« The Greatest Scientific Gamble in History | Main | A Few Americans you Should Know »

August 8, 2005

State Sanity?

Winds of Change delivers good news: the State Department is going to be reorganized.

“Today, protecting America from weapons of mass destruction requires more than deterrence and arms control treaties,” said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in brief remarks at the State Department on Friday when the announcement was made.

“We must also go on the offensive against outlaw scientists, black market arms dealers, and rogue state proliferators. Securing America from terrorist attack is more than a matter of law enforcement. We must also confront the ideology of hatred in foreign societies by supporting the universal hope of liberty and the inherent appeal of democracy,” she said.

To that end, the department said that pending congressional approval it would merge two existing departments to create a bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation that would focus exclusively on the threat posed by terrorists seeking weapons of mass destruction.

Officials said the State Department also intended to bolster the capacity of the Bureau of Political Military Affairs and increase the mandate of the Verification and Compliance Bureau, which provides oversight relating to international arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament agreements and commitments, to include implementation.


There are two parts of the US government that desperately need to be deeply reformed: State and the CIA. The CIA is a subject for a different time. The State Department suffers from a number of problems. In particular, the career diplomats - functionaries, really, for the most part - come over time to identify with the group of people they are around all the time: international diplomats from other countries. And the result of this is that State concerns itself overly much with explaining the world to the American government in a finger-wagging way, and attempting to force American policy to be more friendly to their friends, who are often the representatives of other countries with whom we have vast differences. Lost in all of this is carrying out the American foreign policy, except when an internationalist president like Clinton is in office.

This is bad on a number of levels. First, it tends to undercut US foreign policy, particularly in those areas where a strong stance must be taken. Second, it increasingly separates our representatives to other countries from our own country, meaning that increasingly as their careers progress and these diplomats become more senior, they are also increasingly unable to explain America and American positions. Third, and in some ways most disastrous, it is not uncommon for senior diplomats to work diligently to undercut American policy, either by leaking damaging information, or by giving advice tailored to the conclusion they hope to see enacted into policy, or by not supporting the policy while in contact with foreign representatives. The end result is that State is often an obstacle to implementing American foreign policy, rather than an asset.

The reforms as laid out in the ISN article will be useful, but they don't go far enough (well, neither did the intelligence reforms go far enough; it seems to be a failing of conservative governments that they are not willing to radically overhaul failing government agencies). In particular, they don't address the fact that we need diplomats who are a part of the nation's mainstream in the same way that we need an Army that is part of the nation's mainstream. I would like to see civil service procedures reformed to prevent diplomats from becoming a permanent fixture. This would likely involve a return to a patronage system, with turnover at each administration. This causes problems of novice mistakes and lack of institutional, which is one reason that it was abolished in the first place, but I think that this could be overcome by separating the State Department employees into two categories: country and regional and policy experts, who are under the current civil service rules and have only an advisory role, and diplomats and others in contact with foreign governments on a regular basis, who would have a policy implementation role and would be changed out with each administration. In other words, turnover at each administration needs to reach deeper into the State Department, in order to keep the State Department representative of the nation it represents.

Posted by jeff at August 8, 2005 9:42 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.caerdroia.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/384

Comments

Is the U.S. the only country which has this problem with its diplomats?

Posted by: Morenuancedthanyou at August 8, 2005 7:39 PM

No. But the US has it worse than most countries, as I understand it. The reason for this is that most countries either rotate their diplomatic corps, use only regime loyalists (particularly important in totalitarian and tyrannical states in any case), or have an internationalist foreign policy in which such alienation is a positive benefit. I'm not really familiar with most countries' diplomatic services, though, so take all that with a grain of salt.

Posted by: Jeff Medcalf [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 8, 2005 8:44 PM

Your recommendations are right on the money, Jeff, but I don't think we'll ever get there. Some things are too important to leave to professionals and diplomacy is probably one of them. The professionals should function as consultants to their customers, the amateurs, not as diplomats themselves.

I think the problems of a full-time permanent diplomatic corps are intrinsic. They tend to overvalue the relationships with other diplomats and foreign government and private functionaries they've built over time. This is analogous to the universal tendency to overvalue old software. The value is not what it cost to make but based on what its utility is now.

Posted by: Dave Schuler [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 9, 2005 3:15 PM