Diplomacy: A Rusting Tool of American Statecraft
A Lecture to programs on Statecraft at American
University, Harvard, and MIT
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, the Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs, Brown University
Washington, DC and Cambridge, Massachusetts, February,
2018
I am here to
talk about diplomacy. This may seem an
odd moment to broach the subject. Our
president has told us that it doesn’t matter that his administration is not
staffed to do it, because “I’m the only one who matters.” In other words, “l’état c’est moi.”
Now that it’s
got that straight, the United States Department of State has set about
dismantling itself. Meanwhile, the
Foreign Service of the United States is dejectedly withering away. Our ever-flatulent media seem unconvinced
that Americans will miss either institution.
I suspect
they’re wrong about that. Diplomacy is an
instrument of statecraft that Americans have not been educated to understand
and whose history they do not know. It
is not about “making nice.” Nor is it
just a delaying tactic before we send in the Marines.
Diplomacy is a
political performing art that informs and determine the decisions of other
states and peoples. It shapes their
perceptions and calculations so that they do what we want them to do because
they come to see doing so as in their own best interest. Diplomacy influences the policies and
behavior of states and peoples through measures short of war, though it does
not shrink from war as a diversion or last resort. It is normally but not always overtly
non-coercive. It succeeds best when it
embraces humility and respects and preserves the dignity of those to whom it is
applied. As the Chinese philosopher,
Laozi put it: "A leader is best when
people barely know he exists. When his
work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, we did it ourselves."
Napoleon called
diplomacy, “the police in grand costume” but it is usually not much to look
at. It seldom involves blowing things
up, most of its action is unseen, and it is relatively inexpensive. Diplomacy’s greatest triumphs tend to be
preventing things from happening. But
it’s hard to prove they wouldn’t have occurred, absent diplomacy. So diplomats are more often blamed for what
did happen than credited for what didn’t.
Diplomats are even worse than sailors at marching. Diplomacy stages no parades in which
ambassadors and their political masters can strut among baton-twirling
majorettes or wave to adoring crowds.
Nor, for the most part, does it justify expensive programs that generate
the pork and patronage that nourish politics
All this makes
diplomacy both obscure and of little or no direct interest to the central
institutions in contemporary Washington’s foreign policy. As any foreign embassy will tell you, the
U.S. Department of Defense and other elements of the
military-industrial-congressio nal complex now dominate the policy process. Both are heavily invested in theories of
coercive interaction between states.
Both favor strategic and tactical doctrines that justify expensive
weapons systems and well-paid people to use them. Activities that cost little and lack drama do
not intrigue them. They see diplomats as
the clean-up squad to be deployed after they have demolished other societies,
not as peers who can help impose our will without fighting.
U.S. foreign
policy is heavily militarized in theory, practice, and staffing. No one has bankrolled the development of professional diplomatic doctrine, meaning
a body of interrelated operational concepts describing how to influence the
behavior of other states and people by mostly non-violent means. So there is no diplomatic equivalent of
military doctrine, the pretensions of some scholars of international relations
(IR) theory notwithstanding. This is a
very big gap in American statecraft that the growing literature on conflict
management has yet to fill. The absence
of diplomatic doctrine to complement military science eliminates most options
short of the raw pressure of sanctions or the use of force. It thereby increases the probability of armed
conflict, with all its unpredictable human and financial consequences.
Working out a
diplomatic doctrine with which to train professional diplomats could have major
advantages. Diplomatic performance might
then continually improve, as military performance does, as experience emended
doctrine. But developing diplomatic
doctrine would require acceptance that our country has a need for someone other
than dilettantes and amateurs to conduct its foreign relations. Our politicians, who love the spoils system,
seem firmly convinced that, between them, wealthy donors and campaign gerbils
can meet most of our needs in foreign affairs, with the military meeting the rest. The Department of State, which would be the
logical government agency to fund an effort at the development of tradecraft
and doctrine, is usually led by diplomatic novices. It is also the perennial runt at the federal
budgetary teat.
Leadership of foreign
policy by untrained neophytes was to a great extent the American norm even during the Cold War,
when the United States led the world outside the Soviet camp and deployed unmatched political attractiveness
and economic clout. Now retired and
active duty military officers have been added to the diplomatic management
mix. They are experts in the application
of violence, not peaceable statecraft, to foreign societies. How is this likely to work out in the new
world disorder? As the late Deng Xiaoping
said, “practice is the sole criterion of truth.” So we’ll see.
But while we wait for the outcome, there is still time to consider the
potential of diplomacy as an instrument of statecraft.
The basis of
diplomacy is empathy for the views of others.
It is most effective when grounded in a sophisticated understanding of
another’s language, culture, feelings, and intellectual habits. Empathy
inhibits killing. It is not a character
trait we expect or desire our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to have.
Language and
area training plus practical experience are what enable diplomats to imagine
the viewpoint of foreign leaders, to see the world as they do, to analyze
trends and events as they would, and to evaluate the pros and cons of actions
as they might. A competent diplomat can
use such insights to make arguments that foreign leaders find persuasive. A diplomat schooled in strategy can determine
what circumstances are required to persuade foreign leaders that doing what the
diplomat wants them to do is not yielding to superior power but deciding on
their own to do what is in their nation’s best interest.
Empathy does
not, of course, imply alignment or agreement with the viewpoints of others,
just understanding of them. It is not
the same as sympathy, which identifies with others’ perspectives. Sometimes the aim of diplomacy is to persuade
a foreign country to continue to adhere to established policies, because they
are beneficial. But more commonly, it is
to change the policies, behavior, and practices of other countries or
individuals, not to affirm or endorse them.
To succeed, diplomats must cleave to their own side’s interests,
convictions, and policy positions even as they grasp the motivations and reasoning
processes of those whose positions they seek to change. But they must also be able to see their
country and its actions as others see them and accept these views as an
operational reality to be acknowledged and dealt with rather than denounced as
irrational or duplicitous.
To help policy-makers
formulate policies and actions that have a real chance of influencing a
particular foreign country’s decisions, diplomats habitually find themselves
called upon to explain how and why that country’s history and circumstances
make it see things and act the way it does.
In the United States, most men and women in senior foreign policy
positions did not work their way up the ranks.
They are much more familiar with domestic interest groups and their
views than with foreign societies and how they work. Explanation of foreign positions is easily
mistaken for advocacy of them, especially by people inclined to dismiss
outlandish views that contradict their prejudices as inherently irrational or
malicious.
It’s good
domestic politics to pound the policy table in support of popular narratives
and nationalist postures and to reject foreign positions on issues as
irrational, disingenuous, or malevolent.
But diplomats can’t do that if they are to remain true to their
calling. In a policy process driven more
by how things will look to potential domestic critics than by a determination actually
to change the behavior of foreigners, diplomats are easily marginalized. But when they are backed by strong-minded
leaders who want results abroad, they can accomplish a great deal that military
intervention cannot.
Let me give a
couple of examples of how U.S.
diplomacy has rearranged other states’ and people’s appraisals of their
strategic circumstances and caused them to decide to adopt courses of action
favored by the United States. These
examples show both the complexities with which diplomacy must deal and its
limitations in terms of its ability to secure assured outcomes.
Exhibit A is American diplomacy in late Cold War Africa. In the 1980s, a U.S. policy called “linkage”
rearranged the strategic geometry in southern Africa in order to free Southwest
Africa (Namibia) from South African colonialism and end Soviet-sponsored
military intervention on the continent.
The “linkage” policy proposed and carried out by U.S. Assistant
Secretary of State for African Affairs, Chester A. Crocker was a classic
exercise in regional balance of power diplomacy and offshore balancing in
support of Cold War objectives. It was
also politically friendless, which may be why it remains essentially unstudied.
Crocker
inherited a failed policy focused on shaming and sanctioning South Africa into implementing a UN Security
Council-mandated independence process for its Namibian colony. He replaced this with diplomacy that enlisted
American power to ensure that none of the key actors in the region could get
its way on the issues it cared most about unless all others did and Namibia also
achieved independence. If Cuba were to
withdraw from Angola as South Africa withdrew from Namibia and as elections
replaced civil war in Angola, all would be able to claim some measure of
success. Otherwise, the fighting would
continue, with American favor withheld, the Namibian issue unresolved, and
South Africa ostracized.[1]
“Linkage”
diplomacy required dealing forthrightly with several of America’s and the
world’s most prominent bêtes noirs: apartheid-era South Africa, Communist
Cuba, and the Soviet Union. The Cubans
and Soviets had earlier humiliated South Africa, the United States, and the CIA
in Angola by intervening to forestall elections and install a Soviet-oriented
government. Crocker ended up accepting
semi-clandestine aid to Angola's UNITA[2]
insurgents as a way to pressure the Angolan regime and its Cuban and Soviet
backers to agree to negotiate a regional deal.
UNITA was also supported by apartheid South Africa, making it persona non grata in international
society.
Not
surprisingly under these circumstances, Crocker’s diplomacy was under constant
attack from both the Left and Right. The
Left saw dealing with South Africa under apartheid
as immoral. Accepting the need to deal
with the interests of adversaries like Cuba and the USSR contradicted the
Right’s determination to punish them.
Diplomacy offered an unwelcome and, as American politicians saw it,
unrighteous and unrealistic distraction from their ideological idées fixes and preference for the use
of force to counter Soviet intervention in the Third World. The CIA sought to undermine the policy. But George Shultz, President Ronald Reagan’s
secretary of state, resolutely backed Crocker’s diplomacy. President Reagan backed Secretary
Shultz. And Crocker had the courage of
his convictions. That made all the
difference.
The
decolonization of Namibia was the focus of UN diplomacy in southern Africa, but
it was not a top priority for any of the actors there, each of which had other
objectives to which it attached greater importance. For white-ruled South Africa the priority was
removing the threat that Soviet-backed Cuban troops seemed to pose to it. For the Angolan government and its Cuban
sponsors it was consolidating control of Angola by defeating UNITA and the
South African expeditionary forces that supplied and fought alongside it. The Cubans wanted to demonstrate their power
to help end colonialism in Africa. For
the by-then-overextended Soviets, it was cutting the costs of their policies
while showing that they were still a great power whose interests could not be
ignored by the United States or regional powers. All concerned wanted better
relations with the United States.
The main U.S.
goal in southern Africa at the time was derived from the Cold War grand
strategy of containment. It was the
reduction and prevention of further advances in Soviet influence there. Linking Cuban troop withdrawal to the UN
Security Council’s demand that South Africa give Namibia its independence gave
U.S. policy a claim to international legitimacy that enabled very useful
backstage support from senior UN diplomats.
A time-honored
tool of diplomacy is shameless repetition of an unwelcome proposition so that
it becomes so familiar that it is no longer ruled out. With persistence on the part of the United
States and other countries[3]
that quietly cooperated with American diplomacy, the initially very
recalcitrant parties came to see that there could be something for everyone in
a deal based on “linkage.” The Cubans
could take pride in having stabilized Angola and helped end colonialism in
Africa. The South Africans could rid
themselves of the Cuban-Soviet threat and take pleasure in American and Soviet
recognition that they were the greatest power in their region. The ailing USSR would no longer have to
subsidize Cuban intervention in a region that was of only marginal strategic
importance to it. The Angolans could
gain a chance to pursue domestic tranquility through an election process. The UN could finally oversee the independence
of Namibia. And, to those few who paid
attention, the United States would show its diplomatic mettle, while removing
significant Soviet influence from southern Africa..
Much to the
surprise of its many detractors, “linkage” diplomacy eventually produced the
deal it had set out to produce. This had
the incidental side effect of depriving the Communist-backed Southwest African
People’s Organization (SWAPO) of any claim to have liberated Namibia through
heroically violent struggle. Four
thousand SWAPO guerrillas invaded Namibia to preempt its peaceful independence
under UN supervision pursuant to the ”linkage” accords. SWAPO’s assault united Cuba, South Africa,
Angola, and the members of the UN Security Council in full support of the deal
“linkage” had produced. SWAPO’s historic
supporters, Angola and Cuba joined others in approving the annihilation of the
SWAPO invaders by the residual South African forces in Namibia. Ironically, given the needless sacrifice of
its military wing, SWAPO candidates then easily won a majority in the
UN-supervised elections that cemented Namibian independence.
The Cubans
withdrew from Angola. Portuguese
mediation helped hammer out an agreement to hold elections in a badly divided
Angola, but domestic tranquility in that country proved elusive and ultimately
fatal to UNITA’s hopes of participating in its governance. More importantly, as an added bonus, the
contacts “constructive engagement” and “linkage” diplomacy had brought about
between South Africa, its black African neighbors, and the international
community helped catalyze decisions by the Afrikaner establishment that ended apartheid in their country a few years
later.
Exhibit B is
the diplomatic strategy that underpinned
the third US-China Joint
Communiqué, which was issued on August 17, 1982. This finessed disagreement between the United
States and China over U.S. arms sales to
Taiwan. More importantly, it
incentivized both sides in the unfinished Chinese civil war to search for non-military
means to manage their interactions and resolve their differences.
The Taiwan
question is the issue of what political relationship Taiwan and the rest of
China should have. It arose from the
confluence of two wars. After Chiang
Kai-shek’s Republic of China’s defeat on the China mainland in 1949, he retreated
to the Chinese province of Taiwan. In
1950, as Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army prepared to pursue Chiang to his
island redoubt, north Korea’s Kim Il-sung invaded south Korea. The United States interpreted this as part of
a broader Soviet bloc move to break out of “containment.” It interposed the U.S. Seventh Fleet between
the Chinese combatants in the Taiwan Strait to prevent the Korean war from
spilling over to Taiwan and adjacent areas of the China mainland.
With U.S.
support, Taipei then continued to represent China internationally and to affirm
its intention to reconquer the Chinese mainland. Meanwhile, Beijing stressed its determination
to complete its victory in the Chinese civil war by “liberating” Taiwan. As part of “containment,” the United States
undertook to ensure Taiwan’s defense against assault from the mainland. With each party to the unfinished Chinese
civil war constantly proclaiming its intention – however unrealistic – to use
force to invade the other and reunite China under its rule, worst case
analysis, which weighs capabilities without assessing intentions, needed no
supplement to gauge Taiwan’s defense needs.
Washington took the measure of the military balance in the Taiwan
Strait, including U.S. forces, and then offered or added what seemed necessary
to maintain the balance.
But, as the 1970s
began, the United States stopped using Taiwan to contain China and turned to
using China to contain the Soviet Union.
In December 1978, Washington recognized Beijing rather than Taipei as
the seat of the Chinese government.
Beijing followed this with a pledge to make best efforts to resolve the
Taiwan question by peaceful means. The
withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan and an
American undertaking to exercise restraint in future sales of “carefully
selected defensive weapons” to Taiwan had facilitated this Chinese policy
change. The United States appeared to
have consolidated China’s alignment with it against the Soviet Union while
successfully extricating itself from all but indirect military involvement in
the residuum of the Chinese civil war.
By disengaging militarily, Americans seemed to have laid the basis for
realizing our stated policy interest “in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan
question by the Chinese themselves.[4]”
But, in Ronald
Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, he
pledged to “return” to a policy of unrestricted arms sales to Taiwan. This led to a Sino-American crisis over the
issue after he took office. But both
China and the United States had a stake in at least the appearance of
solidarity in their opposition to the Soviet Union. Toward the end of 1981, Beijing and
Washington began exploring the possibility of a renewed modus vivendi. Beijing saw
an American commitment to temper and eventually end arms sales to Taiwan as
essential to justify its normalization of relations and overt foreign policy
cooperation with the United States.
Washington wanted Chinese public commitments both to stand with the
“free world” against the USSR and not to use force against Taiwan.
In their
agreement of August 17, 1982, neither side got all it wanted, though each got
enough to reaffirm cooperation against Moscow.
More importantly, the agreement put in place an understanding on how
U.S. arms sales to Taiwan should be handled. In return for a U.S. pledge to cap the quality
and gradually reduce the quantity of arms sales to Taiwan, China affirmed and
implemented a “fundamental policy” of striving for reunification by peaceful
means. As intended, these parallel
policy shifts caused both Taipei and Beijing to rethink how best to pursue
their respective strategic interests.
China’s policy
of peaceful reunification plus its rapid modernization made worst case
approaches to the military balance in the Taiwan area increasingly problematic. It was becoming ever more evident that the
indefinite maintenance of military parity between an island of 23 million
inhabitants and the emerging great power across the Strait was infeasible. Beijing’s acceptance of a political rather
than military approach to reunification enabled the United States to
incorporate an appraisal of Chinese intentions into the analysis of what arms
sales might be necessary to “maintain a sufficient self-defense capability” for
Taiwan, as U.S. policy required. As the
threat diminished, so might the need for U.S. arms transfers to Taiwan. This made it very much in Beijing’s interest
to emphasize its peaceful intent.
The prospect of
steadily diminishing American military assistance had the predictable effect of
focusing Taipei on realistic alternatives to military confrontation as a
response to the threat Taiwan faced from the mainland. Within a decade, it had stopped challenging
Beijing as the government of China and decided that it was in its interest to
respond to Beijing’s offers of political dialogue. In meetings in Hong Kong in November 1992 and
Singapore in April 1993, Taipei and Beijing found a framework to justify
ongoing dialogue and negotiations between them.
Without prescribing any particular course of action to either party to
the Taiwan dispute, U.S. policy had created circumstances that induced the
parties to set aside military confrontation in favor of a “peaceful settlement
of the Taiwan question” between themselves.
The realization
by both Beijing and Taipei that dialogue offered a better prospect than
military approaches to the management of cross-Strait differences took time to
take root. But it did take root. To the surprise of many, it survived the
abrupt abandonment by the United States of the agreed limits on its arms sales to
Taiwan. In September 1992, the collapse
of the common Soviet enemy, the deterioration in US-China relations after the
Tiananmen incident, and a long-running campaign by proponents of military
approaches to securing Taiwan came together with the expediencies of
election-year politics to produce a massive sale of advanced fighter aircraft
to Taiwan – the largest arms sale package
to any single purchaser to that date.
The U.S. turnabout predictably encouraged defiance of Beijing by Taiwan
independence advocates and provoked the remilitarization of cross-Strait
relations.
Subsequent
twists and turns in cross-Strait relations included attempts by some in Taipei
to repudiate previous understandings with Beijing and Chinese and U.S. shows of
force in the Taiwan area. But, in 2005,
Taiwan and the mainland extended their rapprochement in a detailed program of
cooperation based on their earlier understandings. Few in Beijing and none in Taipei now
advocate exclusive reliance on military means to deal with each other. Many Americans, by contrast, still advocate a
purely military approach. Ironically,
with the Taiwan roller-coaster now apparently headed for yet another hair-raising
descent, there is more bellicose talk in Washington than between Taipei and
Beijing. Neither the Taiwan story nor
the risks it presents to Sino-American relations is over. The danger remains that, if Sino-American
disagreement about Taiwan is not addressed creatively, it will lead eventually
to a bloody rendezvous between American honor and Chinese nationalism.
These two
examples of diplomacy as strategy – Namibia and Taiwan – show that patient
diplomacy based on accurate assessments of the perceived needs of the parties
to apparently intractable conflicts can maneuver them toward peace when
reflected in hard-nosed policies. Armed
intervention was not a realistic means of addressing the issues in Namibia or
the Taiwan Strait, though there were
powerful interest groups that nonetheless advocated some form of military
action in both cases.
Each of these examples
of diplomacy as strategy contains important lessons for diplomatic
doctrine. But, to the extent the
diplomatic concepts and actions that produced them has been analyzed at all,
this has been almost entirely from the perspective of ideologically tinged
African or East Asian area studies or IR theories uninformed by the reasoning
processes that produced success. Such
overspecialized analyses miss the points relevant to practical statecraft
Diplomacy is
not just the strategic manipulation of circumstances and perceptions to guide,
direct, and control the decisions of those affected by them. It is also, self-evidently, the means of
tactical maneuver by which a state defends and improves its competitive
position in relation to other states and peoples. And it is the process by
which states adjust their relations with each other without unleashing the
unpredictable havoc of war. In this
sense, diplomacy is almost a synonym for “negotiation.” It is also how states conciliate and mediate
between other states to ensure that outcomes benefit them. Mediation is a skill that involves the
simultaneous exercise of empathy with multiple conflicting parties. Handling such complexity demands professional
awareness and competence well beyond what is required for resolving simpler
human equations.
Both diplomatic dialogue and negotiation are
poorly understood in American civic culture.
One purpose of dialogue is to build a basis for empathy that enables the
insight into the motivations and perceptions of another party necessary to
shape an environment and craft an approach that can persuade that party to do
what you want it to do. Another is to
convey one’s own motivations and interests directly to underscore one’s resolve
or reduce misunderstandings that might unproductively escalate tension.
Diplomatic dialogue is not a favor to the other side in a confrontation, but a
means of conducting reconnaissance,
shows of determination, and maneuver for future gain.
Americans like
to substitute sanctions for dialogue with a state with which we have serious
disagreements. But sanctions unconnected
to serious offers of deal-making through negotiations do not promote reflection
on the part of their target. They
entrench differences. “We won’t talk
until you come out with your hands up” is seldom an effective path to persuasion. It is usually seen as humiliating and taken
to signal a lack of seriousness about addressing issues of concern to the party
to which it is addressed.
This decade’s
U.S. interactions with Iran and north Korea illustrate this. It was only after direct talks with Tehran in
Muscat began secretly in March 2013 and offers of sanctions relief were
conveyed by the American negotiators that agreement became possible. The inability to find a suitable format for a
bilateral dialogue with Pyongyang to address not only the U.S. denuclearization agenda but also the
existential concerns of the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea’s (DPRKs) helps explain the current, dangerous
confrontation with it.
No party enters
negotiations unless it believes it has something to gain by bargaining and
something to lose if it doesn’t. The
absence of dialogue deprives the parties of both the influence and insights
that only face-to-face encounters afford.
Willingness to negotiate does not
necessarily foreshadow concessions. What
matters is not the fact of meeting. It
is what is said in it. The purpose of
negotiations is not to come to agreement or to resolve differences through compromise
with the other side. It is to advance
the interests in one’s charge.
This can mean
conducting talks in such a way as to avoid rather than produce a resolution of
differences between the parties. Using
negotiation as a stalling tactic can enable change that obviates concessions or
facilitates a more favorable outcome in future.
A good example of such “diplomacy of deception and delay” can be seen in
Israel’s approach to the interminably
unproductive “peace process” for the decades that followed its beginning in
the mid 1970s.
Israel provided
what it knew both Palestinians and foreign audiences wanted to see in terms of the
prospect of progress toward peace. It did
its best to keep hope alive for a deal based on “land for peace.” But, even as
Israel engaged in on-again off-again talks with Palestinians about their
self-determination, it was erecting barriers to the creation of a Palestinian
state that it calculated would ultimately prove insuperable. In its use of diplomacy as a cover for annexation
and settlement activity rather than a resolution of it, Israel had the
cooperation of American “peace processors.”
Perhaps these Americans, whose sympathy for Israel rather than the
Palestinians ultimately became notorious, will one day explain whether they
were witting or unwitting accomplices in Israel’s protracted duplicity.
Diplomacy may
also be directed at producing an impasse or insult that triggers a war, when
war is necessary to achieve a desired adjustment in relations with other
states. In 1870, Bismarck’s effort peacefully to unite Germany required such a
war. To cause other German states to accept
Prussian leadership, Bismarck needed the French to appear to be the
aggressor. An apparently defensive war
would activate treaties that placed Prussia’s King Wilhelm I in command of all
the armies of Germany, including those in its Prussian-suspicious south.
By altering a
telegram and then releasing it to the public, Bismarck made it sound as if King
Wilhelm had demeaned a ranking French envoy.
Duly provoked by this apparent insult, as Bismarck had supposed it would
be, France declared war on Prussia six days later. In response, the southern German states
united under the command of their Prussian compatriots. As Bismarck had calculated, the victory of a
Prussian-led German army over the French paved the way for the creation of a
German Empire under Wilhelm I.
Sometimes,
diplomacy is a means of deception that conceals the intention to use force to
effect change. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein
used Iraqi negotiations with Kuwait
to convince Kuwaitis and their Gulf Arab partners that there was no imminent
danger of his forces attacking them. An
hour after Iraq abruptly broke off talks with the Kuwaitis in Jeddah, it
invaded Kuwait. Four days later, it was
poised to attack Saudi Arabia. When an
adversary talks in deliberately unproductive and provocative ways while
continuing preparations for the use of force, one has reason to be especially
vigilant. Kuwait was not.
Diplomacy is
not just the craft of adjusting relationships at minimal cost, it is also risk management. It is the means by which a state builds
political capital, sustains a reputation for reliability and responsiveness to
foreign partners and events, and interacts with them day to day. The management of alliances, ententes,
relations with dependencies, neutrals, adversaries, and enemies is a
never-ending task that diplomats necessarily carry out around the clock.
If you represent
a foreign government and you want to know why the United States has boots on
the ground in Mali and Niger but not in Guinea or Côte d’Ivoire, ask your local
American embassy, the U.S. mission to the United Nations, or the Department of
State. In normal times, the answers will
be the same.
Want to learn
what U.S. objectives in Laos or Vietnam are or what concerns the United States
has had about deporting people to Haiti or Cuba? In normal times, ask the American embassy in
your capital to brief you or have your embassy in Washington seek a briefing at
the Department of State.
Interested in
American policy on female genital mutilation, anti-missile defense, or the
Israel-Palestine issue? In normal times,
connect with the experts on these subjects in Foggy Bottom.
Suppose you are
an American university and need help to get shoplifting students of yours out
of a Chinese jail. In normal times, you
can get such help through the U.S. consular officers who support the
application of international norms on the spot.
Concerned about international internet freedom? Your advocate is the Department of
State. Interested in understanding the
progression of events in contemporary Saudi Arabia? In normal times, there are experts at the
Department of State who can explain them and their implications for American
interests to you.
Do you need to
object to excessive tariffs or discriminatory inspection procedures affecting
your company’s exports to a particular foreign market? Communicate your concerns to the U.S.
ambassador there directly, or indirectly, through the Department of State. Providing there is an ambassador in place and
the Department of State is staffed to assist you, you can register your views
through them to the foreign government concerned, while increasing your
leverage in any bargaining for relief.
Need help
figuring out how to be government friendly as you build a market for your sales
or production abroad? The U.S. embassy
and the Department of State are where you can get this help. In normal times, you will seldom need a visa
to enter a foreign country because the Department of State will have negotiated
visa-free border crossing for you.
But these are
not normal times. The United States is
not now performing these basic diplomatic functions reliably or effectively. Power in Washington is no longer brought into
focus through a coherent policy process.
Interagency coordination is the poorest it has ever been. Many key policy positions outside the White
House remain vacant. There is minimal
guidance and delegation of authority by the president and his cabinet officers
to subordinates.
Attempts to
understand U.S. policy through contacts with the Department of State and other
departments of the federal government now frequently fail. The White House or National Security Council
have no time to staff answers to private
inquiries. Routine visits between
key officials of our government and other governments no longer take
place. Different components of the U.S.
foreign affairs bureaucracy now either duck questions aimed at elucidating U.S.
policy or answer them in an uncoordinated, unauthoritative, or even
contradictory manner. Every policy pronouncement that is issued remains subject
to sudden correction by presidential twitterstorm.
The failure to
staff and perform the routine tasks of diplomacy has significant short and
long-term costs. It is eroding foreign
trust in the United States and undermining cooperation between Americans and
their foreign allies, partners, and friends.
It is replacing foreign confidence in American reliability as an
international actor with concern about American erraticism and
unpredictability. It is creating a
diplomatic vacuum that others are filling and from which they will not be
easily dislodged. It is causing
confusion about U.S. purposes and draining foreign support for US-led alliances
and partnerships. In short, it is making
the United States a smaller factor in world affairs by quietly but radically shrinking
American influence in foreign capitals.
It is lessening the extent to which the United States can count on
backing for its interests and policies from others.
The
evisceration of the Department of State and the Foreign Service of the United
States continues as we speak. Experience
teaches us that it takes decades, if not centuries, to form effective
government departments or professions.
The damage already done to the U.S. government’s foreign relations
management capabilities is likely to take many, many years to repair. In the interim, the United States will suffer
and others will gain from the consequences of what amounts to unilateral
diplomatic disarmament by Washington.
It is no
consolation that the American diplomatic capabilities that are being weakened were
less robustly professional and competent than they might have been. The margin of error in American foreign
policy is contracting as other nations become wealthier, stronger, and more
competitive. The continued military strength
of the United States does not offset the deterioration of our international politico-economic
leadership capacity and diplomatic agility.
Meanwhile, the attractiveness
of the United States -- our reputation as both a reliable international actor
and good society -- is corroding.
American foreign policy is increasingly disparaged abroad as perfidious,
indifferent to the interests of allies, and incompetent at countering
adversaries. American exceptionalism no
longer has the credibility and appeal that it once did.
More than two
millennia ago, Confucian moralism asserted that the key to influence outside
one's own state was not military power projection but domestic virtue that
would cause others to see one's nation as a society they should emulate. John Winthrop’s notion of the power of
American rectitude to inspire other societies to match our moral excellence
paralleled this insight. The traditional
idealism of Americans, the oft-stated aspiration of our country to apply higher
than usual standards to itself, and the demonstrated capacity of American
society to embrace change long gave Washington a uniquely persuasive voice in
world affairs. Worldwide admiration for
the wisdom of the American statesmen who created the post-World War II order
legitimized Washington’s international stature as the natural leader of global
governance. It turns out that the
appearance of virtue can add importantly to a society’s power by associating it
with justice, probity, compassion, and
wisdom.
The image the
United States now presents to the world is not helpful in this regard. It is of a society in denial, where government
is gridlocked, intermittent riots expose endemic racism, equality of
opportunity is being replaced by socioeconomic sclerosis and plutocracy,
politics are venal, homelessness is rife, gun massacres are frequent, the elite
is increasingly indifferent to the plight of the poor or unfortunate, and
religious prejudice and xenophobia are on the rise. Propaganda, useful as it can be in enhancing
or defending national reputations, cannot overcome these perceptions. They represent real American problems that
require American solutions.
Quite aside
from the effects they have on foreign views of our country, we Americans need
to get our act back together. But how to
fix our politics is a topic that it would take at least another forty-five
minutes to address and is best left for another day.
We live in a
world in which what happens anywhere is soon known everywhere. Diplomacy is an important element in our
intercourse with other nations and peoples.
It is based on understanding their perspectives on issues as well as our
own and using that understanding to protect and advance our interests. The power of others relative to our own is
increasing. Whether as strategy,
tactics, or simply risk management, diplomacy is something in which, in our own
interest, we ought to seek to excel.
Without competent diplomacy near the center of our statecraft, the
United States is unlikely to fare well.
[1]The process by which linkage was
conceived and imposed is described in Crocker, Chester A. (1993). High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace
in a Rough Neighborhood. New York: W. W. Norton.
[2]União Nacional para a Independência
Total de Angola
[3]Notably, Margaret Thatcher’s United
Kingdom.
[4]Joint Communiqué of the People's
Republic of China and the United States of America Issued in Shanghai, February
28, 1972
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