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Mostrando postagens com marcador American Diplomacy. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador American Diplomacy. Mostrar todas as postagens

terça-feira, 2 de novembro de 2021

Warren Cohen on the American diplomacy and East Asia - H-Diplo

 Depoimento de um grande historiador das relações internacionais e da política externa americana:

H-Diplo Essay 383- Warren I. Cohen on Learning the Scholar's Craft

H-Diplo Essay 383- Warren I. Cohen on Learning the Scholar's Craft

by George Fujii

H-Diplo Essay 383

Essay Series on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars 
2 November 2021

Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Twists and Turns in the Life of a Very Lucky Man

https://hdiplo.org/to/E383
Series Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

Essay by Warren I. Cohen, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Michigan State University

Columbia College did not require a major when I was an undergraduate.  I didn’t take my first history course until my junior year, although I had worked earlier with Peter Gay, the great scholar of modern Europe intellectual history, when he was an assistant professor in the Government Department teaching Contemporary Civilization in Columbia’s core curriculum—lots of Freud.  I enjoyed the survey of American history and enrolled in a wonderful colloquium in American history my senior year—8 students, 3 professors, weekly essays.

As I approached graduation, I was unsure of what to do.  I had started pre-med, planning to become a psychiatrist, but my freshman chemistry class met Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at 8 in the morning and my lab was scheduled for 9-1 Saturday.  These times proved inconsistent with my social life to which I gave priority.  I considered going to law school and in my senior year applied to Yale.  My friends at Harvard and Columbia law schools were suffering and Yale seemed more humane.  I also applied to the graduate history program at Columbia and to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, which I did on a dare, having been told I had no chance of being admitted.  Yale put me on the waiting list.  I was outraged and withdrew.  They had admitted my cousin two years earlier and the Columbia faculty we shared thought I was the sharper of the two.  I was accepted by both Columbia and the Fletcher School.  Harry Carman, then the much beloved Dean Emeritus of Columbia College, said: “Cohen, you’ve lived all your life in New York, go to Boston.”  So I did.

Having applied to the Fletcher School, in the second semester of my senior year I enrolled in a beginning class in international relations taught by a young assistant professor, Ken Waltz.  Neither of us was particularly impressed by the other.  Forty or so years later, when he was generally acknowledged to be the leader in the field, we spent a few days together at a conference in Kuala Lumpur and delighted in memories of the course and of his first and my last year at Columbia.

At the Fletcher School, where I studied American diplomatic history, I developed close friendships with two Japanese students: Shijuro Ogata, who later became #2 in the Bank of Japan, and Chusei Yamada, who served as Japan’s ambassador to India and Egypt.  I became very interested in Japan—the food and the history.  After graduation, I enlisted in the navy and chose to serve as a line officer in the Pacific Fleet, hoping in vain to be deployed to Japan.  I enjoyed shipboard life (I was qualified to run a destroyer escort before I had a driver’s license) and toyed with staying in the navy, but I’d married along the way and we had a son.  Unable to perceive of how I could be a father when I was always somewhere in the Pacific, I decided to study for a Ph.D. in Japanese history.

At the time the leading scholar in Japanese history was Marius Jansen, who taught at the University of Washington.  My wife was eager to stay in the northwest and so I applied and was accepted in the UW Ph.D. program in history.  Unfortunately, when I arrived in Seattle, Marius had left for Princeton and there was no one there to replace him. 

Unable to study Japanese history.  I decided to start with American diplomatic history under the direction of W. Stull Holt—about whom I’d heard good things from a friend who’d taken a summer school class with him at Harvard.  Stull, who had been a fighter pilot in World War One, was outraged when he was not allowed to fly when he reenlisted in December 1941 (he served out the war as a colonel in intelligence with dozens of other historians).  His hostility towards the Japanese was at least equal to his hostility towards the Nazis.  He insisted that I study the Chinese language instead, claiming mistakenly that Japanese would then be easy.  And that was how I ended up focusing on Chinese-American relations.

Initially, the subject of my dissertation was going to be American perceptions of the Chinese Communists during World War II. I wanted to address the question of when the US Government realized the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was likely to take control of China after the war.  Unable to get a fellowship to allow me to work in the State and Defense Department archives in Washington, I wrote instead about a group of historians and journalists known as “revisionists,” who, in the interwar period, had argued it was a mistake for the U.S. to have intervened in the First World War.  I had become interested in them because Ruhl Bartlett, a leading diplomatic historian with whom I did not get along at Fletcher, despised them.  I could do the research for this subject without ever leaving the UW library.  It was a little tricky because Stull had no use for them either.  The dissertation became my first book: The American Revisionists and the Lessons of Intervention in World War I.[1]

My Chinese language proficiency (never great) declined in the year in which I wrote my dissertation and the year I taught at UC Riverside, but I had a stroke of luck shortly after I joined the faculty at Michigan State in 1963.  MSU had played a major role in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program on Taiwan that ended in 1964.  The presidents of MSU and National Taiwan University (NTU) wanted to maintain a relationship and decided on a faculty exchange.  NTU wanted someone in American history and no one else on campus had any interest in spending a year on Taiwan, so off we went—for what proved to be two wonderful years in which my wife and two young children learned to speak Chinese and my language skills improved.  I gained access to the archives of the Bureau of Investigation, where all the documents that Kuomintang intelligence had collected from the Chinese Communists were filed.  MSU asked me to stay a second year, and paid for me to spend the summer between academic years in Hong Kong at the Chinese Research Center, which had the finest collection of post 1949 Chinese Communist documents and publications.  There I became friends with Dick Solomon and Mike Oksenberg, who later served as China policy advisers to national security advisors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski respectively.  I subsequently wrote the first two articles on the development of CCP policy toward the United States since the creation of the Party.[2] Unbeknownst to me at the time, publication of my articles was funded by the CIA.

Two years after I returned from Taiwan, an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) grant allowed me to spend the summer in Washington, D.C., where I read in the State Department archives, gaining much of the information that helped round out what I had found in Taiwan and became the basis of my second book, America’s Response to China (now in its 6th ed.) [3]  The book was published originally by John Wiley & Sons in a series edited by Bob Divine. The Wiley agent at UCR urged me to write it and offered an advance that was irresistible to me and my hungry family.  In the archives, I also came across material that contributed to my third, fourth, and fifth books.[4]

It was in 1967 that I met Dorothy Borg, then at Columbia, who was probably the single most influential person in my career.  Dorothy was determined to create a new field, American-East Asian Relations, equivalent to American or Asian history.  Bob Scalapino, the leading Asianist at UC-Berkeley, had once explained to me that I had not been awarded a Ford Foundation research fellowship because I was neither an Americanist nor an Asianist.  Dorothy was determined to change that.  Scholars working in the field would be expected to master the language and culture of at least one Asian country as well as of the United States.  John Fairbank, then the country’s leading China scholar, and Ernest May of Harvard both supported her in this effort.  Indeed, John spoke of the need for such scholars in his American Historical Association (AHA) Presidential Address in 1967.  Dorothy oversaw the creation of an AHA Committee on American East Asian Relations—a committee that moved to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) when AHA politics interfered with selections of its membership.  May was the initial chair of the committee, but it was Akira Iriye, who became a close friend, who was the driving force.  He chaired it after Ernest—and I chaired it after Iriye.  In 1971 I ran an AHA program on American-East Asian relations at Columbia.  In 1984, I entitled my SHAFR Presidential address “American-East Asian Relations: Cutting Edge of the Historical Profession.”

In 1969, Borg organized the first Japanese-American conference on Japanese-American relations 1931-1941, the papers for which became the prize-winning book, Pearl Harbor as History.[5] She asked me to present an essay on the influence of private groups such as the National Council for the Prevention of War, the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, and the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, on American policy.  The counterpart Japanese essay was written by Sadako Ogata, wife of my Fletcher School friend (and later Japan’s ambassador to the UN and UN High Commissioner for Refugees).  Eager to impress Borg, I probably did more research for that article than any other I’ve written.[6] Out of that research came the ideas for two subsequent books, the poorly named Chinese Connection—a title forced on me by my publisher despite the fact that much of the book was about relations with Japan (my original title was “China, Japan and the Three Wise Men”—May thought it would end up shelved with books on religion. My research indicated the importance of the peace movement and led in part to my Empire Without Tears.

I had come across Dean Rusk’s name in my research on U.S.-China relations and was puzzled by how a man who was so obviously able could have performed so poorly as secretary of state.  When the Sam Bemis-Bob Ferrell series on American Secretaries of State was ready for Rusk, I volunteered to write it.  I had long been interested (perhaps as a remnant of my early interest in psychiatry) in how exceptionally able men went wrong:  Harry Elmer Barnes in American Revisionistsand George Sokolsky in The Chinese Connection, as well as Rusk.  In the course of writing the book, I had several meetings with Rusk.  We had agreed that I would send him sections of the book as I wrote them and he would call my attention to any errors or omissions.  He would not question my judgments.  The process worked well until we got to the chapters on Vietnam when he decided that he would rather watch the Georgia v. Georgia Tech football game on TV than talk about what I had written.  He wrote to me after the book was published taking exception to my conclusions—which, in retrospect, may have been a bit harsh.

Of all the books I’ve written and all the money the Luce Foundation committed to my work and conferences Iriye and I chaired, the Foundation’s leadership was most pleased by East Asian Art and American Culture, published in 1992[7].  Akira was always pushing me to focus more on culture in my writings.  But the major force behind the decision to write the book was an unsuccessful effort to save my marriage, which had been strained by my research travels and time spent writing.  My wife was a studio artist with a deep interest in Asian art history.  We had written a joint article for one of Iriye’s University of Chicago symposia and Luce gave us a large grant to write the book.  The domestic problem was not solved, but Asian art historians and curators loved the book (more than diplomatic historians, few of whom other than Akira and Frank Ninkovich, understood what I was doing).  At a conference at which I spoke at the Frick in 2012, I was astonished to learn from the keynote address by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Asian art curator that I had created a new subfield of art history.

I’m not sure how the idea for the Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations emerged.  Akira, Walter LaFeber, and I were thinking about celebrating our 50th birthdays by each writing one of the volumes.  Walt would obviously write the second volume, from the Civil War to World War One.  Akira would prepare the third, from the First World War through the Second.  I thought I might try the first after a conversation with Ernest about using contemporary IR theory to write about the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Then I asked John Lewis Gaddis to write the Cold War volume, but he demurred.  I decided to write it instead, and to ask Bradford Perkins from the University of Michigan to write the first one.  Perkins was older than we were, but he was in a class by himself as a scholar of late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century American diplomacy.  Initially, Brad was too busy, but a few years later he asked if we were still interested and we went ahead with it.  My Cold War book[8]was intended to give more stress to Asia, less to Europe.  I obviously succeeded: May reviewed the series favorably for Foreign Affairs, but expressed wonder how anyone could write about the Cold War without mentioning West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

John Gaddis and I had become friends at one of Borg’s conferences and when he obtained funding from the MacArthur Foundation for the Cold War History Project, he asked me to join him with primary responsibility for the Asian side and he made the project an extraordinary success.  We were joined by Sam Wells, then deputy director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, when we decided to base the operation at the Center (where I at later became director of the Asia Program).  I always teased John about being what passed for a liberal in Texas.  He found my later writings on American foreign relations too critical, especially when I wrote about the presidency of George W. Bush.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, I decided to write a book for which I had few qualifications: East Asia at the Center: Four Thousand Years of Engagement with the World.[9] I had been struck by the discovery of Chinese pot shards in a thirteenth-century village I visited after a safari in Kenya.  I enjoyed the reading, and found all sorts of things that astonished me.  The book was well received, with few references to the arrogance displayed.  I am currently preparing a second edition.

One of my great interests has long been human rights.  I’ve been involved for many years with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund, Planned Parenthood, and others.  When I went back to the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio in 2000, I began work on series of essays on twentieth-century people whose efforts I admired: Margret Sanger, Jack Greenberg (NAACP Legal Defense Fund), Muslim feminists, Chinese dissidents, Aung Sang Suu Kyi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vaclav Havel, Pope John XXIII (my personal favorite) and others.  Of course, I included Gandhi and Martin Luther King.  In the course of my research I discovered that some of them were less saintly than I had imagined.  Sanger’s interest in eugenics and Gandhi’s relationships with women were appalling.  Once again, the publisher insisted on a title I didn’t like: Profiles in Humanity: The Battle for Peace, Freedom, Equality, and Human Rights.[10] Along those lines, I was outraged when the Board at Cambridge University Press refused to use the title I had chosen for a collection of essays I edited on the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong.  I called it “Red Star over Hong Kong.”[11]  The Board apparently feared it would offend the British authorities responsible for the deal.

Along the way, I edited eight volumes, some with Akira, usually derived from conferences on American-East Relations that one or the other of us chaired.  I also co-edited one with Nancy Bernkopf Tucker (my second wife—thanks to Dorothy who introduced us and to Bellagio where it all began many years later) on Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy.  In that book she wrote the essay on China and I was left with the Middle East.[12]

Other than Profiles and the 5th and 6th editions of America’s Response, and my 2000 Reischauer Lectures for Harvard,[13]most of my writing in the last 20 years has been focused on American policy.  I wrote America’s Failing Empire [14]at the request of Ron Edsforth, a former student who was editing a series for Blackwell.  I wanted to explain the weakness of the U.S. approach to foreign affairs after the Cold War and to reveal the foolishness of policies pursued by President Bill Clinton and by George W. Bush in his first administration—the book was published in 2005.

My most recent book, A Nation Like All Others,[15] was written as a result of pressure from friends and my editors at Columbia University Press—all of whom were eager to shake me out of the paralysis I suffered after Nancy’s death.  Back in the 1960s, the University of Chicago Press had a series on American Civilization and the editor, Daniel Boorstin, asked Stull Holt to write the volume on American foreign policy.  Stull wanted to wait until the war in Vietnam was over and it took too long.  He never was able to write it.  I thought that as his former student, it was my responsibility to write the short one-volume history of America in world affairs, beginning to end (c.2018)—although I wrote it for Columbia rather than the University of Chicago Press.  I intended it to be my last book, filled with my idiosyncratic reflections on American policy from the eighteenth century to the present.  The title tells the story; how I came to realize how my youthful vision of American exceptionalism eroded.

I had one additional experience over the years of possible interest to young historians.  I’ve written hundreds of book reviews and somewhere along the line I became frustrated by the word limitations imposed by the journals.  I think the American Historical Review was giving me 600 words.  I discovered to my delight that I could write them for the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review(back when it was the best in the country) and others and be allowed 1500-2000 words.  And, unlike academic journals, book reviewers for these publications actually got paid for them.

Finally, I want to note that much of what happened in my career was fortuitous and I benefitted at least as much from good luck as from ability.  I won a taxi-cab company scholarship that allowed me to go to Columbia and the Fletcher School.  I got my Ph.D. in 1962 when there were jobs aplenty—and when publishers often begged one to take advances and write a book for them.  My first book, American Revisionists, probably would not have been publishable in an era like this one.  And I was fortunate to encounter Stull Holt, Dorothy Borg, Akira Iriye, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker—and others named in my acknowledgments.

 

Warren I. Cohen is Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Michigan State University.  He has written 13 books and edited eight others.  He is currently preparing a new edition of East Asia at the Center.  He has served as editor of Diplomatic History, president of the Society of Historians of American Foreign relations, and chairman of the Department of State Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation.  He has been a consultant on Chinese affairs for various governmental organizations.


Notes

[1] Warren I. Cohen, The American Revisionists and the Lessons of Intervention in World War I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

[2] Cohen, “Development of Chinese Communist Policy Toward the United States, 1922-1933,” Orbis 11 (1967): 219-237; Cohen, “Development of Chinese Communist Policy Toward the United States, 1934-1945,” Orbis 11 (1967): 551-569.

[3] Cohen, America’s Response to China, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971).

[4] Cohen, Chinese Connection: Roger S. Greene, Thomas W. Lamont and American-East Asian Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Cohen, Dean Rusk(Totowa: Cooper Square Publishers, 1980); Cohen, Empire Without Tears: America’s Foreign Relations 1921-1933 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).

[5] Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto, eds., with Dale K. Finlayson, Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations 1931-1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).

[6] Cohen, “The Role of Private Groups in the United States,” in Borg and Okamoto, ed., Pearl Harbor as History,421-458.

[7] Cohen, East Asian Art and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

[8] Cohen, America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

[9] Cohen, East Asia at the Center: Four Thousand Years of Engagement with the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

[10] Cohen, Profiles in Humanity: The Battle for Peace, Freedom, Equality, and Human Rights (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

[11] Cohen and Li Zhao, eds., Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

[12] Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, eds., Lyndon Johnson Confronts The World: American Foreign Policy 1963-1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

[13] Cohen, The Asian American Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

[14] Cohen, America’s Failing Empire (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

[15] Cohen, A Nation Like All Others (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

domingo, 23 de junho de 2019

Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, 1913-1945 - Akira Iriye

The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: Volume 3, The Globalizing of America, 1913–1945



Since their first publication, the four volumes of The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations have served as the definitive source for the topic, from the colonial period to the Cold War. This third volume of the updated edition describes how the United States became a global power - economically, culturally and militarily - during the period from 1913 to 1945, from the inception of Woodrow Wilson's presidency to the end of the Second World War. The author also discusses global transformations, from the period of the First World War through the 1920s when efforts were made to restore the world economy and to establish a new international order, followed by the disastrous years of depression and war during the 1930s, to the end of the Second World War. Throughout the book, themes of Americanisation of the world and the transformation of the United States provide the background for understanding the emergence of a trans-national world in the second half of the twentieth century.

In The Press

'A clear overview of American ascendance - cultural, military, and economic - in an era punctuated by war and economic crisis. Iriye's global perspective helps us understand the rise of the United States in the context of wider challenges to European power; his analysis of deglobalizing forces and reglobalizing efforts casts new light on American leadership in this tumultuous time.' Kristin Hoganson, author of Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity

sexta-feira, 29 de março de 2019

A destruição da diplomacia, nos EUA e no Brasil - William J. Burns, Paulo Roberto de Almeida


O livro do diplomata Bill Burns, The Back Channel: a memoir of American Diplomacy and the case for its renewall,  é oportuno, e ele pergunta se a diplomacia americana, ou seja, o Departamento de Estado, pode ser salva. Sim, porque aquele presidente acidental está empenhado em destruir tudo o que os diplomatas americanos criaram desde 1944, ou seja, desde Bretton Woods. 
Aqui no Brasil, temos um problema quase similar: pode o Itamaraty ser salvo, em face do empenho conjunto de olavistas e bolsonaristas em destruir a diplomacia brasileira, tal como a conhecemos?
Perguntas cruciais. Os problemas do DOS e do Itamaraty são similares mas não semelhantes. Com medíocres no comando do processo, tanto na instituição própria, como ao lado e mais acima, parece que profundas transformações, para pior, vão prevalecer.
Minha função, similar a de Bill Burns, mas não semelhante, é a de tentar salvar o que pode ser salvo. Apenas pela denúncia, claro, e pelo ridículo...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Can the State Department Be Saved?
By William J. Burns

Foreign Affairs, March 2019

Diplomacy may be one of the world’s oldest professions, but it’s also one of the most misunderstood. It’s mostly a quiet endeavor, less swaggering than unrelenting, oftentimes operating in back channels, out of sight and out of mind. U.S. President Donald Trump’s disdain for professional diplomacy and its practitioners—along with his penchant for improvisational flirtations with authoritarian leaders such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un—has put an unaccustomed spotlight on the profession. It has also underscored the significance of its renewal.
The neglect and distortion of American diplomacy is not a purely Trumpian invention. It has been an episodic feature of the United States’ approach to the world since the end of the Cold War. The Trump administration, however, has made the problem infinitely worse. There is never a good time for diplomatic malpractice, but the administration’s unilateral diplomatic disarmament is spectacularly mistimed, unfolding precisely at a moment when American diplomacy matters more than ever to American interests. The United States is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block, and no longer able get everything it wants on its own, or by force alone.
Although the era of singular U.S. dominance on the world stage is over, the United States still has a better hand to play than any of its rivals. The country has a window of opportunity to lock in its role as the world’s pivotal power, the one best placed to shape a changing international landscape before others shape it first. If the United States is to seize that opportunity and safeguard its interests and values, it will have to rebuild American diplomacy and make it the tool of first resort, backed up by economic and military leverage and the power of example.
ANOTHER ERA
I remember clearly the moment I saw American diplomacy and power at their peak. It was the fall of 1991, and I—less than a decade into my career—was seated behind Secretary of State James Baker at the opening of the Madrid peace conference, a gathering convened by the George H. W. Bush administration in a bid to make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Around a huge table in the Spanish royal palace sat a collection of international leaders and, for the first time, representatives of Israel, the Palestinians, and key Arab states. They were united less by a shared conviction about Israeli-Palestinian peace than by a shared respect for U.S. influence. After all, the United States had just triumphed in the Cold War, overseen the reunification of Germany, and handed Saddam Hussein a spectacular defeat in Iraq.
On that day in Madrid, global currents all seemed to run toward a period of prolonged U.S. dominance. The liberal order that the United States had built and led after World War II would, we hoped, draw into its embrace the former Soviet empire, as well as the postcolonial world for which both sides had competed. Russia was flat on its back, China was still turned inward, and the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia faced few regional threats and even fewer economic rivals. Globalization was gathering steam, with the United States taking the lead in promoting greater openness in trade and investment. The promise of the information revolution was tantalizing, as was that of remarkable medical and scientific breakthroughs. The fact that an era of human progress was unfolding only reinforced the sense that the nascent Pax Americana would become permanent.
The triumphalism of that heady era was nevertheless tempered by some sober realizations. As I wrote in a transition memorandum for incoming Secretary of State Warren Christopher at the beginning of 1993, “alongside the globalization of the world economy, the international political system is tilting schizophrenically toward greater fragmentation.” Victory in the Cold War had stimulated a surge of democratic optimism, but “it has not ended history or brought us to the brink of ideological conformity.” Democracies that failed to produce economic and political results would falter. And while it was true that for the first time in half a century, the United States didn’t have a global military adversary, it was “entirely conceivable that a return to authoritarianism in Russia or an aggressively hostile China could revive such a global threat.”
JONATHAN ERNST / REUTERS
U.S. President Barack Obama shakes hands with Cuban President Raul Castro in Panama City, April 2015
The question, then, was not whether the United States should seize the unipolar moment but how and to what end. Should the United States use its unmatched strength to extend its global dominance? Or, rather than unilaterally draw the contours of a new world order, should it lead with diplomacy to shape an order in which old rivals had a place and emerging powers had a stake? Bush and Baker chose the second option, harnessing the United States’ extraordinary leverage to shape the new post–Cold War order. They combined humility, an ambitious sense of the possibilities of American leadership, and diplomatic skill at a moment when their country enjoyed unparalleled influence.
DIPLOMATIC DRIFT
It proved difficult, however, to sustain a steady commitment to diplomacy. Successive secretaries of state and their diplomats worked hard and enjoyed notable successes, but resources grew scarce, and other priorities loomed. Lulled into complacency by a seemingly more benign international landscape, the United States sought to cash in on the post–Cold War peace dividend. It let its diplomatic muscles atrophy. Baker opened a dozen new embassies in the former Soviet Union without asking Congress for more money, and budget pressures during the tenure of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright froze intake into the Foreign Service. Between 1985 and 2000, the U.S. government’s foreign affairs budget shrank by nearly half. Then, shocked by 9/11, Washington emphasized force over diplomacy even more than it already had, and it stumbled into the colossal unforced error of the Iraq war. Officials told themselves they were practicing “coercive diplomacy,” but the result was long on coercion and short on diplomacy.
Early on, the Trump administration inflicted its brand of ideological contempt and stubborn incompetence on the State Department.
Throughout the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. diplomats preoccupied themselves with social engineering and nation building, tasks that were beyond the capacity of the United States (or any other foreign power, for that matter). Stabilization, counterinsurgency, countering violent extremism, and all the other murky concepts that sprang up in this era sometimes distorted the core mission of U.S. diplomacy: to cajole, persuade, browbeat, threaten, and nudge other governments and political leaders so that they pursue policies consistent with U.S. interests. The State Department often seemed to be trying to replicate the role of the nineteenth-century British Colonial Service.
During his two terms in office, President Barack Obama sought to reverse these trends, reasserting the importance of diplomacy in American statecraft. Backed up by economic and military leverage, and the multiplier effect of alliances and coalitions, Obama’s diplomacy produced substantial results, including the opening to Cuba, the Iran nuclear deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the Paris climate accord.
Even so, the dependence on military instruments proved hard to break. The number of drone strikes and special operations grew exponentially, often highly successful in narrow military terms, but complicating political relationships and inadvertently causing civilian casualties and fueling terrorist recruitment. On the rugged playing fields of Washington’s bureaucratic politics, the State Department too often found itself pushed to the sidelines: assistant secretaries responsible for critical regions would be squeezed out of meetings in the Situation Room, where the back benches were filled with National Security Council staffers. The Obama administration’s commitment to diplomacy was increasingly held hostage to poisonous partisanship at home. Members of Congress waged caustic fights over the State Department’s budget and held grandstanding spectacles, such as the heavily politicized hearings over the attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.
As the Arab Spring turned into an Arab Winter, the United States got sucked back into the Middle Eastern morass, and Obama’s long-term effort to rebalance the country’s strategy and tools fell victim to constant short-term challenges. It became increasingly difficult for the president to escape his inheritance: a burgeoning array of problems much less susceptible to the application of U.S. power in a world in which there was relatively less of that power to apply.
UNILATERAL DIPLOMATIC DISARMAMENT
Then came Trump. He entered office with a powerful conviction, untethered to history, that the United States had been held hostage by the very order it created. The country was Gulliver, and it was past time to break the bonds of the Lilliputians. Alliances were millstones, multilateral arrangements were constraints rather than sources of leverage, and the United Nations and other international bodies were distractions, if not altogether irrelevant. Trump’s “America first” sloganeering stirred a nasty brew of unilateralism, mercantilism, and unreconstructed nationalism. In just two years, his administration has diminished the United States’ influence, hollowed out the power of its ideas, and deepened divisions among its people about the country’s global role.
JONATHAN ERNST / REUTERS
Trump on the phone with Putin in the Oval Office, Washington, DC, January 2017
Turning the enlightened self-interest that animated so much of U.S. foreign policy for 70 years on its head, the Trump administration has used muscular posturing and fact-free assertions to mask a pattern of retreat. In rapid succession, it abandoned the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and a slew of other international commitments. There have been glimmers of real possibility, including overdue efforts to get NATO allies to spend more on defense and attempts to improve the terms of trade with rivals such as China. Career diplomats have continued to do impressive work in hard places around the world. But the broader pattern is deeply troubling, with disruption seeming to be its own end and little apparent thought given to what comes after. Taken as a whole, Trump’s approach is more than an impulse; it is a distinct and Hobbesian worldview. But it is far less than anything resembling a strategy.
Early on, the Trump administration inflicted its brand of ideological contempt and stubborn incompetence on the State Department, which it saw as a den of recalcitrants working for the so-called deep state. The White House embraced the biggest budget cuts in the modern history of the department, seeking to slash its funding by one-third. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reduced the Foreign Service’s intake by well over 50 percent and drove out many of the State Department’s most capable senior and midlevel officers in the course of a terminally flawed “redesign.” Key ambassadorships overseas and senior roles in Washington went unfilled. What were already unacceptably gradual trend lines toward greater gender and racial diversity began moving in reverse. Most pernicious of all was the practice of blacklisting individual officers simply because they worked on controversial issues during the Obama administration, such as the Iran nuclear deal, plunging morale to its lowest level in decades. And Tillerson’s successor, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has managed adeptly his relationship with the president but has had less success repairing the structural damage.
Standing alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin at their July 2018 summit in Helsinki, Trump asserted that he was an advocate of “the proud tradition of bold American diplomacy.” But Trump’s view of diplomacy is narcissistic, not institutional. When dictators such as Putin see his compulsive need for attention and flattery, his attacks against his predecessors and his political opponents, and his habit of winging it in high-level encounters, they see weakness and manipulability.
TOOL OF FIRST RESORT
For all the injuries the United States has inflicted on itself in recent years, it still has an opportunity to help shape a new and more durable international order. No longer the dominant player that it was after the Cold War, the United States nevertheless remains the world’s pivotal power. It spends more every year on defense than the next seven countries combined. It has more allies and potential partners than any of its peers or rivals. Its economy, despite risks of overheating and gross inequalities, remains the biggest, most adaptable, and most innovative in the world. Energy, once a vulnerability, now offers considerable advantages, with technology having unlocked vast natural gas resources and advances in clean and renewable energy accelerating. The task now is to use these advantages, and what remains of the historic window of U.S. preeminence, to update the international order to reflect new realities. That, in turn, will require recovering the lost art of diplomacy.
This endeavor must start with reinvesting in the fundamentals of the craft: smart policy judgment, language skills, and a feel for the foreign countries where diplomats serve and the domestic priorities they represent. George Kennan described his fellow diplomats as “gardeners,” painstakingly nurturing partners and possibilities, always alert to the need to weed out problems. Such a prosaic description may not fit well on a recruitment poster, but it still rings true today. Diplomats are translators of the world to Washington and of Washington to the world. They are early warning radars for troubles and opportunities and builders and fixers of relations. All these tasks demand a nuanced grasp of history and culture, a hard-nosed facility in negotiations, and the capacity to translate U.S. interests in ways that allow other governments to see those interests as consistent with their own—or at least in ways that drive home the costs of alternative courses. That will require modestly expanding the Foreign Service so that, like the military, the diplomatic corps can dedicate time and personnel to training, without sacrificing readiness and performance.
Renewing American diplomacy will be impossible without a new domestic compact.
Reaffirming the foundations of American diplomacy is necessary but not sufficient to make it effective for a new and demanding era. The State Department will also have to adapt in ways it never before has, making sure that it is positioned to tackle the consequential tests of tomorrow and not just the policy fads of today. It can begin by taking a cue from the U.S. military’s introspective bent. The Pentagon has long embraced the value of case studies and after-action reports, and it has formalized a culture of professional education. Career diplomats, by contrast, have tended to pride themselves more on their ability to adjust quickly to shifting circumstances than on paying systematic attention to lessons learned and long-term thinking.
As part of a post-Trump reinvention of diplomacy, then, the State Department ought to place a new emphasis on the craft, rediscovering diplomatic history, sharpening negotiation skills, and making the lessons of negotiations—both successful and unsuccessful—accessible to practitioners. That means fully realizing the potential of new initiatives such as the Foreign Service Institute’s Center for the Study of the Conduct of Diplomacy, where diplomats examine recent case studies.
The U.S. government will also have to update its diplomatic capacity when it comes to the issues that matter to twenty-first-century foreign policy—particularly technology, economics, energy, and the climate. My generation and its predecessor had plenty of specialists in nuclear arms control and conventional energy issues; missile throw-weights and oil-pricing mechanisms were not alien concepts. During my last few years in government, however, I spent too much time sitting in meetings on the seventh floor of the State Department and in the White House Situation Room with smart, dedicated colleagues, all of us collectively faking it on the intricacies of cyberwarfare or the geopolitics of data.
The pace of advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and synthetic biology will only increase in the years ahead, outstripping the ability of states and societies to devise ways to maximize their benefits, minimize their downsides, and create workable international rules of the road. To address these threats, the State Department will have to take the lead—just as it did during the nuclear age—building legal and normative frameworks and ensuring that every new officer is versed in these complex issues.
It will also have to bring in new talent. In the coming years, the State Department will face stiff competition from the Pentagon, the CIA, and the National Security Agency, not to mention the private sector, as it seeks to attract and retain a cadre of technologists. The department, like the executive branch in general, will have to become more flexible and creative in order to attract tech talent. It should create temporary postings and launch a specialized midlevel hiring program to fill critical knowledge gaps. New fellowships can help leverage the tried-and-true tactic of using prestige as a recruiting tool, but more dramatic changes to compensation and hiring practices will be necessary to build up and retain in-house expertise.
The State Department will also have to become more dexterous. Individual U.S. diplomats can be remarkably innovative and entrepreneurial. As an institution, however, the State Department is rarely accused of being too agile or too full of initiative. Diplomats have to apply their gardening skills to their own messy plot of ground and do some serious institutional weeding.
The State Department’s personnel system is far too rigid and anachronistic. The evaluation process is wholly incapable of providing honest feedback or incentives for improved performance. Promotion is too slow, tours of duty too inflexible, and mechanisms to facilitate the careers of working parents outdated. The department’s internal deliberative process is just as lumbering and conservative, with too many layers of approval and authority.
During my final months as deputy secretary of state, I received a half-page memo on a mundane policy issue—with a page and a half of clearances attached to it. Every imaginable office in the department had reviewed the memo, including a few whose possible interest in the matter severely strained my imagination. A serious effort at reducing the number of layers in the department, one that pushed responsibility downward in Washington and outward to ambassadors in the field, could markedly improve the workings of a bureaucracy that too often gets in its own way.
AN OPPORTUNITY, NOT AN ELEGY
No matter what reforms the State Department undertakes, renewing American diplomacy will be impossible without a new domestic compact—a broadly shared sense of the United States’ purpose in the world and of the relationship between leadership abroad and middle-class interests at home. Trump’s three immediate predecessors all began their terms with a focus on “nation building at home” and a determination to limit overseas commitments. Yet each had trouble, some more than others, marrying words with deeds, and they ended up taking on more and more global responsibilities with little obvious benefit. Most Americans understand instinctively the connection between disciplined American leadership abroad and the well-being of their own society; they just doubt the capacity of the Washington establishment, across party lines, to practice that style of leadership.
The starting point for reversing this trend is candor—from the president on down—about the purpose and limits of the United States’ international engagement. Another ingredient is making the case more effectively that leadership abroad produces beneficial results at home. When the State Department plays a valuable role in nailing down big overseas commercial deals, it rarely highlights the role of diplomacy in creating thousands of jobs in cities and towns across the United States. There are growing opportunities for diplomats to work closely with governors and mayors across the country, many of whom are increasingly active in promoting overseas trade and investment. Policymakers have to do a better job of showing that smart diplomacy begins at home, in a strong political and economic system, and ends there, too—in better jobs, more prosperity, a healthier climate, and greater security.
The next administration will have a brief window of possibility to undertake imaginative transformations that can move the State Department into the twenty-first century and reorient American diplomacy toward the most pressing challenges. Trump’s disregard for diplomacy has done substantial damage, but it also underscores the urgency of a serious effort at renewal, on a competitive and often unforgiving international landscape.
What I learned time and again throughout my long career is that diplomacy is one of the United States’ biggest assets and best-kept secrets. However battered and belittled in the age of Trump, it has never been a more necessary tool of first resort for American influence. It will take a generation to reverse the underinvestment, overreach, and flailing that have beset American diplomacy in recent decades, not to mention the active sabotage of recent years. But its rebirth is crucial to a new strategy for a new century—one that is full of great peril and even greater promise for America.