Making American Diplomacy Relevant

Monteagle Stearns

From Foreign Affairs, October 1973

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Summary:  Writing in 1969 Henry Kissinger commented that "the United States is no longer in a position to operate programs globally; it has to encourage them. It can no longer impose its preferred solution; it must seek to evoke it. In the forties and fifties, we offered remedies; in the late sixties and in the seventies our role will have to be to contribute to a structure that will foster the initiative of others. . . . This task requires a different kind of creativity and another form of patience than we have displayed in the past."

Writing in 1969 Henry Kissinger commented that "the United States is no longer in a position to operate programs globally; it has to encourage them. It can no longer impose its preferred solution; it must seek to evoke it. In the forties and fifties, we offered remedies; in the late sixties and in the seventies our role will have to be to contribute to a structure that will foster the initiative of others. . . . This task requires a different kind of creativity and another form of patience than we have displayed in the past."1

What kind of creativity and what form of patience? At first glance the task of evoking preferred solutions to the problems of a multipolar world would appear ideally suited to the powers of reason, patience and persuasion with which professional diplomats are supposed to be preternaturally endowed. The objective conditions for a rebirth of traditional diplomacy seem everywhere present. The number of nation-states jockeying for position in world affairs has never been larger. The influence of international political organizations has never been weaker. And the concentration of mutually offsetting military power in the hands of a few states has generally enhanced the bargaining advantages of national sovereignty.

Yet, paradoxically, at this most propitious of moments the professional diplomat finds his ability to influence events at its lowest ebb. The decline in his fortunes almost exactly parallels the decline in the ability of governments to conduct their relations without diplomacy. Does career diplomacy thus have a valid and continuing role to play in world affairs, or, as Maria Callas once said of opera, is it a dead art which can at best be resuscitated only for individual performances?

II

While the diplomatic institutions established in Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were embellished in succeeding years, notably by the French, the essential features of the diplomatic method-resident ambassadors accredited to one state by the ruler of another and empowered by him to conduct business in his name under reciprocal privileges of immunity extended by both states-were well established by the end of the Renaissance and have remained the essential prerequisite for effective diplomacy ever since. Ad hoc diplomacy-by conference or visiting mission-has an even longer history, coming to the Italians from classical Greece through Byzantium. But it was the Italians who first conceived of diplomacy as a continuing process, a permanent relationship among states, and who created the machinery to bring it into being.

Garrett Mattingly in Renaissance Diplomacy suggests two underlying reasons for this. The first was the existence of an unstable equilibrium among the usually belligerent Italian city-states, which required constant vigilance for survival. The second, which itself contributed to the first, was physical contiguity and a rough balance of power at least among the larger states. It took transalpine Europe another 300 years to organize its physical space to a comparable extent and yet another 100 years before the diplomatic profession, as distinct from diplomatic practice, came into existence. In ...

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