American Diplomacy for a New Era
Speech
October 30, 2024
DEPUTY SECRETARY VERMA: Well, good morning. Good morning, everybody.
AUDIENCE: Good morning.
DEPUTY SECRETARY VERMA: Thank you – thank you for your patience. I asked who the opening act was, and they said there wasn’t one, I was the opening act, which is – (laughter) – which is really too bad, but – (laughter). Thank you, Joan, for hosting us at FSI, and for the amazing work that you and the faculty do each day in training our incredible workforce.
It was three years ago this month that Secretary Blinken set forth his vision for modernizing the State Department, for giving our people the tools to tackle the challenges and opportunities of today; to strengthen our institution to compete with adversaries, and also to deepen our key partnerships; to make the work experience at the State Department more fulfilling; and to sure we were all poised to lead in this century through what President Biden calls an inflection point, a point of great change, technological advancement, and, yes, new threats to our democratic order.
It’s in this complex environment that the work of the State Department and diplomacy, in particular, becomes even more critical today and in the months and years ahead. We have faced such challenges before, and this institution has shown it can deliver since the founding of our republic.
But with the rapidly changing landscape, we have to change and adapt too, if we want to continue to shape and lead on the global stage. That means building new capabilities around our critical missions, developing new skills, continuing to attract the most talented and diverse workforce, utilizing new technologies, and updating our approach to risk. Critical missions, workforce reforms, risk and innovation – these were the pillars of the effort. And I know the Secretary will give you a more detailed update on how we have fared and the work that yet remains.
Of course, there have been reform and modernization efforts in the past that have produced important results. We cannot forget Secretary Powell’s speech some 23 years ago when he called for a more modernized department, and even committed that every employee will have an internet connection at their desk. (Laughter.) Now, on some days many of us wish we didn’t have that particular – (laughter) – connection, given the avalanche of email. But his vision was important. He also called for a training float, which I’m happy to report has been a key part of this effort, and the successes would not have been possible without the hard work and creativity of the team right here at FSI.
Secretary Clinton, too, instituted the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, or QDDR – an effort to ensure we were right-sized with the proper resources and in the right places.
And we can go back through the history of the various reform efforts to see how the department has continued to adapt, and it is in this long arc of progress that brings us here today to discuss the Secretary’s agenda. But I would argue it has been distinctive in three main ways.
First, it’s been driven by all of you. It was informed and led by our workforce. The Secretary understood from the beginning that true reform cannot be top-down alone; it must engage the people who are at the heart of the institution – the Foreign Service Officers, our civil servants, locally employed staff, family members, and so many more who carry out our foreign policy every day. From listening tours across the globe to town hall meetings – and yes, to seemingly endless surveys – we have actively sought input from employees at every level, making sure their voices are heard in shaping the future of the department, a department that is agile, inclusive, expert, and more capable across multiple domains.
Second, we took in the advice and guidance of so many outside experts, think tanks, retired diplomats, congressional members and staff, universities, our Foreign Service Association to bring the best ideas forward, and many of you are in this room today. We are grateful for your continued leadership and for your vast experience and insights. A special word of thanks to Salman Ahmed and the team at Policy Planning, who weaved all of the internal and external ideas together, crafting a careful and studied plan under the Secretary’s direction. Salman, Suzy George, Marcia Bernicat, Kelly Fletcher, Matthew Graviss, Rena Bitter, John Bass, Alaina Teplitz, and so many more did so much to drive this effort forward.
Finally, I think what’s made this particular reform effort especially distinct and impactful has been the leader who launched it three years ago and the one who has led it at every turn. We could not be more fortunate to have Secretary Blinken as the architect and visionary leader to guide the department during these complex times. He understands, from his vast experience over decades, what this institution means and what it can do to bring greater peace and prosperity to so many. He’s had a bird’s-eye view and direct role from his experience on the National Security Council staff, to a young staffer here in the department, to his days on Capitol Hill, as national security advisor to the vice president, and as deputy secretary of state.
I had the privilege of working with then-staff director of the Foreign Relations Committee Blinken 22 years ago. And it was obvious then that this is someone who cared deeply about people, who was and remains the foremost expert on international affairs, and who understood deeply about the essential role that the U.S. plays in the world. And we see his experience and vision come to life in this modernization effort that has posted real results to make American diplomacy stronger, better, more inclusive, and more impactful.
Mr. Secretary, thank you for your outstanding service, your commitment to this incredible workforce, and for making such an important impact that will be felt for generations.
And so without further ado, it is my privilege and honor to present to you the 71st Secretary of State, Tony Blinken. (Applause.)
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Please, have a seat.
Rich, one of the great pleasures and privileges of my time in Washington has been working with you. And as I look out at so many people here, so many people who have come back to the department, so many people working today to strengthen the department, it’s also cause for reflection that the best part of my 32 years has been the people I’ve had the immense privilege to work with. And I see so many of them here today, and I’m grateful to each and every one of you.
So, I started at the department more than 32 years ago – my first job in Washington, coming here at the beginning of the Clinton administration. I was a special assistant in what was then the Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs, for those with long memories. (Laughter.) I was in the front office, and I had my own office. Its previous occupant had been a very large safe. (Laughter.) I found, on the desk that barely fit into that office – and some of you will remember this – those very large Wang computers. (Laughter.) And that was the beginning of an experience that led me to where I am today. And a I like to say, over the course of 32 years, I moved up one flight from the sixth floor to the seventh floor and got some windows. (Laughter.) So not bad.
But it was the start of a deep attachment to this institution and to its people – and a conviction that those of us who are entrusted for a brief period of time with responsibility for leading this institution owe it to the institution, and owe it to the institution’s people, to try to leave it a little bit stronger, a little bit more effective, a little bit more fit for purpose than when we found it. And that’s what we’ve been working to do.
During my time as Secretary, we’ve traveled a million miles. I’ve met with leaders and citizens in some 86 countries, and more than a dozen cities and towns across the United States. We’ve seen remarkable things during that time.
But everywhere I’ve gone, my conversations have focused on issues that are increasingly shaping the lives of the people that we’re here to serve: Protecting workers and businesses from unfair trade practices that hurt their bottom lines, threaten their jobs, threaten their livelihoods. Securing supply chains for critical items – like semiconductors, medicines – that our people and our economy depend on. Safeguarding digital infrastructure to make sure that our privacy is protected, our data secure, our hospitals and electric grids are safe. Using emerging technologies like AI – using them for good, while working to prevent their misuse. Producing clean, affordable energy that people can count on to power their homes, businesses, while keeping this planet habitable for our children and grandchildren. Preventing another pandemic. Stopping the flow of synthetic drugs into our communities. Contending with historic migration across our hemisphere and around the globe.
At the same time, we face a small number of revisionist powers – principally Russia, with the partnership of Iran and North Korea, as well as China – that are aggressively challenging our interests and values, and are determined to alter the foundational principles at the heart of the international system. China alone has acquired the economic, the diplomatic, the technological, and military power to do so on a regional and a global scale.
As geopolitical competition is underway to shape a new era in international affairs, longstanding challenges remain – conflicts, terrorism, political instability. We see this around the world, from the Middle East, to Sudan, to Venezuela. So the world we face is more competitive, it’s more complex, it’s more combustible, than at any other point in my career.
Now, to address these challenges from a position of strength, we’ve made historic investments here at home in our competitiveness and we’ve worked to re-engage, to rejuvenate, to reimagine our alliances and our partnerships around the world. Across the State Department and the globe, my colleagues and I are hearing the same thing: The United States remains the partner of first choice. Not just our federal government – local government, private sector, universities, technologists, philanthropies. People continue to look to the United States.
Now, it’s also profoundly in our interest to team up with our counterparts abroad because we can accomplish so much more together than any one of us can do alone. And we know that the strength, the success, of our friends redounds directly to our own security and prosperity – more markets for our products, more partners to tackle global challenges, new allies to deter and defeat aggression. That’s at the heart of something that used to animate our approach to the world – enlightened self-interest – and I believe it needs to be at the heart of how we approach the world now.
To meet this moment, our diplomacy and this department have to be fit for purpose, organized, resourced, and with the talent to lead on the most pressing issues of our time.
So as Rich said, three years ago, right here at FSI, we launched a plan to strengthen and revitalize American diplomacy for this new age in international affairs.
Now, before we could build for the future, we had to reinvest in some of the foundations of our diplomatic tradecraft: our people’s regional expertise, foreign language fluency, negotiation skills, an understanding of international politics and history.
We had to tend to some core management issues, too – ensuring that we could maintain and protect our embassies and consulates, safeguard our data and communications, take care of our people’s health and their welfare.
At the same time, in developing this modernization agenda, as you heard from Deputy Secretary Verma, we wanted to build on past efforts, past initiatives, not reinvent the wheel. Look at the incredible work that had been done by some of my predecessors, Democratic and Republican alike, to work to strengthen the department.
And as you heard, we’ve drawn on the visions, the voices, the expertise, the experience, of so many people across the department, allies and partners on Capitol Hill – and I’m gratified to see Representative Barbara Lee here with us today, a great champion of the department – so many others.
We were animated by the knowledge that we couldn’t finish this work overnight or even in a single term or administration. If it’s going to endure, this agenda had to be rooted in our national interest, and in the initiatives that any secretary of state, regardless of party, would be expected to carry forward on behalf of the American people.
I’m proud of the progress that we’ve made over the past few years.
Now, I want to talk about that today, and I also want to talk about some of the work that’s left to be done. But let me start with this: None of the modernization work would have been possible without strong bipartisan support from Congress, including Representative Lee. It’s taken exceptional efforts and people at every post, in every bureau of this department: members of our Civil Service and our Foreign Service, eligible family members, contractors, locally employed staff. And, of course, our senior leadership team: Deputy Secretary Campbell; Deputy Secretary Verma; his predecessor, Brian McKeon; John Bass, now the acting Under Secretary for Political Affairs; Alaina Teplitz, who’s taken on the duties of Under Secretary for Management; our Director General of the Foreign Service and Director of Global Talent, Marcia Bernicat; the director of the Foreign Service Institute, Joan Polaschik; my Policy Planning Staff, led by Salman Ahmed; and so many others.
As I look out at all of you, at our remarkable chief of staff, Suzy George, and so many others, it’s like I’m looking at the 2024 Los Angeles Dodgers, which as a Yankee fan – (laughter) – is not the best sight.
So let me talk a little bit about what we’ve accomplished so far, and again, what remains to be done.
First, we’ve reorganized the department and invested in our ability to lead on the issues that are increasingly animating our diplomacy.
We established the Bureau of Cybersecurity and Digital Policy and the Office of the Special Envoy for Critical and Emerging Technology. We brought in incredible talent in these areas to ensure that the United States and our partners retain our collective edge in the technologies that are shaping our future.
Across our diplomacy, we’ve prioritized leading on norms and standards, promoting digital freedom, protecting our most sensitive technology, making critical supply chains more resilient. We’re committed to building what we call digital solidarity – because we have a profound stake in working with and supporting partners that share our vision for a vibrant, open, and secure technological future.
We dedicated more resources to combatting the climate crisis, powering the clean energy transition, protecting the environment – across our department, through our special presidential envoy for climate – and I have to, again, thank with deep appreciation Secretary Kerry for taking on this work – and with the creation of a new dedicated Foreign Service Officer positions across the department.
In the wake of COVID, President Biden made it clear that we needed to prioritize health diplomacy, drawing on the decades of experience that this department has and USAID have with SARS, with Ebola, with HIV/AIDS. So, we created a Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy. By acting as a central hub for all of our public health efforts, this team works with our partners abroad to strengthen health systems, to fight deadly diseases, to prevent future pandemics.
The challenges posed by People’s Republic of China touch every aspect of our foreign policy and every region of the world. So we built what we call “China House” – an office that brings together experts from across the department and other agencies under one roof, where they can better coordinate and better manage this most complex and consequential relationship.
We invested in our economic statecraft – focusing more on improving development finance, strengthening supply chains, elevating our Office of Sanctions Coordination, establishing a coordinator on global anti-corruption, appointing a special representative for international labor affairs, setting up a task force to help countries become more resilient to economic coercion.
We stood up an office to advance our interests and values in an increasingly contested and crucial set of international organizations. That team is getting Americans elected to senior leadership positions, while building coalitions to drive reform and to safeguard the integrity of institutions like the United Nations.
And in a world where foreign and domestic policy are increasingly intertwined, we set up a Subnational Diplomacy Unit to build collaboration with – and between – mayors, governors, locally elected officials both here at home and around the world. And I’ve seen the power of this. These leaders, they’re the ones day in, day out – particularly at the local level – who are finding cutting-edge solutions for what are global challenges, from ransomware to public health crises. And it’s critical that they have the opportunities to share their ideas with other local officials and with national governments, so that we can all learn from each other and make our own policies better.
Now, with all of this focus on reorganization and making sure that the institutional building blocks of the department were fit for purpose, we also knew that to truly modernize our diplomacy, we had to embrace new tools and some new tactics. To become more innovative, more nimble, more effective.
So we transformed the way that we assess, accept, and deal with risk in an increasingly volatile world. And you heard this from Rich Verma.
Now, we can’t and we shouldn’t set out to try to eliminate risk entirely. That’s an unrealistic standard. But what we are doing is working to manage risk responsibly – making it easier for diplomats to work in person, in the field, with fewer security constraints – and better realizing the full potential of our presence and our people.
That broader shift is helping us expand our diplomacy’s reach and get more out of our taxpayers’ dollars.
Now, previously, it could take up to 15 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to open a single U.S. embassy. So we teamed up with Congress to update the rules, the requirements around how we build our embassies. Now, we can be on the ground in more places, more quickly, without sacrificing security. That means America can advance our interests and values more effectively in this more competitive world.
Just in the last two years, we’ve established five new embassies in the Indo-Pacific – in the Maldives, Tonga, the Seychelles, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands. In some cases, we were able to open our doors in less than 12 months, with much smaller budgets. Now, some of these embassies have smaller staffs, others share a location with an ally, but they’re letting us deepen and strengthen our partnership with these nations.
Another way that we’re changing our diplomacy is by embracing different tools.
Three years ago, we released the department’s first-ever strategy to incorporate more data into our work, and we surged hiring of dedicated data officers to help us do the job. Now, whether we’re designing our foreign assistance programs, responding to crises around the world, we’re doing so in a way that’s using more timely, data-informed insights to guide the decisions that we make.
We’re harnessing the power of technology to improve our productivity in other areas.
Americans can now renew their passports online, without leaving their homes or putting anything in the mail. So far, more than 1 million people have successfully used online passport renewal. And just yesterday, I had an opportunity to be with our colleagues in Consular Affairs who have done such an extraordinary job in building back, stronger and better than ever before, our ability to deliver visas for people who want to come to the United States and deliver blue books to Americans who want to be able to travel the world. We’ve issued or renewed a record number of passports over the last year. And the result of this, as well as a record number of visas, means that more that more people are able to come to the United States than ever before; more Americans are able to travel the world than ever before.
We’ve also made the State Department a leader – a leader in our federal government when it comes to incorporating artificial intelligence into our work. The State Department is leading the pack.
A few months ago, we rolled out our own set of AI tools, including our own State Department chat bot. They saved our teams tens of thousands of hours, translating documents, fact-checking reports, tracking international news and social media posts, creating instantly accessible databases of diplomatic knowledge and diplomatic practice. Now, we’re just getting started using AI, but I can see a future that’s already with us to become not only more efficient, but more rigorous, more effective in our analysis, in our planning, and also freeing up all of our people to focus their time where they can have the most value added, the most impact, to do what’s really at the heart of their jobs.
Now, there’s one more tool that we’ve embraced: downgrading, declassifying, sharing intelligence with our foreign partners and with the public.
2022, working our remarkable Intelligence Community, we warned the world before Russia began its further invasion in Ukraine. Just last month, we used intelligence diplomacy to shed light on the link between the media company RT and Russia’s intelligence apparatus, including their efforts to manipulate Moldova’s upcoming election. In both cases, and in so many others, intelligence diplomacy helped us expose lies and disinformation, build trust with our partners, develop a stronger and collective response.
We’ve also worked to do something that I think is essential for the well-being, the strength, the resilience of this institution – and that’s working to renew a spirit of discourse and debate here at the department.
We have a workforce, represented by so many in this room, of exceptionally smart, exceptionally creative, exceptionally experienced people. But it’s a large bureaucracy, and too often our bureaucracy can stop good ideas from rising to the surface. We wanted to encourage people to share their perspectives, their advice, even – in fact, especially – when the subject is a hard one.
We launched the Policy Ideas Channel to create a platform for fresh thinking where people from every post and bureau can send forward suggestions, ideas.
We revitalized the Dissent Channel so that officers can express their concerns about our policies directly to senior leadership without fear of retribution. In the last few years, I personally read and responded to every dissent message we’ve received. Dissent makes our policy stronger, our diplomacy more resilient; it’s patriotic, and I will always protect it.
In addition, we revived the Open Forum, which hosts conversations between our workforce and leaders and critics from across and outside the department. I’ve seen the result of these panels. They’ve sparked incredibly constructive dialogues on a wide variety of topics, from trade strategy to our approaches to the PRC, to the Middle East.
Now, not every dissent nor every discussion is actually going to generate a change in policy. But each and every one causes us to at least pause for a moment, to step back, to maybe question our assumptions, to test alternative approaches. And in some cases we have implemented recommendations, shifted our thinking. So I strongly want to encourage this to continue.
One employee suggested that more American diplomats should do stints at multilateral organizations, something our competitors and many of our friends have done for a long, long time. So we thought that was a good idea – that it would offer hands-on experience for our workforce, let us deepen our cooperation with, and influence in, these institutions. Our first cohort will start their jobs next summer.
We also needed to improve our ability to anticipate and plan for developments that will challenge even the best strategy and even the best policy. That’s one of the key lessons we took away from the Afghanistan After Action Review.
So we launched the Policy Risk and Opportunity Planning Group to carry out this work – to do it in a rigorous and deliberative manner. Thanks to contributions from colleagues across the department, we’ve successfully anticipated a number of scenarios, from coups to conflicts and technological breakthroughs, to economic crises – and we’ve been better prepared when they happened.
Finally, new structures and innovations will only deliver if they’re matched by investments in our workforce – the remarkable people who bring diplomacy to life. And in many ways, that’s really at the heart of everything we’ve been trying to do for the last three and a half years.
And we’re doing that by recruiting and retaining the best talent that America has to offer, building a more robust and equitable pipeline for the next generation of diplomats.
We got direct hiring authority for critical positions – a status that lets us bring on qualified candidates through a faster, less bureaucratic process. And in a world that is changing as rapidly as this one is, the ability to do that – to make sure we can bring in the best talent in this country to address these emerging challenges – that is a critical asset to have.
We’re finding people with expertise in key fields, like STEM, through fellowships and tailored recruitment programs.
We’re making job opportunities more inclusive. We launched a paid internship program for the first time in the history of the department. It’s already brought on 1,700 interns, making entry-level roles more accessible for people from a broader range of socioeconomic backgrounds. We moved the Foreign Service application process online instead of requiring that many candidates pay to travel to D.C. for an interview.
Thanks in part to these efforts, and to some historic budget increases that we received from Congress, we have more people in the Foreign Service than we’ve ever had before. And since 2021, our Civil Service team has expanded 22 percent – the biggest hiring surge in 20 years. This year, eligible family member employment – the spouses, the adult children of our diplomats overseas – hit an all-time high.
But growth is not enough. We need to offer more support, more flexibility, more room for advancement to win today’s competition for talent. And make no mistake about it: We’re in a competition for talent. The people in this department could be doing so many other things, and indeed, many have come from doing other things. We have to be the best possible place to work, if we’re going to continue to recruit the best and continue to retain the best.
So that’s the goal of the first-ever retention plan that we rolled out last month, based on surveys and interviews we did to try to understand why some people choose to leave well short of the normal time they would spend at the department, why they might be giving up on the incredible investment that they made and that we made in them – and drawing on that, again, how to make this department the best possible place to work.
Now, this is going to be a long-term effort, but we’ve already taken steps to improve training for managers, to combat workplace bullying, and to lighten unnecessarily heavy workloads. We’re offering more room for career growth by adding senior positions and expanding overseas roles for Civil Service employees. We’re providing more chances and choices for professional development. We grew our training float, allowing more people to focus on learning new skills full time, without understaffing their teams or sacrificing our readiness.
And this is an initiative that I think is going to make a profound difference. It’s something we’ve been trying to do for years but that now we have at hand, and it really will free up people to engage in career-long learning, but to do it in a way, again, that doesn’t undermine the work of a particular office or bureau or our readiness for any challenge that we have.
And here at the Foreign Service Institute, we’re working together to strengthen that career-long learning, to create new and more advanced courses on critical topics – commercial tradecraft, emerging tech, global health diplomacy.
And here again, I can’t begin to emphasize the importance of this initiative and the work that Joan and her team have been doing at FSI. We know, you all know, that the rapidity of change, the profundity of change, is such that we have to have effective career-long learning if we’re going to keep up, never mind get ahead. And so having a Foreign Service Institute that is geared not only to the work that comes with bringing people in, but that is with them, that’s with you, every step of the way in your careers, I believe is mission critical. And I’m grateful for the work that we’ve been doing and the more that needs to get done.
We’re also taking steps to support our locally employed staff – you all know this, I know this – the lifeblood of our embassies in every country in the world. Locally engaged staff account for some two thirds of this department’s personnel. Their support, their success, is mission critical. We’re making their pay more predictable, competitive, more reflective of local conditions, so that we remain an employer of choice overseas. We’re improving their access to training and professional development so that our colleagues can strengthen their skills and stay at the forefront of emerging fields.
As Secretary, one of my top priorities has also been to make sure the department’s capitalizing on one of our nation’s greatest strengths: our diversity. It’s not just the right thing to do; it’s the smart and necessary thing to do. We’re operating in an incredibly diverse world. The greatest benefit we have in operating in that world is our own diversity, this diversity in experience, in skills, in knowledge, in backgrounds. It’s profoundly in our interest to make sure that we’re drawing on it in this department. If we don’t – if we don’t, we’re simply short-changing our diplomacy, short-changing our foreign policy, and short-changing our country. So this is an area of tremendous importance and one that we’ve really dug into. And we’ve done a number of things to make sure that we are building a strong department reflective of the country that we serve.
In 20011, I created the Office of Diversity Inclusion. It reports directly to the Secretary. Based our initial strategic plan, we’re conducting regular studies on our workplace environment, the demographics of our staff, to give us the information we need to make informed change. We made hiring and promotion processes for senior-level roles, like deputy assistant secretaries, more transparent. We’re continuing to make our embassies and ambassadors’ residences more accessible. We’ve expanded access to assistive technologies, from adaptive keyboards to magnification software, so that people with disabilities have the tools that they need to do their best work.
On top of these efforts, we’re taking steps to make people’s jobs – and their lives – a little bit easier. You all know this: Serving abroad involves unique challenges – often separation from loved ones, stress, danger. So we’ve improved our mental health programs, expanding counseling and other support for our colleagues and families overseas as well as right here at home.
We found ways to make it less difficult and less expensive to move with pets – (laughter) – one of the things that I heard again and again as I was traveling around. We expanded a program that lets more of our colleagues work remotely so they can join their family members who are serving overseas with State or the Department of Defense. Instead of our team members swapping official laptops and phones every time they transition from one post to another or one office to another – and losing access in between assignments – employees can now take their tech with them from day one.
Now, some of this may seem like a small step, but we know that even these small steps can have a powerful impact, a real effect, on people’s quality of life, and so we’ve also made them a priority.
In all of these different ways, we’ve made steady progress to implement the modernization agenda.
By creating offices that draw on expertise from across the department to address pressing new challenges, by embracing cutting-edge tools and letting our people get creative, by giving our workforce more chances to grow and to contribute, the State Department has become a more agile, a more effective institution. And as a result, we’re better able to strengthen our partnerships, compete with strategic rivals, deliver for our people during a moment of remarkable challenge.
And just to give you a few examples of how all of this is translated into real-world effect, when it comes to the PRC, we’ve achieved a level of strategic convergence with allies and partners across and between the Atlantic and Pacific that was unimaginable just a few years ago – looking at the problem and the challenges posed by the PRC in the same way, acting increasingly together to address those challenges. And even as we strengthen our hand in this competition, we’re maintaining communications channels, including between our militaries, and even growing cooperation on issues like the threat of synthetic opioids.
We’re not asking countries to choose between China and the United States, but we’re working hard to improve the value proposition that partnering with the United States brings to deliver on countries’ economic needs and aspirations.
We’ve expanded opportunities for countries to access development finance by reforming international financial institutions and establishing new lending policies. With the G7, we launched the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment to unlock some $600 billion for high-quality, environmentally sound infrastructure projects that will improve access to markets, support entrepreneurship, create jobs, empower communities.
Our diplomats are shaping the rules and norms for emerging tech50 like AI, enlisting our leading companies to make voluntary commitments on safety, security, trustworthiness; enshrining those pledges with the G7; and then winning the support of all United Nations member states – 193 countries – for the first-ever General Assembly resolution on artificial intelligence.
We’re extending digital access in the Pacific Islands, Africa, South America, and beyond. That means our partners don’t have to give up their security and privacy to gain high-speed, affordable internet connections. As part of the CHIPS Act, we’re investing $500 billion2 to build secure telecommunications networks and diversify semiconductor supply chains from the Caribbean to Europe to the Indo-Pacific.
We’re also building trusted tech ecosystems, including in emerging areas like quantum – a technology with capabilities that exceed even the most powerful supercomputers. Through the Quantum Development Group, we brought together eight European and Asian allies to strengthen supply chain resilience, deepen our research and commercial partnerships.
We’re expanding our collaboration with local officials across this country and around the world. Just in the last few years, we’ve engaged with over 5,000 mayors, governors, county supervisors, and other sub-national leaders. By bringing people together through events like the first-ever Cities Summit of the Americas in Denver, which included 250 mayors from all across our region, we sparked initiatives to promote clean energy, create good jobs, improve public health in cities and states around the world.
We’ve quadrupled financing to countries as they pursue their own climate goals. We launched the Mineral Security Partnership to accelerate the development of diverse and sustainable supply of critical energy minerals.
At the same time, we’re strengthening energy security by helping our partners in the European Union reduce their dependency on Russian gas. Back in 2021, 45 percent of their natural gas imports came from Russia. Today, it’s down to less than 15 percent. Now, the United States is the top LNG supplier to the EU, and we’ve been that for the last three years in a row.
We’re revitalizing U.S. leadership at the United Nations, rejoining organizations like the Human Rights Council and UNESCO. We’ve successfully elected American candidates to lead roles at six major institutions like the World Bank, the International Telecommunications Union. We’re driving reforms to make the international system more effective and more inclusive, from the UN Security Council to the G20.
We built coalitions to better strengthen public health threats from synthetic opioids to food insecurity. We helped launch a platform that’s focused on improving coordination between foreign ministries as we tackle infectious disease, providing direct support to, working with partners to slow the spread of Marburg virus; delivering vaccines to communities affected by mpox; providing HIV treatment to tens of millions of people around the world, continuing to build on the extraordinary achievements of PEPFAR.
These developments, and so many others, show the power and purpose of a revitalized American diplomacy.
But – and I’ll end with this – there’s more work to be done, more work that we can do, more work that we must do.
We need to continue investing in diplomatic tradecraft – if we let our core diplomatic skills and competencies atrophy, we’re not going to be able to deliver on emerging missions.
We need to do more to bridge the gap between the skills that we have and those we’ll need in the coming years.
We need faster, more efficient, more equitable hiring processes. We also have to continue prioritizing hiring in critical issue areas and filling the staffing shortages that still exist.
We need more flexible personnel structures to allow the department to take full advantage of the deep bench of talent that we already have.
We have to reward a broader range of experiences, expertise, and career paths for both the Civil and Foreign Service, including those staff that concentrate on priority areas.
That includes making it easier for our career professionals to gain experience in other parts of government – and outside government – and then rewarding them when they return. We need to find more ways for world-class experts to join the department for short stints and make their perspectives incorporated into our policies.
And it’s high time for us to update the way we evaluate performance and promote talent. Right now, performance evaluation takes an enormous amount of energy from our workforce, and, I have to say, with too little return on investment. I know this – too many people feel this process is insufficiently transparent, insufficiently objective. They feel that it doesn’t lead to enough improvement in performance and accountability.
So there is a lot left to be done. We’ll continue these efforts, and we’ll continue these efforts in part by working with the bipartisan Commission on Reform and Modernization of the Department of State, which Congress recently created, to share recommendations for how the department can further strengthen its operations, its organizational structure, its policies.
And of course, for our diplomacy to truly succeed, we’ll also need the continued partnership with Congress – and I hope not just a continued partnership, but a strengthened one.
Look, if we’re serious about U.S. leadership in the world, we can’t keep operating without knowing whether we’ll have a budget for the next fiscal year, forcing us to impose harmful cuts and hiring freezes.
We can’t reduce our investments in international financial institutions. We can’t fail to authorize historic bipartisan successes like PEPFAR, or new efforts to combat the threat of disinformation like the Global Engagement Center. We can’t fail to pay our dues at the UN and cede the space to our competitors.
And we can’t hold up the confirmation of highly skilled, capable, and patriotic Americans – sometimes for years at a time – when they should be leading our missions overseas. In 2001 – in 2001 – on average, nominees were confirmed 50 days after their nomination. Today, nominees, including our ambassadors, are waiting an average of 240 days. The system is broken. It’s damaging our diplomacy; it’s undermining our competitiveness; it’s disincentivizing public service.
And of course, this all feeds our competitors’ false narratives of our decline and division. It reinforces their conviction – their false conviction – that now is the time to challenge the United States and pursue their revisionist goals. It shakes the trust and confidence of our friends. So together, we have to find a way to fix this system. We have to do better by our people; we have to do better by our diplomacy; we have to do better by our foreign policy; we have to do better for our country.
When our diplomats have the resources they need, when they have the support they deserve, when they have the chance to contribute to their full potential, there’s nothing – nothing – they can’t do.
Two weeks ago, 235 of the newest members of our Foreign Service took their oath of office. That’s our largest single class ever.
These people – and the more than 2,000 others who joined the Foreign Service and the Civil Service this year alone – they represent the future of American diplomacy.
Former attorneys, engineers, teachers, veterans, financial experts – they’ve lived in every part of the world. They speak some of the most difficult and critical foreign languages.
They’re bringing a wealth of experience with them. The diversity is staggering. One person trained as a hostage negotiator. Another worked as the first carbon-negative farm in Costa Rica. Someone else created Nepal’s first digital library.
And like the people that I have the immense privilege of working with every day, I know – I know that they’re going to serve our country with incredible dedication, with character, with heart.
Ultimately, it’s them – and all the people of the State Department – that fill me with optimism and fill me with confidence about the future of this institution, the future of American diplomacy.
I thank each and every one of you who’ve participated in taking our country to the world, helping us to understand the world a little better, informing our diplomacy, informing our foreign policy, making America stronger at home and around the world. This is a collective enterprise. I’m gratified by the extraordinary talent we have at the department. I can see an incredibly powerful, productive, positive future for this institution, but we’ve all got to make it happen together, and I thank you for the work you’re doing to do just that.
Thank you, everyone. (Applause.)
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