Diplomacy is the art of obtaining foreign policy objectives through skillful negotiation rather than military force. It is often more effective and always less costly in terms of both blood and money than going to war. History provides many examples of weak nations using astute diplomacy to defend their interests, as well as many instances of militarily powerful nations declining due to inept diplomacy.
Diplomacy has frequently played a significant role in American history. It turned the tide in the American Revolution when Benjamin Franklin convinced France to support the fledgling cause with money, arms, men, and most importantly a fleet. It was essential to winning the American Civil War when Secretary of State William Seward convinced Britain and France not to recognize or support the Confederacy. Again in 1990 it was essential when Secretary of State James Baker assembled a multinational coalition to liberate Kuwait following Iraq's invasion.
Yet in this century, the United States has largely ignored diplomacy in favor of direct military intervention. In the brief moment of American hegemony that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, this approach may have seemed credible. It was not. From Afghanistan and Iraq to Somalia and Libya, not one of our military interventions has achieved lasting success. Now, in an increasingly multipolar world and with our national debt approaching record levels, the need for more effective and less costly solutions is obvious, The United States can no longer dictate. It must again learn to negotiate, though its diplomatic tools have grown dull.
The State Department's corps of career Foreign Service officers remains the backbone of American diplomacy. Unfortunately, 25 years ago, the Hart-Rudman Commission, (formally known as the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century) described the State Department as a "crippled institution." That has not changed. Unless it does, elected political leaders will continue to lack a robust means of defending American foreign interests short of war.
Bureaucracies possess an instinctive urge to grow, acquire new responsibilities and consume ever more resources. It is not in their nature to monitor or check themselves and the State Department is no exception. It has grown from a small, elite corps of Foreign Service officers into a cumbersome bureaucracy more focused on its own internal clearance process than on getting anything done. The State Department now has far more bureaucrats pushing paper in Washington than diplomats working abroad. It badly needs restructuring.
Traditionally, the State Department's regional bureaus handled anything related to their geographic area. This is no longer the case. Over the past 30 years, dozens of functional bureaus and offices have sprung up to handle specific issues; each one coming with plumb senior positions, large budgets, and ever-growing staffs. Issues with their own designated bureaucracies now functioning outside of the traditional regional bureaus include health security, energy security, food security, climate change, religious freedom, human rights, women's rights, narcotics, hostages, counterterrorism, combating antisemitism, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Israel-Palestine and even Tibetan affairs, among many others. An ironclad rule of bureaucracy is that the workload will expand to consume all available resources, and so it has been with this plethora of new offices.
All these issues are important, but the unavoidable truth is that each of these new bureaucratic entities has developed an excessively parochial view of policy focused solely on promoting its own issue and often overlooking the president's broader foreign policy agenda. The most effective means of rapidly improving the Foreign Service's ability to execute foreign policy decisions would be to eliminate some of the functional bureaus that merely complicate policy implementation and do very little that regional bureaus could not handle.
Foreign Service officers do not administer large government programs. They are employed primarily to advise elected policy makers and execute their decisions. Producing high-quality advice and negotiating with foreign counterparts requires a corps of experienced professionals with years of academic study, regional experience, and strong foreign language skills. It requires people who understand foreign societies as they are, not as we wish them to be. Such expertise has become remarkably rare in the Foreign Service.
Currently, the Foreign Service personnel system creates "globalists" and "generalists" who routinely jump from one region to another. We know one officer who started his career in Mauritania, moved on to Australia, Great Britain, Mali, Burma, the Philippines, and Mexico before ending up in charge of Andean Affairs. How could anyone develop the language skills and cultural awareness to understand such a diverse set of societies? Policymakers need advice from officers whose careers have developed a deep regional and country specific knowledge. If the Foreign Service wants to remain relevant in the Washington policy arena, it needs to reform its personnel policies and create genuine experts who bring something to the table.
Above all, the Foreign Service must adapt its world view to a greatly changed planet. The exceptional days of easy American dominance are over. A more conventional multipolar world order based on security competition and a balance of power among sovereign nations has returned. Under these circumstances, and regardless of who wins the November presidential election, the United States will need to focus more sharply on its own core interests rather than frivolous interventions and endless wars of choice.
Today, much of the Foreign Service remains committed to exporting democratic institutions and American cultural values to societies which are not amenable to either. Many career officers continue to support interventionist concepts such as "transformational diplomacy" and "responsibility to protect." Under the first, we have set out not to understand or communicate with foreign societies, but to reshape them in our own image. Under the second, we have agreed to use force when a state manifestly fails to protect its own population. Both policies are rooted in the erroneous belief that good intentions matter more than facts on the ground, that our capacities are unlimited and that others will inevitably embrace our worthy goals.
The Foreign Service needs to replace its interventionist inclinations with a realist approach based primarily on critical American interests. It needs an ideology that accepts the predominance of national security, sovereignty, and survival over universal principles, international organizations, and utopian visions. To be clear, it needs to focus more on how its work affects women in Alabama rather than in Afghanistan. This is not an abandonment of American principles. It is rather a reaffirmation of the vision that guided the nation for most of its history. As John Quincy Adams wrote "We are the friend of liberty everywhere, but the champion only of our own. We go not abroad seeking monsters to slay."
The Department of State was one of the first cabinet offices created. Thomas Jefferson was the first secretary of state. For two hundred years, the department played the dominant role in conducting American foreign policy. That is no longer the case. While Foreign Service professionals remain patriots committed to advancing American interests abroad, they have seen their prestige eroded and their influence in Washington decline. Reversing this trend and strengthening our diplomatic corps is in the interest of all Americas. Reform, however, will require a secretary of state who understands the problems and is committed to changing the Foreign Service's bureaucratic organization, personnel policies and ideological orientation.
David H. Rundell is a former chief of mission at the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia and the author of Vision or Mirage, Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads. Ambassador Michael Gfoeller is a former political advisor to the U.S. Central Command and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.