Harry W. Kopp

is a former foreign service officer and consultant in international trade. Kopp was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for international trade policy in the Carter and Reagan administrations. His foreign assignments included Warsaw and Brasília. He received meritorious and superior honor awards from the Department of State and a meritorious service award from President Reagan. Kopp left the foreign service in 1985. He is now president of Harry Kopp, LLC, a consulting company, and Venture Factors, Inc., a division of Zabaleta and Company. Kopp has published in The New York Times and many other publications. He also wrote Commercial Diplomacy and the National Interest (American Academy of Diplomacy and the Business Council for International Understanding, 2004). More information about Mr. Kopp can be found at: www.HarryKopp.com.

Charles A. Gillespie

entered the foreign service in 1965 and retired in 1995. His career included assignments as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs; American ambassador to Grenada, Colombia, and Chile, and Special Assistant to the President on the National Security Council Staff. He received meritorious and superior honor awards from the State Department. After retiring, Gillespie joined The Scowcroft Group, a consulting company. He was a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy, the Business Council for International Understanding, and the Forum for International Policy. Gillespie passed away March 7, 2008. (Read his obituary in the Boston Globe or the LA Times ).

Georgetown University Press Q and A with Harry Kopp

Q: What prompted the writing of this book?
Kopp: The book started with General Jack Galvin, a soldier-diplomat who was NATO commander and later dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. General Galvin joined the policy committee of the Cox Foundation, a private group that supports a strong foreign service, and wanted a book that would teach him the basics of the organization. Told there was no such book, he said, “Well, there should be.” Tony Gillespie, another member of the committee, heard him and agreed. Gillespie recruited me for the project.

Q: What made you want to enter the U.S. Foreign Service?
Kopp: In high school in New Rochelle, New York, a social studies teacher [Rafael Cortada, who later became president of the University of the District of Columbia] talked me into taking part in the Model United Nations. I won a prize for best delegate and was hooked.

Q: What is the biggest perk of working in the foreign service? What is the biggest drawback?
Kopp: Of course different people have different answers to that question. But most members of the service are people who seek engagement with foreign cultures and with American foreign policy. They like the travel and the change. What they usually don’t like is the bureaucracy and the squabbling among U.S. government agencies.

Q: If you could offer one piece of advice to someone considering a career in the foreign service, what would it be?
Kopp: Read this book.

Q: Do you have a favorite anecdote from your time as a diplomat?
Kopp: I once spent ten hours in a sealed railway car in the People’s Republic of Poland playing penny-ante poker with Senator Hubert Humphrey and three Minnesota journalists. I didn’t get to commit much diplomacy during the train ride, but I learned a lot of politics. Ten hours with Hubert Humphrey is a powerful antidote to cynicism.

Q: Why does the U.S. need the foreign service?
Kopp: We have a foreign service because the U.S. government has to deal with other countries – which, when we do it peaceably, is what we call diplomacy. Diplomacy requires persuasion, negotiation and an understanding of foreign cultures, languages, interests, and motivations. These skills are best cultivated and identified in a professional, competitive setting, like the U.S. Foreign Service. We’re not the only ones to figure this out. Every country that has a department or ministry of foreign affairs has a corps of people who make diplomacy their life’s work.

Q: In the book, you discuss how the war in Iraq has tested the foreign service. What have been some of the main challenges, and how have the diplomats addressed those challenges?
Kopp: The foreign service was not prepared for the mission it was given. The mission was to create political conditions in Iraq that would allow the Iraqi people to choose a government responsive to their needs, able to provide security and basic services, and ready to live in peace with its neighbors. This was a daunting task, and the foreign service was daunted. The service didn’t have enough people or the right people. The service had to strip posts all over the world of personnel and bring in technical specialists from the Department of Defense, the National Guard, and the private sector. A shortage of Arabic-speaking diplomats meant too much reliance on interpreters and English-speaking Iraqis. And the diplomats and the U.S. military had to learn to work together, which was difficult on both sides. The foreign service needs to do a much better job of identifying how many and what kind of people it will need in the future, and then recruiting and training to meet the need. The administration will have to ask for enough money, and Congress will have to provide it, year after year after year.

Q: What would you say is the most important function of a U.S. Foreign Service officer?
Kopp: Three are equally important: representation, operations, and policy. Representation is negotiation, persuasion, reporting, and analysis – in other words, trying to understand what is going on and finding ways to shape events favorably. Operations is running U.S. government programs, like provincial reconstruction in Iraq, administering U.S. laws, like the visa provisions of the immigration act, and managing support for the U.S. civilian presence overseas. Policy is connecting U.S. actions to their international consequences – figuring out what kind of a world our behavior will produce, and what kind of behavior will produce the world we want.

Q: What are some of the biggest changes that have happened within the foreign service over the last few years and where is the organization headed?
Kopp: Since the end of the Cold War, the pace of political, economic, and technological change in the world has accelerated. The service was slow to adapt, but now the pace of change seems to be accelerating in the service as well. Positions and resources are moving out of Europe, into China, India, Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Tours in Washington have been cut back. Promotions are coming most quickly to those who can speak critical languages well and who are prepared work in areas where danger is high and infrastructure is poor. This administration speaks of the need to conduct transformational diplomacy, a foreign policy that aims to change foreign societies, not just government policies. Diplomats have to change as diplomacy changes, and inside the foreign service there’s been a shift in the center of gravity away from reporting and analysis toward operations and management.