Excellent guide to a decaying enterprise

My friend Harry Kopp and his co-author John Naland have encountered a perfect storm in launching their third edition of Career Diplomacy: Life and Work in the US Foreign Service just as interest in State Department careers collapses and the institution itself goes through unanticipated trials in a new Administration that took office after the manuscript was finalized. It’s a shame the likely market of Foreign Service aspirants has contracted, because this book is a fine testament to the glories and challenges of Foreign Service life. It really is a life, not just a career.

Caveat emptor: I spent 21 years committed to it, moving my family every few years and occasionally risking life and limb in service to the United States. Mine were admittedly great posts: Brasilia once and Rome thrice, plus being Sarajevo’s most frequent visitor during the last year of the Bosnian war and two stints at the State Department working on global energy and later European issues. Harry Kopp was my deputy chief of mission in Brasilia. We also went to the same big high school but didn’t know each other then.

You won’t find a better or more readable account of the US Foreign Service as an institution, profession, and career than this. I’ve delayed publishing this review because I found the book so interesting I read it all with some care. You’d think 21 years would suffice for me to become my own expert and able to skip a few things, but I still found this book put things in a structure that enlightens. It also includes vignettes based on interviews with active duty and recently retired diplomats that illustrate in personal terms important themes.

Harry and John Naland, whom I don’t know, are keenly aware of the Foreign Service’s not always illustrious history and try to keep it in focus as they discuss its present and possible future. Even without the Trump Administration, there were already a big question marks:  what is to become of an institution, profession and career in the digital age of wide open access to information, an age when women and minorities are claiming their rights and everyone is expecting better and more equal treatment? How does diplomacy deal with civil war, insurgency and terrorism, all of which are a far cry from the state-to-state relations that traditionally dominate diplomatic discourse?

Those questions have become enormously more complicated with the advent of the Trump Administration. Diplomats thrive on objectivity, accuracy, and reliability. They seek to strengthen the country’s position internationally, or at least protect its vital interests and slow its relative decline. What is the fate of the Foreign Service in an age of Fake News, when America’s president thinks the country has to be made great again and tries to upend its alliances and the norms-based international order America constructed so assiduously after World War II?

I won’t pretend to have the answers. What I’m sure of is this: as presently constituted and in this Administration, the Department of State and the Foreign Service that staffs so much of it are not today well-equipped to meet these challenges. As Kopp and Naland suggest, the Foreign Service needs more training and less conformity, more risk-taking and less reliance on tradition, more innovation and less continuity. Instead, our diplomats are being ensconced in well-protected fortresses that prevent them from doing what many of them joined the Service to do: get out and talk to foreigners, understand other cultures and countries in depth and on their own terms, and use that knowledge to further US interests.

In Brasilia more than 35 years ago, I was the science counselor of the US embassy. Brazil has forsworn nuclear weapons and its barriers to computer imports have changed, though I suppose the Amazon is still a sensitive issue. I would have new tools available: access to the internet and much better and cheaper communications. But I would still want to do what I did more than three decades ago: visit laboratories, climb over and around nuclear facilities, attend a missile launch, speak at universities, take a small boat with Brazilian scientists to the meeting of the waters at Manaus.

Terrorism has made that kind of outreach perilous, and “Benghazi” has made the State Department more nervous and risk-averse than ever. The Trump Administration is cutting both staff and budget. The Pentagon, used to running risks and endowed with far greater and rapidly expanding resources with which to meet them, is taking over large swathes of diplomatic work, making State every more beholden to military priorities and perspectives. The diplomatic career is appealing less, others are encroaching on the profession, and the institution is enfeebled. The Foreign Service this book so ably describes is in trouble.