Ambassadors, professional and political

We are in the midst of a periodic revival of the brouhaha about “political” ambassadors. Those are the ones who come from outside the professional Foreign Service. The current excitement is appointees to Argentina and Hungary who have performed poorly in Senate confirmation hearings. Their primary qualifications were serving as “bundlers” of contributions for President Obama’s election campaigns. This has understandably roused both Republicans and professional diplomats to high dudgeon. They want more professional appointees.

But the matter is really not so simple. Ambassadors are supposed to be personal representatives of the chief of state. All in that sense are “political.” Senatorial approval is intended not primarily to verify their competence–few in the Senate would even claim to be able to do that–but rather to pass them through a political filter. Do they have any behavior in their backgrounds that could embarrass the United States? Can they be relied upon to represent the United States and its interests? Will they have the political skills to persuade the host country to do what Washington wants them to do?

This last question is especially important. Embassies do a great deal of reporting on what is going on in the host country. A good ambassador will contribute to that, but her primary roles these days are persuasion and leadership. Bundling may not appear at first glance relevant to diplomacy, but getting wealthy and powerful people to open their wallets is actually good preparation for getting foreigners to do what Washington wants them to do. It may also reflect good leadership skills that professional diplomats too often lack.

I served as a professional Foreign Service officer for 21 years. I had both professional and political ambassadors. Relatively few of the professional ones have the kind of preparation that enables them to sell. Virtually all of the political ones did.

One of my ambassadors had run a lumber distributorship in the Midwest. He was known to have cracked a bad joke about the Italian Navy in public before being named as ambassador to the Quirinale. Much of the professional Foreign Service regarded him with hostility. But up close I came to appreciate his enormous talent for sales. He taught me that one trainload of 2-by-4s of a particular quality is just like any other trainload of 2-by-4s and costs the same amount. If you are going to succeed at selling your trainload, you need a personal connection to the buyer. He kept a cheat sheet of ministers, their wives and children by his bedside and studied it every night. He knew which ones had studied in the US, what their professions were, which sports they enjoyed, the teams they rooted for, where they were born and raised. In my three years serving with him, the Italians (including their Navy) never failed to come around on anything important he asked.

Another of my “political” ambassadors had lived in Brazil until he was 15 or so. As ambassador there decades later, he would saunter into a minister’s office and say in teenage Portuguese slang the equivalent of “hey dude, what’s up?”  Few professionals would do that. But his rapport with the Brazilians was extraordinary. Invited to an informal barbecue at a presidential retreat, the then military autocrat let it be known he was preparing to turn the country back to democratic rule. Brazil was just too big and complicated for the military to continue governing. The professional diplomats had their doubts. But that is what happened. The Americans had early notice of it because the ambassador knew how to banter.

I could of course tell good stories about professional diplomats as well, including a few of my own triumphs. Brazil’s decision with Argentina to abandon nuclear weapons ambitions owed something to my efforts several years earlier to persuade key people that national security requirements could be satisfied better without them. We brought half a million American troops through Fiumicino airport on their way to and from the Middle East for Desert Storm without incident, even though the first planes were already on their way across the Atlantic before the embassy was notified. In a matter of hours, we had persuaded the prime minister to give us blanket permission.

The biggest advantage I’ve seen of professionals over non-professionals is the inclination of some of the latter to do more of the host country’s bidding than they should. Many of them are used to business environments where trading of favors is very much part of the game. They don’t like instructions that tell them to get without providing anything they can give. Some of the supposedly personal representatives of the president have little connection to him but feel they need to prove their bona fides by delivering something the host country wants. This can cause big trouble:  it isn’t easy to get the American bureaucracy to deliver on some ambassadorial commitments.

But the issue is not “political” vs “professional.” The issue is competence. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were among our first chiefs of mission abroad, more than a century before the professional Foreign Service was created. President Obama is entitled to send whom he wants, provided they can pass muster in the Senate. I only ask that they be demonstrably competent, whether professional or not.