The Demilitarization of American Diplomacy

Two Cheers for Striped Pants

L. Pope

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137298546
• eBook ISBN: 9781137298553
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Laurence Pope describes the contemporary dysfunction of the State Department and its Foreign Service. He contends that in the information age diplomacy is more important than ever, and that, as President Obama has stressed, without a "change of thinking" the U.S. may be drawn into more wars it does not need to fight.

1

A City on a Hill Cannot Be Hid

Abstract: American exceptionalism as embodied in the “Shining City on a Hill” trope coexists uneasily with diplomacy, which requires a world of sovereign and juridically equal states. Of relatively recent coinage, the terms “diplomat” and “diplomacy” date to only about 1800. As American power declines in a relative sense in the 21st century, diplomacy will be more important than ever. At its heart is the exercise of state power, not the search for international understanding.

Pope, Laurence. The Demilitarization of American Diplomacy: Two Cheers for Striped Pants. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137298553.0003.

The structure of contemporary American foreign policy institutions is the result of many factors.¹ One of them is certainly the conviction, which is deeply rooted in the American psyche, that the United States is endowed with a special mission which makes it different from other countries – the notion of American exceptionalism. Early in his first term President Obama appeared to call this into question, responding to a journalist’s question by saying “ ‘I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.’ ”² To state the proposition in this way was to undermine it, and he was pilloried for his heresy. He later sought to make amends, and did so with a rhetorical vengeance. At the Air Force Academy in March 2012, not coincidentally a Presidential election year, he invoked the notion again, adding Madeleine Albright’s notion of the “indispensable nation” for good measure: “And one of the reasons is that the United States has been, and will always be, the one indispensable nation in world affairs. It’s one of the many examples of why America is exceptional. It’s why I firmly believe that if we rise to this moment in history, if we meet our responsibilities, then – just like the 20th century – the 21st century will be another great American Century.”³ In less bombastic tones, in a 2011 address from his White House office about the Libyan intervention, Obama declared that “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.”⁴

The exceptionalist doctrine has deep roots in American history, but the city-on-a-hill trope is relatively recent. It was introduced into the American political vocabulary by John F. Kennedy before his inauguration as President, in a 1961 speech to the Massachusetts legislature. Invoking a homily by Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 to his flock on board the sloop Arabella en route to the new world, Kennedy declared: “But I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arabella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier. ‘We must always consider’, he said, ‘that we shall be as a city upon a hill – the eyes of all people are upon us.’ ”

As Winthrop’s flock would have known, but we have forgotten, the reference is to the Gospel of Saint Matthew: “A City on a Hill cannot be Hid.” Quoting from Winthrop’s homily was the suggestion of Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, who had urged Kennedy to invoke it as a rebuke to corrupt Massachusetts politicians.⁵ Wisely Kennedy cited it as an injunction to a higher standard of morality in politics generally, rather than as a lesson to the pols of the Bay State, whose wicked ways he knew all too well. It was of course Ronald Reagan who adopted and popularized the reference, and it became a staple, indeed the staple, of his political rhetoric, from his address to a conservative political group in 1974, when he quoted it correctly, to his farewell to the American people in 1989, by which time he and his speechwriters were routinely adding the adjective “shining” to the city. No longer exposed and vulnerable it had become a beacon to mankind, Winthrop’s admonition stood squarely on its head.

These days the exposed and vulnerable city of Saint Matthew’s gospel has become the proud citadel from which Americans patrol a restive world. Eisenhower’s injunction that “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed”, is ignored.⁶ The Cold War is over, and the terrorists who planned the attacks of September 11, 2001 are mostly dead, but the Global War on Terror continues in the powerful institutions built in its name which thrive inside a military-intelligence complex little understood outside the charmed precincts of the Washington beltway. When military power becomes an end in itself, we are closer to 19th-century Prussia than to the good land of John Winthrop.

Exceptionalism and diplomacy coexist uneasily. Before going any further it may be well to consider a definition of the latter term, though no less an authority than Henry Kissinger wrote a long book with that title without doing so. It is a particularly elastic word – but when Humpty Dumpty asserts with regard to the meaning of words that it is a question of who is to be the master, and the commonsensical Alice wonders whether it is really possible to make words mean so many different things, our sympathies must be with Alice.

They have a spurious air of antiquity, but “diplomacy” and “diplomat” are relatively recent coinages. The Renaissance knew nothing of them, much less the ancient world. They arise about the time of the French Revolution, popularized in English by Edmund Burke according to the august OED.⁷ Diplomacy derives from “diplomatics”, la diplomatique in French, which meant (and still means in some rarefied circles) the systematic analysis of charters of nobility, titles, and genealogical documents.⁸ In the first act of Shakespeare’s Henry V, when the Archbishop of Canterbury justifies Henry’s invasion of France by tracing his disputed claim to the French throne, that is what he is engaged in. It is a scene usually played for laughs today, as the pedantic Archbishop unrolls his foolscap, but contemporary audiences would have understood that unless Henry’s aggression could be shown to be a just war, not only his immortal soul but those of his soldiers would be endangered. Indeed Henry says this himself, in eloquent words which incautious advocates for military force would be well advised to ponder.⁹

It is only much later that diplomatics in this sense gives rise to diplomacy and the creatures we know as diplomats. (The words are formed on the pattern of aristocracy/aristocrat, plutocracy/plutocrat, and so forth.) Traditionalists and sticklers for correct usage like Harold Nicolson, a British diplomat and historian better known today as the husband of Virginia Woolf’s lover, used to insist on the obsolete “diplomatist”, but a search of the website of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom, where grave ministers of state now have Twitter accounts, suggests that even there diplomatists are as extinct as the passenger pigeon.

Diplomacy, however, flourishes, though definitions vary. One useful definition is “the conduct of relations between sovereign states through the medium of officials based at home or abroad.”¹⁰ It is about the relations between nation-states – where the sovereignty of one leaves off and another one begins, and how to manage the overlap. The word is used loosely for everything to do with international affairs, but it is not really diplomacy when Steven Seagal visits Vladimir Putin to promote the Russian leader’s cult of physical fitness, even though the two men may share a world view, or when the former basketball star Dennis “the Worm” Rodman calls on his friend Kim Jong Un, the autocrat of North Korea. These private individuals do not represent states.

In a popular sense diplomacy is synonymous with tact, but Couve de Murville, General de Gaulle’s foreign minister, was joking when he said that “to be a diplomat, it is not enough to be a fool; good manners are also essential.” Proust’s elaborately polite and deeply stupid Marquis de Norpois is a creature of fiction, though an immortal one. As our friends and enemies know, the prevailing American diplomatic style is blunt to the point of arrogance and beyond, as befits the last remaining superpower. Not even the best friends of the late American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who forged an agreement to end the war in Bosnia in 1995 by tactics which involved bullying and threats, would argue that he was distinguished by fine manners and politesse. The U.S. government is overly fond of telling other people that they must do things, and of declaring that things are unacceptable which it subsequently finds all too possible to accept. Negotiation was the term used by the Enlightenment. It had the virtue of requiring the involvement of two parties prepared to at least talk, but we are stuck with the murkier term diplomacy which obscures this reality.

Even American diplomacy requires a world of juridically equally sovereign states – the improbable idea that makes it possible for Malta and the United States to exchange ambassadors. Some sovereigns are obviously more equal than others in a power sense, but diplomacy and sovereignty are inseparable. Without sovereign states, there is no diplomacy. A glance at the headlines is enough to show that in the information age the globe is still made up of these entities, and that they are as attached to their sovereignty as the United States is to its own, though this may come as a shock to traveling members of Congress. Talk about ungoverned territory and failed states is exaggerated. The government of Somalia lacks control over its population and territory, but there is a recognized legal entity called Somalia. The former Northwest frontier of British India, where even today the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s writ barely runs, is Pakistani territory when U.S. drones strike targets there. The remote uplands of the Arabian peninsula in Yemen where a branch of al-Qaeda has taken root are part of that legally sovereign state, though they are not under its control – which is why the Republic of Yemen permits U.S. drone strikes. Terrorists are not virtual even though they may be networked. They have to live somewhere.

In the sense of juridically equal nations, large and small, the modern notion of sovereignty developed in Europe at the time of the Westphalia treaties of 1644–1648 ending the Thirty Years’ War, and with it came the resident embassy. It was Cardinal Richelieu of France, that ingenious statesman, who borrowed from the Italian Renaissance what he called a system of “permanent negotiation.” Instead of sending ambassadors out for a particular negotiation or ceremonial occasion, he sent envoys to remain in foreign capitals, considering that this was the power equivalent of maintaining a substantial body of troops, and a lot cheaper. During the long reign of Louis XIV, Richelieu’s innovation was imitated by other European states, and in our era it remains astonishingly successful. In rare periods of peace in continental Europe, the Sun King maintained some 19 permanent embassies. Today France has 150 of them around the globe, and the United States has no fewer than 250 embassies and consulates.

At last count there were 193 member states of the United Nations Organization. If every one of them maintained a resident embassy in the capital of every other, the math suggests that there would be some 36,000 of these offices. Most states can’t afford to maintain scores of resident embassies; even so the total must be well up in the five figures: Togo has an embassy in Japan, and so on.

International organizations from the UN to the European Union have their own networks of permanent representation. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s first (also perhaps the last?) “High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy”, appoints her own ambassadors in many capitals, as if Europe were itself a sovereign. So for that matter does the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a Co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  A City on a Hill Cannot Be Hid
• 2  The Decline of the State Department
• 3  Hillary Clintons Power Outage
• 4  Drones, Cyberwar, Special Forces, and Other Extraterritorials
• 5  Two Cheers for Striped Pants: Diplomacy for the 21st Century
• Selected Bibliography
• Index