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?
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.”
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.
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.
