correspondents. To be successful in the foreign service is an art
form akin to being a good and prolific cable writer. That has traditionally
meant being a good reporter in the back-of-beyond, away from the embassy in the
capital city. The golden age of the State Department, before email tethered
diplomats to their desks, was in significant measure about first and second
secretaries getting away from their desks and reporting in a manner not
dissimilar to how journalists report on things.
Rebuilding the State Department
is not only a matter of repairing the devastation of the Trump era with its
politicization of everything at Foggy Bottom. It doesn’t only mean reducing the
number of political appointees as ambassadors and replacing them with career
diplomats, or even raising the department’s budget. It also means
re-emphasizing the reporting function of the foreign service, and thereby
underlining the development of area expertise. The Cold War-era Arabists and
China hands might have gotten certain things wrong, but they represented the foreign
service at its best: merging linguistic and cultural knowledge that made them
indispensable to policymakers.
Good policy rests on understanding
the material at hand in distant places: all the nuances and
distinctions that, for example, separate one Baathist head of state in Syria
from another in Iraq; that separate one Cold War-era proxy insurgency in Angola
from another nearby in Mozambique; that separate the ideological evolution of
Turkey’s current ruling Islamists from the generation of Turkish Islamists
which preceded them. Henry Kissinger once told me that while he was the one to
make the policy decisions, he could not have executed his diplomatic agreements
in the Middle East without the advice and granular knowledge of the
Arabists.
I concentrate on the Cold War
because it was an era when political differences within the State Department
were muted compared to today when realists worked well with neoconservatives,
and vice versa. It was an era when realism and human rights were not enemies,
as humanitarian considerations fit more easily into calculations of national
interest because the Cold War was a contest over which system of political
values—the United States’ or the Soviets—was best. This ability
to synthesize opposing positions constitutes an intellectual virtue that should
not be lost.
Alas, the bane of Washington
today has often been the tendency to see the world in opposing, unreconcilable
archetypes: democracies and dictatorships, moderates and radicals, friendly
states and enemy states. But it is the job of the foreign service to break down
those formulaic categories and to depict a world of subtle shades: in which
progress can be made even with adversaries because some dictatorships are
enlightened and some democracies illiberal. The foreign service through its
field reporting is the networker par excellence for the U.S. government. It
creates opportunities where none have thought to have existed.
Having studied the foreign service
for several years in the course of writing a biography of a State Department
humanitarian, I can attest that what makes a good foreign service officer is
sometimes not that much different from what makes a good newspaper
correspondent: a willingness to escape from the embassy and explore beyond the
capital city; to explore alone so as not to be influenced by groupthink; to
listen for hours to people in the field without asking leading questions; to
employ anxious foresight, that is to know the worst about a place
so as to warn policymakers about avoidable bad outcomes; and most of all to
avoid letting the perfect be the enemy of the good since policymaking is often
a world of tough choices. In other words, it takes a highly unusual individual
to become a successful foreign service officer. And that is the way it always
should be. If we compromise on innate talent, the quality of the foreign
service will suffer, no matter how much money is thrown at it.
America’s standing in the world
can now be improved in quite a number of ways from the top down. The government
can be made to work. The State Department can be renewed. But this transition
should begin from the ground up; it should start with the human element.
Robert D. Kaplan is
the author of The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U. S. Government’s
Greatest Humanitarian. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in
Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Image: Flickr /
State Department
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