Diplomacy Without Diplomats?

George F. Kennan

From Foreign Affairs, September/ October 1997

Summary:  America could have had a foreign service second to none. But Washington could not accept any such rigorously selective and nonpolitical corps. And with the diffusion of authority around the globe, many entities from outside the diplomatic world are busy representing their nations abroad, for better or worse.

George F. Kennan was a career officer in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1926 to 1953, retiring as Ambassador to the Soviet Union. He has been Professor, then Professor, Emeritus, at the Institute for Advanced Study.

By 1950 the foreign service bore little resemblance to the corps its authors had intended. In subsequent decades the handling of the service has seemed to reflect a persistent effort on the part of those in Washington able to influence its destiny to do away with its identity as a separate body of public servants, merging it to the extent possible with the domestic civil service and the competing activities of other arms of government.

The effects of this treatment on the quality of the foreign service have never been carefully examined. It is doubtful that they ever will or could be. Suffice it to say that they have hardly all been positive. On the quantitative side, the service, which in 1945 had some 770 members, by the mid-1990s numbered nearly 10,000 -- some 8,000 of whom have survived the changes demanded by the present Republican Congress.

Any thinking about future arrangements for the professional representation of the United States abroad must take into account the entrenched political control of the foreign service. Failing that, new arrangements would be doomed to a short and ineffectual life.

A DIFFICULT CAREER

In addition to the impairment of the identity of the service, a number of factors have conspired to reduce its attractiveness as the lifetime career it was originally meant to be. The first is the practice, liberally indulged in by presidents since the founding of the republic, of filling a large percentage of ambassadorial slots with their personal appointees, selected for qualities not necessarily connected with any professional preparedness, or sometimes even fitness, for the position. That practice, blocking off as it does a considerable number of top posts that would normally have crowned a distinguished foreign service career, has served as a species of semi-decapitation of the service.

Where the politically selected candidate otherwise suited for the job is also close to the president and enjoys the latter's personal confidence, it adds importantly to his or her ability to fill the ambassadorial role. A number of noncareer people of high distinction and competence, well qualified for the work the office implies, have been appointed to ambassadorships. But there have been many others to whom these qualifications could not plausibly have been attributed. The negative consequences for the service's effectiveness and the morale of its career officers are obvious.

Another factor diminishing the allure of the foreign service as a lifetime or even long-term career relates to the frequent transfers that are an integral part of the job. It was difficult enough to reconcile family obligations, including the rearing and education of children, with a foreign service career in the days when the service was overwhelmingly male. Wives were not expected to have professional aspirations of their own, but to follow their husbands to each successive assignment (and even assist them in their work there). Today, with the great increase in two-career families, the frequent changes of residence that have always marked a foreign service life discourage both women and men from entering or staying with the service.

FRAGMENTED DIPLOMACY

Certain broader conditions must also be borne in mind when one considers the future of foreign service work. Among the most significant has been the extreme fragmentation of American policymaking and diplomacy in recent years.

Effective diplomacy in the traditional European sense, up through the French Revolution and even later, rested on the assumption that the diplomat, in speaking to the government to which he was accredited, was speaking for the supreme source of power in his own country and would be backed up by its authority in anything he undertook to say in its name. This in turn rested on the assumption that some single coherent and responsible center of power -- a crowned head, a president, or an all-powerful prime minister -- in the diplomat's own country was in a position to compel the country's other authorities to play their part in meeting any commitments made through the diplomatic process. This principle, known in German-speaking countries as das Primat der Aussenpolitik (the precedence of foreign policy), was seen by monarchs and prime ministers of earlier ages as a sine qua non of successful diplomacy.