The Diplomat as Gardener
What George
Shultz Understood About American Power
February 19, 2021
In July 1988, during his final year as
secretary of state, George Shultz embarked on an eight-country, three-week tour
of Asia. No crisis or urgent diplomatic objective had spurred the
trip—unthinkably long by today’s standards. With the Soviet Union in decline
and China focused inward, the United States’ global position was strong. But
Shultz had a deep commitment to what he called “tending the diplomatic garden.”
I was a young Foreign Service officer accompanying Shultz. Watching the way he
treated his hosts in each capital city was a powerful lesson in American
diplomacy and why it matters.
Upon his arrival in Tokyo, Shultz raised
the confidence of the Japanese—long insecure about the attention lavished on
China ever since President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit—by proclaiming that the
United States had no more important ally in the world. In Beijing, Shultz, the
rare American leader who listened more than he spoke, sat through long meetings
and an even longer ceremonial dinner at the Summer Palace with his proud but
prickly Chinese hosts. From Bangkok and Manila to Seoul, Hong Kong, Jakarta,
and the Marshall Islands, he spent meeting after meeting weeding, watering, and
watching over the diplomatic garden. His commitment to building personal
relationships with his foreign counterparts demonstrated the United States’
keen interest in the fortunes of a rapidly changing and ascending region.
Shultz’s gardening metaphor was grounded
in a simple core belief: even a superpower had to show up in distant capitals,
demonstrate interest and respect, get to know the leaders, and build
familiarity and trust, so that when the crises came—as they surely would—it
would have a network of friends and allies to turn to for help. The costs of
neglecting that insight have become all too clear on multiple occasions in the
decades since.
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A GENUINE
OPPORTUNITY
When Shultz died in California at the age
of 100 earlier this month, he left a record of public service that few
Americans have attained in recent history. For my generation of career
diplomats, Shultz represents an American leadership that exercised power with a
level of confidence, purpose, and effectiveness that has been noticeably absent
in recent years.
The sheer breadth and depth of Shultz’s
long service to the United States was extraordinary by any standard. A Marine
Corps combat veteran of World War II, Shultz returned home from the Pacific to
earn a doctorate in economics at MIT and go on to a stint as a member of
President Dwight Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers before moving to the
University of Chicago, where he was a professor and ultimately dean of the
business school. Brought back to Washington by President Nixon, Shultz
subsequently became one of only two people in U.S. history to serve in four
cabinet positions (the other was his contemporary Elliot Richardson).
As secretary of labor, Shultz tried to
create greater opportunities for Black businesses in the construction industry.
As the first director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), he brought
an intellectual rigor and practical sensibility to one of the least heralded but
most important jobs in the executive branch. Succeeding John Connally as
secretary of the Treasury, he implemented Nixon’s historic move off the gold
standard, before leaving government to run Bechtel in 1974. Even if he’d never
gone back to Washington, Shultz would have had a storied government career.
Shultz had a deep commitment to what he
called “tending the diplomatic garden.”
But it was his service over six and
one-half years as President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state that was his
crowning achievement in public life. Taking office in 1982, at a time of deep
tension and division in the Cold War, Shultz was a primary architect of
Reagan’s confrontational posture toward Moscow and the major U.S. defense
buildup that the Soviets ultimately could not match. Yet following Mikhail
Gorbachev’s appointment as Communist Party general secretary in 1985 and the
launch of the reformist policies of glasnost and perestroika, Shultz detected
earlier than Reagan and most others in Washington that this was a genuine
opportunity to transform the long and contentious relationship with the
Kremlin.
Ever the diplomatic gardener, Shultz
worked hard to develop a close and ultimately trusting relationship with
another Soviet reformer, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. At the Reykjavik
Summit in 1986, Shultz and Reagan even came close to agreeing with Gorbachev on
the abolishment of their respective nuclear weapons forces. While that brief
and stunning vision vanished as quickly as it had materialized, Shultz and Shevardnadze
succeeded in negotiating the elimination of thousands of intermediate-range
nuclear weapons in the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which
brought the threat of conflict arguably to its lowest point in the nuclear age.
Such efforts brought a demonstrable thaw
in the once frozen superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet
Union. Yet at the same time, Shultz made it a personal mission to convince the
Kremlin to permit Soviet Jews to immigrate to the West, remaining proud of that
singular accomplishment throughout his life. And as a champion of free markets,
free labor, and ideas, he encouraged those leaders across Eastern Europe
challenging failing communist governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and beyond
in a rapidly weakening Warsaw Pact.
Shultz had handed the baton of leadership
in the State Department to his successor, James A. Baker III, by 1989 and was
out of office for the astonishing events that followed—the fall of the Berlin
Wall, unification of a long-divided Germany, and the stunning collapse and
disintegration of the Soviet Union itself on December 25, 1991. His
consequential role in steering the Cold War to a mercifully peaceful end is
secure, however, in the history books. And in the three decades that followed
his departure from the State Department, Shultz enjoyed an impressively
productive life as one of the United States’ most important foreign policy
intellectuals. From his perch at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, he arrived
each day at his office well into his late 90s, conducting a rolling seminar (as
well as authoring papers and books) on everything from global economics to
U.S.-Russian relations and waging a public campaign, alongside his
contemporaries Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, and William Perry, to imagine a world
without nuclear weapons.
DIPLOMACY FIRST
Shultz often returned to a few central
themes about American power in the world—themes that are especially relevant
today, when so many doubt the United States’ ability to sustain its role as the
world’s most powerful country. He was a persistent advocate of American
economic power in the world and, given prior experiences at the Treasury
Department and OMB and as a corporate executive and economics professor, made
an especially strong and persuasive case for economics as the vital foundation
of U.S. global influence. (When my colleagues Bob Mnookin and Jim Sebenius
and I interviewed Shultz a few years ago for a research project, he returned
frequently to his conviction that Reagan’s revival of U.S. economic strength
was a key factor in ending the Cold War.) Shultz was also early to recognize
the significance of the information age and the relationship of technological
innovation to U.S. power.
But throughout, Shultz pushed to give
diplomacy a lead role in U.S. foreign policy. As secretary of state, he was a
vigorous champion of the career Foreign Service and civil service and, in
contrast to his successors in the Trump administration, listened to advice from
career officers and appointed many to senior positions. He also created the
Foreign Service Institute in Virginia, which trains diplomats in languages,
global politics, regional studies, management, and leadership.
Shultz may be best remembered for his
defiance of a 1983 Reagan administration edict that State Department officers
be subjected to polygraph tests, like their brethren in the intelligence
community. He spoke out publicly, for all State officials and for himself: “The
minute in this government I am told that I’m not trusted is the day that I
leave.” He won the argument. American diplomats were not polygraphed, and
Shultz kept his job for six more years.
For Shultz, diplomacy was more than the
ends: the summits, arms control agreements, trade deals.
For Shultz, diplomacy was more than the
ends: the summits, arms control agreements, trade deals. In conversations in
recent years, he returned time and again to the personal aspects of what it
means to be an effective diplomat: the underrated value of listening, of
personal relationships between leaders, especially antagonists, and of what he
called the “coin of the realm,” trust.
One of the stories career diplomats recite
most often about Shultz was about new ambassadors going to see him before
leaving for foreign postings. In Shultz’s imposing office on the seventh floor
of the State Department was a very large globe. After ushering the ambassador
to stand beside it, he would ask each to point to his country. When,
invariably, ambassadors would point to Peru or Mali or Singapore or wherever else
they had been appointed, Shultz would point to the United States to remind them
that this was “their country.”
With the United States unmoored by the
presidency of Donald Trump and convulsed by the COVID-19 pandemic, a recession,
racial injustice, and an insurrection, we would do well to adopt both Shultz’s
fundamental optimism and his sense of American strength and purpose. But it
will also take a renewed investment in Shultz’s model of diplomacy to convince
a world questioning the U.S. commitment to global leadership that America can
rise again.
·
NICHOLAS BURNS is Professor of Diplomacy and International
Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School; he served as U.S. Undersecretary
of State for Political Affairs from 2005 to 2008 and as U.S. Ambassador to NATO
from 2001 to 2005.
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