Contents

• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I. The Institution
• 1. What Is the Foreign Service?
• 2. History
• 3. The Foreign Service Today
• Part II. The Profession
• 4. Form and Content
• 5. The Foreign Service at War
• 6. Politics and Professionalism
• Part III. The Career
• 7. Stability and Change
• 8. Foreign Service Functions — Five Tracks
• 9. Assignments and Promotions
• Part IV. The Future Foreign Service
• 10. Tomorrow's Diplomats
• Appendices
• A. Department of State Organization Chart
• B. Foreign Service Core Precepts
• C. Interviews
• D. Websites and Blogs
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors

Chapter 1: What Is the Foreign Service?

... Like the army, the navy, the air force, and the marines, the US Foreign Service is a true service. Its officers are commissioned by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and sworn to uphold and defend the US Constitution. Rank is vested in the person, not in the job. Members of the foreign service, with a very few exceptions, are available for assignment anywhere in the world. On average, they spend two-thirds of their careers abroad.

The Mission

The foreign service has a triple mission. The first is representation. In US government jargon, representation often refers to official entertaining, for which the government provides a famously small allowance. But diplomacy is not a dinner party, and representation, as used here, is not so much something a diplomat does as a condition of foreign service life abroad. A member of the foreign service on overseas duty not only acts on behalf of the US government but lives as a representative of the country as well. On behalf of the United States, the foreign service talks, listens, reports, analyzes, cajoles, persuades, threatens, debates, and above all negotiates. The foreign service reaches into other societies across barriers of history, culture, language, faith, politics, and economics to build trust, change attitudes, alter behaviors, and keep the peace.

The second mission is operations. The foreign service is on the ground, dealing every day with host governments and populations, running US programs, executing US laws, giving effect to US policies, offering protection to American citizens, and supporting the full US official civilian presence overseas.

The third is policy. Members of the foreign service, through their long engagement with foreign societies, are well placed to predict the international consequences of what we say and do. They are the government's experts on how America's national interests, defined by our political process, can be most effectively advanced abroad. The service is the government's institutional memory for foreign affairs and is able to place policy in historical perspective and project risks, costs, and benefits over the long term.

All three missions are essential. A foreign service that sees its mission as diplomacy, with no role for policy, will wait passively for instructions that may come too late, or not at all. A service that believes it should set policy as well as carry it out will lose the trust of the president and the Congress and become an irrelevant annoyance. A service that neglects hands-on operations will exhaust its energy in bureaucratic exercises and forfeit its ability to act to more nimble and aggressive organizations.

Representation, operations, and policy are all essential to the grand task the country has asked its diplomats to perform. At her confirmation hearings, Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "if I am confirmed, the State Department will be firing on all cylinders to provide forward-thinking, sustained diplomacy in every part of the world; applying pressure and exerting leverage; cooperating with our military partners and other agencies of government; partnering effectively with NGOs, the private sector, and international organizations; using modern technologies for public outreach; empowering negotiators who can protect our interests while understanding those of our negotiating partners. There will be thousands of separate interactions, all strategically linked and coordinated to defend American security and prosperity."1 Her approach, she said, was "what has been called 'smart power': [using] the full range of tools at our disposal — diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural — picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy."2

An Institution, a Profession, a Career

This book is descriptive, not prescriptive. Readers looking for polemics for or against smart power, or a program for reform of America's foreign policy, or a reconstruction of its foreign policy establishment should go elsewhere. What we have produced here is a guide to the foreign service as it is, with a look back at what it was and a look ahead at what it may become. We treat the service three ways: as an institution, as a profession, and as a career.

The Institution

The institution is the men and women, and their predecessors and successors, who serve the United States under the Foreign Service Act. But the people and the institution are not the same. Presidents often distrust the foreign service as an institution — President Nixon vowed to ruin it — even as they promote individual members of the service to positions of confidence. Yet the spirit and culture of the service shape its members and, in turn, are gradually shaped by them.

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Chapter 4: Form and Content

...national interests and decide what resources should be deployed to secure them. Professional diplomats carry out policies. They try to manipulate events to produce the outcomes policymakers desire; at times, they serve as policymakers. Diplomats in a position to advise on policy must know how to bring their knowledge of foreign cultures, languages, institutions, leaders, aspirations, capabilities, and intents to bear constructively on the questions confronting the policymakers. That requires an understanding of how American foreign policy is made and an awareness of the forces, including the domestic political forces, that are at work on any issue. The value that the foreign service brings to the development of foreign policy is its knowledge of the motivations and levers of power in foreign countries, its sense of the range of possibilities in a negotiation, its ability to predict foreign reactions to a given set of circumstances, and its skill, based in language, personal contact, and a record of honest dealing, at communication without misunderstanding.

Experienced FSOs are uniquely qualified to advise policymakers on what is required — in human, financial, and physical resources; in time; and in political will — to carry their ideas into effect. Such advice is not always well received. Ron Neumann, American ambassador in Afghanistan in 2005-7, who devoted many hours and much energy to laying out the resource requirements for success to the Department of State, the National Security Council, and members of Congress, sounds almost plaintive about the difficulties he confronted: "Searching for a new strategy seems to be policymakers' default reaction to problems. Instead of asking whether the problem lies in some mix of funding, procedures, and troops — all of which would require additional money and people — to implement the strategy already decided, the search is launched for a new idea. Certainly ideas are come by more easily than money and soldiers."33

Diplomatic Practice

The three areas of diplomatic practice — representation, operations, and policy — are bounded by the blurriest of lines. An FSO over the course of a career can expect to train and perform in all three areas.

No foreign service job is confined to one area of practice. A consular officer, faced with the repetitive challenge of applying US law to an endless line of visa applicants, represents the United States on a powerful, personal level to scores of families each day. An AID chief of party (as project managers are called) is thoroughly operational, but he or she is also shaping public opinion and, through control of the disbursement of substantial US resources, shaping US policy as well. A commercial officer who represents US export interests is a source of advice for Washington on US commercial policy and strategy for trade negotiations. The most successful diplomatic professionals work in representation, operations, and policy simultaneously.

Carlucci in Portugal

Frank Carlucci, a career FSO who later served as national security adviser and secretary of defense, came to Portugal as ambassador in January 1975, eight months after a revolution by military officers who were fed up with colonial wars in Africa had toppled a rightist authoritarian government. In the political vacuum that followed, the country had a series of weak governments (six in two years) that moved successively to the left. Washington felt a rising level of concern that Portugal might become the first NATO country to fall under communist control.

Most concerned was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who told a conference of American ambassadors in Europe that "the dominance of Communist parties in the West is unacceptable.... It is hard to imagine that, if one or the other of these parties takes control of a Western government, it will permit the democratic process to operate and thereby face the possibility that it may itself be removed from office.... We must do our utmost to assure [sic] the survival of democratic processes and to preserve the Western political orientation of western European countries."34

Many at the State Department felt that "it was probably best to write Lisbon off and teach them a lesson" that would dissuade voters in other European countries, especially France and Italy, from following the Portuguese example. Carlucci and his embassy, however, argued for vigorous US support of the country's democratic parties, including in particular the socialists, in the belief that "the electoral process could serve to undermine communist control of the country." This conclusion was not based on faith; Carlucci had personal knowledge of Portuguese politics. "I would make it a goal of meeting at least two or three political figures a day," he told an interviewer in 1999. "I spent many, many hours in long debates and discussions with the prime minister," as well as with the foreign minister and the ....

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Chapter 4: Form and Content

... equity share in the new pipeline, "the United States is strongly identified with the project," Mann explained. "Our name is on it." The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, 1,100 miles long, opened May 25, 2005, and began moving 150,000 barrels per day to market. Five years later, the line was carrying up to 1.2 million barrels a day, close to 6 percent of US consumption and 1 percent of world demand.

With the opening of the pipeline, the work of the special envoy for Caspian Basin energy affairs was complete, but Steve Mann's expertise and unique knowledge of the region did not go to waste. He next moved on to become the State Department's special adviser on Europe's frozen conflicts — four unresolved ethnic and secessionist disputes in the former Soviet Union (Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan, South Ossetia and Abkhazia on the borders of Georgia, and Moldova's eastern region of Transdniestria). In that capacity he traveled to many of the same capitals and dealt with many of the same people that he had come to know through his work on the pipeline. He built on the trust he enjoyed throughout the region to mediate these disputes, which threaten peace and stability in a volatile and strategic part of the world. "My job gives me the opportunity to work in policy and to execute," Mann said. "I have a free hand to travel to the countries, I decide on the tactics. I have great support from the rest of the State Department, from the Pentagon, and from the intelligence community. It's the best job in the foreign service."

Transformational Diplomacy to Smart Power

American diplomatic practice began to change after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The administration of George W. Bush, especially in its second term, introduced new methods and reordered the relative importance assigned to different types of diplomatic work. The administration of President Obama altered the terminology but carried forward, and often accelerated, most of the changes launched in the Bush administration. From Secretary Rice to Secretary Clinton, even where foreign policies and diplomatic strategies have shifted, the diplomatic tactics employed have not.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration made the political transformation of other societies an explicit goal of American diplomacy. A White House paper, published in September 2002, put it this way: "The US national security strategy will be based on a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests. The aim of this strategy is to help make the world not just safer but better."42 A second National Security Strategy, published in April 2006, was even clearer: "The goal of our statecraft is to help create a world of democratic, well-governed states that can meet the needs of their citizens and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system. This is the best way to provide enduring security for the American people."43

The administration drew on and appealed to a long American tradition. The convictions that governments that respond to their people are less threatening than those that don't and that democratic reform abroad improves security at home are deeply rooted in American political thought and experience. So is the belief that American foreign policy should promote democracy in foreign lands. The United States from its founding embraced certain human rights as God-given and universal, and from the early days of the country's twentieth-century emergence as a global power, it sought "a world made safe for democracy."44 Ambassador Carlucci's active intervention in Portuguese politics certainly favored democratic outcomes, but the language of the Bush administration (and in particular of Secretary Rice), which described the impulse to change foreign societies as transformational diplomacy, used universal, moral terms that Ambassador Carlucci, Secretary Kissinger, and President Nixon did not employ.

Traditional diplomacy aims to influence how states relate to other states. "Governments," wrote Henry Adams, "were meant to deal with governments, not with private individuals or the opinions of foreign society."45 Transformational diplomacy aims also — even primarily — to influence how states behave inside their own borders.

This shift of emphasis implied a change in American diplomatic practice and in the demands placed on the foreign service. Rice told an audience at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service that the nature of risk in the postcommunist world required a new diplomatic mission: "The greatest threats now emerge more within states than between them. The fundamental character of regimes now matters more than the international distribution of power.... We seek to use America's diplomatic power to help foreign citizens to better their own lives and to build their own nations and to transform their own futures."46 In seeking resources for the Department of State, she told the Congress much the same: "This time of global transformation calls for transformational diplomacy. More than ever, America's diplomats will need to be active in spreading democracy, reducing poverty, fighting terror, and doing our part to protect our homeland."47

The first reaction of most members of the professional foreign service was applause, mixed with a sense that appreciation of their work was overdue. "United States foreign policy has been encouraging democracy for a hundred years," said retired Ambassador Tom Boyatt. "And you know what? It's been a huge success."48 "I think it's what we've been doing all along," Ambassador Rea Brazeal observed. "The Georgetown speech reminded me of the Home Depot slogan: 'You can do it but we'll be there to help.' " Another ambassador with long service in Africa said, "I think we started about fifteen years ago to do what Secretary Rice calls transformational diplomacy." A public diplomacy officer with twenty years of service remarked, "I've been doing transformational diplomacy since the beginning of my career."49

Some saw the risks. What if a host government did not wish to see its country transformed? Would it consider transformational diplomacy subversive agitation and interference in internal affairs, another example of US imperial arrogance? Some scoffed. A retired ambassador called "this transformational diplomacy nonsense" a fad or a mistake that would end when Rice and the administration left office.

The retired ambassador was half right. Although the Obama administration killed the name — transformational diplomacy was out, "smart power" was in — it kept much of the practice. "The ideas behind it made sense," said Harry Thomas, head of State Department human resources during the transition.50 The Obama administration also dropped its predecessor's idealistic rhetoric, which paradoxically had drawn inspiration from Democratic forebears, especially Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter. The Obama administration's approach drew more on Republican realists like Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon.

Harvard professor Joseph Nye had coined the term soft power to refer to the diplomatic power of attraction, which he defined as inducing others to do what you want without coercion or bribery. He later used the term smart power to refer to the ability to make soft and hard (coercive) power work together. Secretary Clinton described smart power as "central to our thinking and our decision-making." She defined it as "the intelligent use of all means at our disposal ... a blend of principle and pragmatism." And she popularized smart power with phrases borrowed from her predecessor, linking diplomacy, defense, and development — called the three D's or Diplomacy 3.0 — as the three equal pillars of American foreign policy and stressing the importance of interagency coordination in a whole-of-government approach to policy execution. For those parts of a whole-of-government approach over which the secretary of state had greatest control, diplomacy, and development, Secretary Clinton added one more phrase to the lexicon: civilian power.51

Transformational diplomacy, smart power, and civilian power had similar implications for American diplomatic practice and for career diplomacy. Members of the foreign service saw staff at embassies in western and eastern Europe cut back and shifted, along with other resources, to China, India, central and near eastern Asia, and to regions where governments were unstable or dangerously weak. They saw a shift toward operations and away from reporting and analysis; toward spending more time in civil (or in some countries, clerical) society and less with foreign government officials; toward a higher premium on speaking foreign languages well, especially the languages of the Middle East and the developing world, and a lesser premium on writing in English. The Department of State placed greater stress on public diplomacy and on integrating foreign assistance with other elements of foreign policy. In conflict and postconflict regions, foreign service personnel would work literally side by side with US and allied military forces to build up friendly local authorities, establish local institutions to provide basic public services, and promote short- and long-term economic development. Skills in planning and managing complex operations, which neither the foreign service nor the civil service in the Department of State had ever really cultivated, became highly prized. FSOs and specialists whose careers were already focused in these areas saw opportunities for more rapid advancement, and those with less experience in the developing or unstable countries became concerned that their work might be undervalued.

Inside the Department of State and AID, discussion of ways in which the foreign service would adapt to the new diplomatic strategy and tactics eclipsed debate about the strategy itself or the policies it supports. Building a service with a different mix of skills required changes in recruitment, hiring, retention, training, assignments, and promotions. Such changes, discussed in part III of this book, will show their full effect only after some years, as they work their way through the corps. Overseas, diplomats adopted new practices on the fly, with varying degrees of success.

Fighting AIDS

Diplomacy that promotes security through social change in foreign countries is not confined to counterinsurgency. The President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), launched in 2003, is the exercise of ....

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Chapter 5: The Foreign Service at War

... was unprecedented in scale and ambition. By 2009 the Baghdad embassy was the world's largest, with a budget of around $1.6 billion and a staff of more than 1,800 employees and 13,000 contract personnel. The embassy in Kabul was a close second, with a staff of more than 1,200 employees and plans for rapid expansion. In both countries, the task of the embassy, including personnel working in the field, was to create the political and economic environment for defeating insurgencies, to build functioning democracies from the bottom up. In both countries, the United States had anticipated a quick military victory and had not planned on confronting a subsequent insurgency. The counterinsurgency effort, of which the embassy was the civilian side, was late and initially haphazard.

In Iraq the work of the foreign service in the immediate wake of the invasion was unstructured and improvisational. As security deteriorated it became progressively more constrained, with objectives more narrowly defined but no less difficult to accomplish. Security did not improve until 2008, when the United States increased its troop levels and modified its political strategy. In Afghanistan security deteriorated from 2005 until well into 2009. Secretary Clinton testified in April 2009 that "in Afghanistan, the casualty rate for USAID employees, contract employees, locally engaged employees, and other international aid workers, is, one in ten have been killed in the last eight years. Our comparable percentage for military casualties in Afghanistan is one in fifty-seven."8

The mission of stabilization and reconstruction was a test of the idea, the soundness of which many doubted, that diplomats can do this work. The enormity of the challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan forced the foreign service, an institution famously slow to change, into new thinking and new behaviors that continue to shape the service and will do so for years to come.

Provincial Reconstruction Teams

The term provincial reconstruction team (PRT) was first adopted in Afghanistan, where American and allied forces began stability operations soon after the fall of Kabul in November 2001.

In Afghanistan

According to Ambassador Bob Perito of the US Institute of Peace, the PRTs began as "'Coalition Humanitarian Liaison Cells' that the US military forces ... established in early 2002." By the end of 2002, the first PRT, adding a few US civilian officials and a force protection component to a military outpost, opened in the province of Gardez. Other PRTs quickly followed. The US embassy in Kabul defined the PRT mission in early 2003: extend the authority of the Afghan central government, improve security, and promote reconstruction.9 That definition remained valid in 2010. Although the PRTs were a US creation, many of the countries participating in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) established PRTs or took over PRT locations from US forces. By early 2010, the US military operated nine PRTs in Afghanistan, and other ISAF countries led another fourteen.

The foreign service had little to do with the PRTs in Afghanistan at the outset. The teams were almost entirely military, and as late as 2009, a typical team in a US-led PRT had 80 to 250 members but only three or four civilians, one each from USAID, the Department of State, the Department of Agriculture, and the Afghan ministry of the interior.10 The military predominance was true in all US locations, even in regions that were relatively secure. The civilian role, though small, was vital, and often poorly managed. The foreign service agencies were unable to meet the demands placed on them in Afghanistan. They had neither the people nor the skills nor the money required.

Even though the State Department had ordinarily to provide only one FSO to a PRT, gaps and vacancies were frequent enough and long enough to provoke a complaint in May 2006 from the CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid to the American ambassador in Kabul, Ronald Neumann. The ambassador explained to the general that they "had created new PRTs and political officer positions with the regional commands at the military's request, but the personnel system could not find and forward new officers to keep up with even the handful of additional new positions.... John wrote back ... 'My concern is that the Government of the United States needs to be in the field to its full capacity everywhere if we expect to win this war. That we have fallen short for nearly five years is a disgrace.' " As Neumann noted later, "The problem was not just the State Department but the lack of civilians from the Departments of Justice, Agriculture, and others.... The administration needed to put the country on a war footing, not only by ordering other cabinet departments to participate but by finding the funding for them to do so. That was not happening."11

Panjshir

The PRT in the Panjshir valley is a case in point. The valley, northeast of Kabul, was the stronghold of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Tajik leader of the Northern Alliance who was assassinated two days before September 11, 2001. The Northern Alliance, supported by US special forces, led the march into Kabul two months later. "The Panjshiris," wrote Ambassador Neumann, "were solidly anti-Taliban and well able to control who entered the valley."12 As a result, members of the PRT moved about relatively freely, at least until a suicide bomber killed four team members in an attack on a PRT convoy in May 2009.13

Civilian staff were hard to find and skills were sketchy. Amy Frumin, an AID FSO, wrote that when she arrived in Panjshir in July 2006 to take the position of USAID representative on the PRT, the position had been vacant for nine months.14 USAID, Ambassador Neumann wrote, did not have the personnel to implement technical projects. The agency relied on contractors, as it does in most of the world, but in Afghanistan it did not have the personnel to oversee the contracts. USAID in 2006-7 had one American FSO and two Afghan foreign service nationals at the Panjshir PRT, managing two PRT contracts with three-year budgets of about $120 million and several other USAID contracts. In Washington, at the end of 2008, USAID had seven people working on the Afghanistan country desk — one FSO and six contractors.15

Frumin faced bureaucratic rigidities that had a Joseph Heller quality. Team members held meetings with village elders and district leaders to discuss what projects would best meet local needs. By May 2006, USAID had promised to build women's health facilities in each district. But money could not be obligated until project proposals had been prepared and sent up the bureaucratic chain for approval. The military commander of the PRT offered to help prepare the documents that USAID required, but AID officials in Kabul, fearful that the military would end up implementing an AID project that should belong to the consulting company that was AID's implementing partner in Panjshir, said no. By the time the project proposals were complete in good form, money that had been available — about $1.5 million — had been swallowed up by the consulting company's overruns elsewhere. New money came through in April 2007, but only $600,000 — enough for equipment but not construction. The equipment was purchased and given to Afghan midwives, but instead of earning goodwill for American generosity, the project was remembered as a serious disappointment — remembered at least by the Afghans.16 With a year's delay between the meetings with the elders and the funding of the projects, the Americans who had promised the buildings had all finished their tours of duty and were gone before their promises were broken.

Long-term projects fared better. Between 2004 and 2006, USAID built a paved road into the valley that linked farms to markets and improved the reach of the central government by halving travel time to Kabul.17 Indeed, once policymakers in Washington came to accept that the United States would need to remain in the country for the long haul, road building, with projects planned jointly by USAID and the Army Corps of Engineers, became the centerpiece of US assistance for Afghanistan's infrastructure.18

The road projects and other long-term projects at which AID excelled were managed out of Kabul and Washington, not out of the PRTs. The civilian side of the PRTs in Afghanistan were not designed, staffed, or funded to manage long-term projects. Yet as Amy Frumin learned, they had neither the resources nor the bureaucratic agility to manage short-term projects either. They could determine the needs of the local population, but they had to rely on others, often the military, for funding and support.

Failed Project Cycle

That reliance often led to conflicts between the civilians and the military, conflicts rooted in the different missions and cultures of the two organizations. Frumin wrote that in Panjshir, where livestock were essential to the well-being of the population, the military and the civilians in the PRT agreed on the desirability of improving veterinary medicine. USAID set up a project to equip and train Afghan veterinary field units, but the military brought in American veterinarians who provided free veterinary services. The military program undercut the initiative. USAID wanted to build a self-sustaining Afghan capacity, but the military, said Frumin, wanted to win friends and push into areas they had not yet reached.19

Similar tensions developed in Iraq. The military favored programs like garbage collection that would immediately employ large numbers of youth, even at US expense, and get them off the streets, but the State Department looked for ways to develop long-term economic activities that Iraqis would own and operate. David Satterfield, senior adviser to the secretary of state on Iraq and former deputy chief of mission in Baghdad, spoke about an anonymous army officer quoted in an army manual on lessons learned in the PRTs: "The State Department wants to build Iraqi capacity. We need to get shit done." Satterfield commented, "One of our gifted PRT leaders has a great cycle called the Failed Project Cycle, pointing out how 'getting shit done' actually makes things worse a lot of times. If it's not incorporated into the Iraqi budget cycle, and we build it for them, then they don't maintain it, they don't staff it, they expect us to, we're mad at them because they didn't do it, they're mad at us because we didn't do it.... That's a bad cycle. We would argue that getting stuff done is actually not the top priority."20

In Iraq

In the months after coalition forces invaded Iraq, diplomats joined with military officers in what were initially called governorate coordination teams, small civilian-led groups whose mission was to strengthen local governments and make them responsive and accountable to the local population. The teams in Iraq were largely improvisational; they relied on insight, quickwittedness, luck, and a monopoly of military power. When any of these were lacking, the teams lost their influence over events. "Improvisation," Ambassador Robert Perito pointed out, "is not a concept of operations."21

The teams were disbanded in 2004, then reconstituted as PRTs in 2005, and greatly expanded in 2007. Many of the PRTs wound down their work in 2010 as US armed forces began their withdrawal. The teams initially relied heavily on Defense Department funds in the Commanders Emergency Response Program (CERP), whose expenditure could be authorized on the spot by military commanders at the brigade level. Later, additional US money became available through various civilian foreign assistance appropriations, chiefly economic support funds (ESF) and a small quick response fund (QRF), a civilian counterpart of the CERP. But the PRTs were relatively small spenders. Once an Iraqi government was in place in Baghdad in June 2004, PRT efforts turned to helping local authorities identify projects to be funded from Iraqi, not US, sources.

The PRTs in Iraq differed from their namesakes in Afghanistan in structure and mission. In Afghanistan, a "model PRT," as designed by the US Combined Forces Command in 2006, numbered eighty-three military and four civilian personnel — but only sixteen people, including the civilians, had duties that took them outside the wire to interact with the local population. The commander was a military officer with the rank of lieutenant colonel.22 A typical PRT in Iraq was larger, more diverse, and led by an FSO from the ....

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Chapter 6: Politics and Professionalism

Tension between the professional foreign service and its political masters is inevitable. It can be invigorating or corrosive. The professionals are proud of their knowledge, skill, and experience, but it's the elected officials and those they appoint who set the policies and vote the taxes and budgets to carry them out. Foreign service professionals must give effect to the policies of the administration and the laws of the land, even as the policies change and the laws are revised. To maintain the flexibility they need, many professionals try to hold themselves above politics. If they succeed, they succeed just barely, for try as they may they are in politics up to their eyeballs.

There is no way around it. As members of the foreign service advance in their careers, they take on jobs of increasing responsibility and public presence. Whatever their position in closed-door debates, when ambassadors, their deputies, their press officers, and their senior aides deal with foreign officials or the public, they have to follow the official line and defend it vigorously. So do assistant secretaries, their deputies, and their office directors. All foreign service officers (FSOs) are commissioned by the president and, at least notionally, serve at his pleasure. They speak not only for their country but also for their government, which means for the administration in power.

Once upon a time, the adage goes, politics stopped at the water's edge. The adage belongs to Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who abandoned isolationism to support the Marshall Plan and the United Nations during Truman's presidency. But bipartisanship in foreign policy was a bit of a myth even during Senator Vandenberg's ascendancy (he died in 1951), and in recent years it has been rare and fleeting.

One reason surely is that foreign policy is no longer foreign. Ambassdor L. Craig Johnstone wrote in 1997, "Almost every international issue has a domestic consequent, more visible and direct than ever before. Almost every major domestic issue has an international component. The distinctions between domestic and foreign are gone."1

The past decade has proven him right. How we respond to international terrorism affects our civil liberties, and how we define our liberties affects our response to terrorism. Taxing and spending decisions made in the US Congress affect the value of the trillion dollars of US bonds held by the Bank of China, and what China does with its holdings affects US economic welfare. How we deal with global warming affects spending by domestic business, and vice versa. Political differences over privacy, health care, bank regulation, or almost any other domestic issue have powerful implications for our foreign relations as well.

Political clashes over foreign policy pose two questions for the foreign service: First, how does the foreign service remain professional while carrying out policies that may change radically with each election? Second, how can each new political leadership comfortably entrust its policies to a foreign service that had worked hard and effectively for the policies of its predecessor?

Staying Professional

The first question is less difficult than it seems. Diplomats represent their governments the way lawyers represent their clients. They do not speak for themselves. The placard on the green baize table says "United States," not "Ambassador Patterson" or "Ms. Woods." An FSO conducting official business always says "my government believes" or "the position of my government is." An officer's personal views are of no consequence and should never enter an official discussion.

The result of this self-effacement is that when policies change, the foreign service — both as a whole and as individuals — can remain zealous advocates. It is still "my government believes" and "the position of my government is." An FSO below the rank of ambassador or assistant secretary who becomes personally identified with a policy has probably let ego interfere with professional detachment.

Sudden or radical changes in foreign policy may pose problems for the country's international credibility and influence, but foreign service personnel have to cope as best they can. Henry Kissinger wrote that "frequent gyrations in our national direction demoralize the Foreign Service, as they do foreign nations."2 But Tony Motley, a political ambassador and assistant ....

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Chapter 6: Politics and Professionalism

... country, and even if they believe current policies are profoundly wrong, they will not abandon their profession.

Congress

Congress looks to members of the foreign service, and to civil servants in the foreign affairs agencies, to provide prompt, accurate information untainted by partisanship. At the same time, Congress and the administration expect members of the service to transmit and defend the administration's views. Performing at a high level in both capacities requires skill, practice, time, and effort. Abroad or at home, professional diplomats should be able to carry a politically colored message without discarding their professional status.

The executive branch has the lead in foreign policy. As many presidents have learned, however, Congress has the tools to block almost any presidential initiative. Keeping key members of Congress informed of the administration's strategy, plans, and activities does not prevent clashes between the executive and the legislature. However, it does reduce their number and make debate more constructive. Members of congress challenge the administration every day over foreign policy, often in dramatic ways, but for every headline about clashes, there are literally thousands of cooperative transactions.

In Washington, the foreign service deals with Congress in four areas: policy, oversight, personnel, and resources. A glance at the list of testimony given before Congress shows that policy presentations to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations receive the most attention, closely followed by budget presentations to the appropriations committees.28

Most personnel matters are internal to the foreign service agencies, but because FSOs — whether at State, USAID, Commerce, or Agriculture — are commissioned, their inductions and promotions, like those of the armed services, must be approved by the Senate. Promotion lists are almost always approved without controversy and by voice vote or unanimous consent, but almost always is not always. Ambassadors and policy-level officials (roughly assistant secretary and above) also require Senate confirmation.29 AFSA, the collective bargaining agent for foreign service members in all four foreign service agencies, maintains active contact with congressional staff and key members of the foreign affairs committees on issues of pay and working conditions.

Congress also exercises oversight responsibilities, reviewing the way in which the executive branch carries out the laws that Congress has enacted. For the foreign service, oversight is especially intense where the service bears direct responsibility for execution of the law, for example in issuing visas pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act or licensing weapons sales under the Arms Export Control Act. Oversight hearings are generally conducted by the committees with primary jurisdiction over the legislation, but other committees with an interest may also become involved.

Foreign policy is not a congressional preoccupation. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, said a member, "is not an 'A' committee. It's not linked to any interest groups" that are willing and able to finance campaigns.30 A serious interest in foreign relations can be an electoral millstone for a representative or senator, taking time away from matters of greater or more immediate interest to important constituents. "If it doesn't benefit a member's short-term political considerations," said a staffer, "he loses interest."31 Under these circumstances, it is remarkable how many members have taken risks to perform great service in foreign affairs, through legislation and sometimes through direct diplomacy. The list is long, distinguished, and bipartisan.

Much of the work of liaison with Congress falls to the State Department's Bureau of Legislative Affairs, called H for [Capitol] Hill, and to USAID's Bureau of Legislative and Public Affairs. There is no lack of contact: The H bureau says on its website that each year it handles 1,500 pieces of legislation, 8,000 pieces of correspondence, 8,000 congressional inquiries, and 300 hearings and that it sends the Hill more than 500 mandated reports and notifications.32 The website doesn't count them, but the bureau also arranges scores of briefings for staff and members.

The department has struggled, though, to make its liaison effective, and congressional staffers often feel frustration at the tight control they believe the H bureau tries to exercise over the flow of information. A 2002 study prepared for the Una Chapman Cox Foundation documented some serious problems. One Senate aide said this: "We have a devil of a time just getting State Department folks to come up and talk off the record. And then when we do get them, we have this legislative shop person in the middle, making sure they don't say anything out of the box." A House staffer said of H, "I swear, if they could, they would come up to the Hill with their foreign service officers with ankle shocks and a remote control to make them shut up and say what they want." The usual view from the Hill is that FSOs are intelligent, dedicated to public service, professional, and nonpartisan, but also aloof and cautious to a fault.33 An aide to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had some advice:

When you say "career diplomat," my member says, "career bureaucrat, career talker, stuffed shirt, someone who's not going to give me a straight answer." I sympathize with the diplomats — it's not like everyone up here is looking out for them, and certain diplomats have been burned for telling certain things to certain people. But what State needs to send up here are people with big egos, people who can make a convincing case and win our trust. If you come up here and whine, say about earmarks, then we say, "you're weak, you suck, we're going to write some earmarks now."34

Jennifer Butte-Dahl, a civil servant who handled Near East Asian affairs in the H bureau, is now an adviser to the deputy secretary of state for management and resources and doesn't dispute that a little ego can be helpful, but most important is making the case. "We have to see the whole picture, just the way the appropriators do," she said. "We have to explain how our resources — our programs and our people — are supporting our foreign policy goals." Congressional hostility is overplayed, and congressional liaison is undervalued. "Day to day," she said, "you have good relations with people on the Hill. Relations are better than people think.... There's a sense inside the State Department that H doesn't really help. If they realized the ability H has, based on access to information and personal relationships, to change the course of events on the Hill — for example, to tweak bill language, kill a damaging amendment, or negotiate budget allocations — they'd be a lot more appreciative."

And on rare occasions everything falls into place. Butte-Dahl explained,

In 2008 we did a claims agreement with Libya that was a model of bipartisan, legislative-executive cooperation. Bilateral relations with Libya had been improving since 2003, when Libya publicly renounced its support for terrorism and voluntarily gave up its WMD programs. As time passed, outstanding unresolved claims by victims of previous Libyan terrorism, including the bombing of Pan Am 103 and the LaBelle discotheque, were becoming an increasingly problematic element in the relationship. The Executive and Congress both had an avid interest in resolving these claims ...

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Chapter 7: Stability and Change

Ask a member of the foreign service about the work, and it won't be long before you hear something like this: "Where else can you reinvent yourself every two or three years? There's always a different job, boss, country, or culture just ahead. You change posts, and you walk into the middle of a new adventure."

Change is only part of the story. Foreign service people don't talk much about it, but most of them take comfort in the stable framework that surrounds and cushions the constant change of foreign service life. That framework is the structure of a foreign service career, with its hierarchies and formalities; annual evaluations, periodic training, competitive promotions, regional and functional specialization, rotation through a variety of posts, and rising levels of responsibility, pay, and status. Retirement, which can come as early as age fifty with twenty years of service, is generous. So are health benefits. There are moving allowances, housing allowances, education allowances, hardship allowances, and other benefits, along with a reliable salary that keeps foreign service families comfortably in America's middle class. That, along with their diplomatic status and privileges, places them among the elites of most of the countries where they are assigned. Whether one serves in Afghanistan or Zimbabwe or Washington, D.C., there is the mixed but ever-present blessing of the same warm bureaucratic embrace. It is the relative security of the career that lets foreign service people thrive on the risk, tumult, and rootlessness of foreign service life.

Rank, Title, Pay, Benefits

Foreign service ranks run backward, like NASA countdowns. Classes nine, eight, and seven are noncommissioned classes ....

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Chapter 10: Tomorrow's Diplomats

"Who needs the State Department?" a senior administration official said in 2004, echoing the speaker at the beginning of this book. He was speaking of reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. "The military does a better job." But, paradoxically, the widespread dissatisfaction with the performance of the foreign service in Iraq and Afghanistan led to a rare moment when the administration — two successive administrations, in fact — resolved to rebuild the foreign service and equip it to perform its mission: to make America's way in the world.

The drive for change that began when Secretary Colin Powell's Diplomatic Readiness Initiative caught a second wind in Secretary Clinton's Diplomacy 3.0, and Congress accepted the need for a more robust, more agile, better-trained, and better-funded civilian force to carry out American policy. A hiring surge began in fiscal year 2009 that, by the end of 2010, had already increased the size of State's foreign service by 15 percent above FY 2008 levels. If the administration and the Congress stick with the plan, which, as of this writing, seems unlikely, the increase will reach 25 percent in FY 2013 (table 10.1).

In USAID, the planned surge is steeper and faster, a net doubling of the number of FSOs, from 1,200 at the beginning of fiscal year 2009 to 2,400 by the end of fiscal year 2012. The Department of Commerce and the Department of Agriculture expect to hire more FSOs during this period as well (see chapter 3).

The purpose of this surge is the interesting part of the story. It is meant to strengthen the foreign service as a component of national security, the agent of smart power and of two parts of the triad of defense, diplomacy, and development. This view of the mission of the foreign service, long held by many career diplomats, took hold more broadly across the executive branch in the midst of the failure of American force to bring stability or democracy to Iraq after the defeat and capture of Saddam Hussein.

Broadly, but also slowly, and by no means smoothly: Behind the cheery "whole of government" slogan are bureaucratic rivalry, resistance to change, aversion to risk, and loyalty to existing methods and institutions. The effort to build a unit in the State Department to plan and coordinate the US government response to dangerously fragile states has struggled. Its future, still uncertain, may determine the shape of the foreign service in which today's junior officers will spend their careers.

Stabilization, Reconstruction, and Civilian Response [S/CRS]

American forces entered Iraq in March 2003 and took control of Baghdad three weeks later. Within a year, however, an insurgency had taken hold in many parts of the country, with resistance to coalition forces combining with sectarian struggle to create a downward spiral of violence and economic collapse. In 2004 the National Security Council, tacitly acknowledging failures in planning, ordered the establishment of a US government office for stabilization and reconstruction, and after some strong debate placed that office in the Department of State. The president a year later reinforced that decision — and tried to end interagency conflicts — by directing the secretary of state to "coordinate and lead integrated United States Government efforts, involving all US Departments and Agencies with relevant capabilities, to prepare, plan for, and conduct stabilization and reconstruction activities."2

To carry out the president's directive, Secretary Colin Powell created an Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (CRS) and placed it directly under his control, making it S (for secretary)/CRS in ....

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