Career Diplomacy

Life and Work in the US Foreign Service, Fourth Edition

Harry W. Kopp, John K. Naland

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781647121365
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Diplomacia y tratados

In this new and thoroughly revised edition of Career Diplomacy, Foreign Service veterans Harry W. Kopp and John K. Naland lay out what to expect in a Foreign Service career, from the entrance exam through midcareer and into the senior service—how to get in, get around, and get ahead. This guide offers readers a candid look at the profession.

Part I

The Institution

1

What Is the Foreign Service?

“Look,” he said. “What do we need them for? Especially so many of them.” He was talking about members of the US Foreign Service. “What we need to know,” he continued, “is mostly in the news. What we need to say should come from people in tune with the president, not from diplomats in tune with each other.”

The speaker was a businessman with international interests. His listener was a former Foreign Service officer. His question was serious and deserves a careful answer.

Why does the United States need its Foreign Service, professionals who spend the bulk of their careers in US embassies and consulates around the globe? Does the work they do need to be done and, if it does, could others do it better or more efficiently?

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, answers those questions: in our “unstable, unpredictable, multipolar world,” he says, “our diplomats and development specialists have been on the front lines, all too often in the crosshairs of the enemy. The knowledge and experience of these dedicated public servants”—members of the US Foreign Service—“are unparalleled.”¹

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis stresses the connection between diplomacy and national security: “If you don’t fund the State Department fully,” he told members of Congress, “then I need to buy more ammunition.”²

At the end of 2018 Congressman Edward Royce, Democrat of California, said of the Foreign Service, “These professionals defend our national security, enforce our laws, and protect our fellow citizens overseas, often at great risk to themselves. Our embassies and consulates are platforms of U.S. influence and vigilance and our diplomats are often the first to spot threats to our national security.” The business community, Royce said, “counts on American diplomats around the world to compete in the global marketplace—and to urge the State Department to send more diplomats to the field with the mission of advancing America’s commercial interests.”³

How the United States deals with the rest of the world and how the rest of the world deals with us does not begin or end at our borders. More than 13 percent of our population—and about 10 percent of eligible voters—are foreign-born.⁴ Foreign trade, at over $5.5 trillion a year, affects every farm, factory, and family.⁵ Pandemics and epidemics, environmental disasters, refugees, narcotics, and financial panics sweep across borders and beyond unilateral control. Around the world, violent conflicts among nations, tribes, faiths, and ideologies threaten our security, affect our interests, and touch our hearts.

We need to make sense of this world and we need to make sure the world makes sense of us. We need to understand, protect, and promote our own interests. Whenever and wherever we can, we need to shape events to our advantage. To do so requires knowledge, wisdom, judgment, empathy, honesty, courage, and skill. That is why we have a Foreign Service.

The Foreign Service is the corps of more than fourteen thousand professionals who represent the US government in 275 missions abroad and carry out the nation’s foreign policies. Its members serve mainly in the Department of State but also in the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Agriculture, stationed wherever the US government has a mission that requires civilian service abroad.

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 the job. Members of the Foreign Service, with 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, acting as both official and unofficial representatives of the United States. Official representation includes conveying US policies and views, persuasively in the local language, to foreign governments and foreign societies; reporting information of use to officials in Washington and placing that information in an analytic context; and negotiating agreements large and small.

If official representation is central to Foreign Service work, unofficial representation is a condition of Foreign Service life. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, himself the son of a Foreign Service officer, puts it this way: “When you step out of the Embassy and go down the street or wherever you live, wherever you are, you’re an ambassador of our country. And when you treat people with respect and you give them the best of yourselves, you show them the best of America, and that means showing them what we believe, what we stand for, and what we share with the world.”⁶ Officially and unofficially, members of the Foreign Service reach 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, protecting American citizens, running US programs, executing US laws, giving effect to US policies, and supporting the full official US civilian presence overseas. It is hands-on—and sometimes dangerous—work.

The third mission 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, able to place policy in historical perspective and project the risks, costs, and benefits over the long term.

All three missions are essential. A Foreign Service that sees its mission as representation, including no role for policy, will wait passively for instructions that may come too late or not at all. A Service that believes it alone should set policy as well as carry it out will lose the president’s trust and become an irrelevant annoyance. A Service that neglects operations will exhaust its energy in paper exercises and forfeit leadership to more nimble and aggressive organizations.

America’s Foreign Service is often called our first line of defense.⁷ The National Security Strategy of President Donald Trump’s administration said, “America’s diplomats are our forward-deployed political capability,” a trip wire for detecting trouble and heading it off.⁸

But America’s diplomats are more than a defensive skirmish line. Among the several tools of American foreign policy, diplomacy is, or should be, the most important: “our tool of first resort.”⁹ Policymakers turn first to diplomacy as they try to shape the world to America’s purposes.

Unlike Silicon Valley, diplomacy does not move fast and break things. It moves slowly, sometimes over the course of decades, to build things. When diplomacy works, it builds international systems strong and flexible enough to manage and contain disorder. When diplomacy fails or is not tried, disorder spreads and conflicts sharpen. As conflicts grow, so does the risk of war.¹⁰

What This Book Does

This book is a guide to the US Foreign Service. Our work is descriptive, not prescriptive, but it is not agnostic—we have a point of view. The Trump administration demeaned the professionalism of the Foreign Service and impugned the honor of its members. The damage inflicted was severe and will not be easily repaired. But the need for repair is an opportunity to examine the Service afresh and address long-standing problems related to personnel, resources, and culture. We do not argue for specific remedies or reforms but we hope to provide readers with a clear understanding of the Service as it is, with a look back at what it was and a look ahead at what it could become. We treat the Service three ways: as an institution, a profession, and 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. The people make the institution. At the same time, the spirit and culture of the Service shape its members and in turn are gradually shaped by them.

Certain events and decisions have played an especially large role in making the Foreign Service what it is today. The most important are

•the nineteenth-century split between diplomats, who were responsible for state-to-state relations, and consuls, who took care of commercial matters and citizens abroad;

•the wall that until the 1950s separated officers of the Foreign Service, who spent their entire careers abroad, from officers of the Department of State, who were members of the civil service and served only in Washington;

•the effective exclusion from the Service, until late in the twentieth century, of the non-white and the non-male;

•the posting to war zones, first in Vietnam and then in Iraq and Afghanistan, of large numbers of Foreign Service personnel;

•a spoils system that in large and increasing numbers favors politically connected individuals over career diplomats in filling senior positions;

•the political attacks, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, on the loyalty of the Foreign Service to the United States; and

•similar loyalty attacks—this time led by the president himself—during the Trump administration.

Shaped by these factors and by its statutory design, the Service has developed over its nearly one hundred years of existence the characteristics that account for many of its strengths and its weaknesses. Broadly taken, the Service is elite, hierarchical, cautious, sensitive to status, deeply informed, strong in analysis, patriotic, and respectful of the weight of history.

In recent years the Service has also become more diverse, more skilled in languages, less desk-bound, less confident of its position, and less obeisant to rank. Its patriotism and its devotion to the US Constitution and the country’s highest ideals are unchanged.

The Profession

The profession of the Foreign Service is diplomacy. Among professions, it is an odd one—more like journalism than like law or medicine. It is open to all. Specialized training is available but not required.

The skills needed to practice diplomacy at a high level are hard to master, but they are not esoteric. They can be acquired in many fields, including politics, business, law, military service, government, and academia. Some of the best diplomatic practitioners, and many of the worst, are outsiders who start at the top of the diplomatic ladder.

Virtually every country that has a department of foreign affairs also has a professional diplomatic service. Only the United States employs amateurs—people brought on board for reasons other than their diplomatic skills or subject-matter knowledge—in large numbers. Most governments recognize that diplomatic skills are most surely gained through education, training, and experience in the field. A diplomatic service, with rank earned by merit, serves to identify the best talents and temperaments as it weeds out the worst.

Diplomatic professionals are skilled in negotiation, communication, persuasion, reporting, analysis, organization, and management. They are quick to recognize ambiguity and dissembling and can practice both when necessary. They know foreign languages, cultures, and interests, and they have learned, with respect to at least some parts of the world, how other governments make and carry out decisions and what moves societies to action and change. Equally important, they have learned how their own government works—its politics, laws, and bureaucratic processes. They know where diplomacy fits in within the array of tools the nation can deploy to assert its interests, and they can work effectively with military and intelligence professionals in pursuit of common objectives.

One need not be a member of the Foreign Service to be a skilled or even a great diplomat. Talented foreign-affairs professionals who come from other fields can bring new ideas and new energy. Political appointees can sometimes bring to diplomacy a relationship with the country’s elected leadership, which nonpartisan career diplomats rarely attain.

But gifted amateurs are rare. The work the nation demands of its diplomats, arou...