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.

This writer has the impression that there has recently been a tendency at higher levels in Washington to underrate the importance of the bilateral relationship fostered by the ambassador, as compared to other means of international interaction. Many international questions today are addressed in multilateral forums of one sort or another. To such multilateral deliberations the president or his entourage often sends representatives, persons without a diplomatic background and not always reporting to, or through, the State Department. It is at such gatherings, it will be argued, that the United States now has most of its dealings with any particular government, rather than through the resident ambassador in that country.

That is all very well, but it must be remembered that the foreign envoy at an international conference of this nature is speaking and acting under the discipline of a government's instructions, and if one wants to understand his statements, one must know something of the nature and the motivations of that government. The envoy in question, however, is often not fully familiar with that background, and the American envoy at the conference is apt to be even less so. Nor is the American negotiator always cognizant of the wider spectrum of American national interests and policies into which her or his activities should be fitted. The ambassador at the capital of the respective country, on the other hand, has no excuse for not being aware of precisely those interests and policies. Thus, while the immediate arena of the ambassador's responsibility may be limited, the bilateral relationship he or she cultivates should not be underrated. It is in many ways the foundation of American diplomacy.

Beyond the regular ambassador in any foreign country is the embassy staff. Here the changes since the Second World War have been staggering. Originally the staff was a small group, normally consisting only of the deputy chief of mission, a career officer; three or four diplomatic secretaries also drawn from the foreign service; and, in a more distant way, any attach?s from the armed forces currently attached to the post. But today, each of the major embassies has hundreds of staff members. "Inside a U.S. Embassy," a 1996 American Foreign Service Association publication, in describing the staff of a major embassy lists in addition to the deputy chief of mission 11 staff sections, each with a titled chief: a political counselor; an economic counselor; officers for consular and administrative affairs; others for environment, science and technology, and public and cultural affairs; a refugee coordinator; a security officer; an information systems specialist; a labor and an agriculture officer; a director for aid matters; and a functionary bearing the title of foreign service secretary who seems to have some responsibility for coordination of the others.

These heads of section, collectively known as the country team, theoretically report directly to the ambassador or the deputy chief of mission. Some, however, seem to operate directly or indirectly under the authority of Washington bosses, some in the State Department, some elsewhere. Such is the number of these officials, in any case, that only a portion of them could expect to have regular access to the chief of mission or to operate under his immediate guidance and authority. As one might surmise, their relation to the traditional concerns central to the ambassador -- the cultivation of the bilateral relationship and the promotion of the national interest -- varies greatly. And the situation of their underlings is similar.

A HUMAN SERVICE

With all this in mind, let us return to the foreign service as a whole. First of all, and particularly considering the purposes it was created to serve, it has become a very numerous body indeed. Some of the growth from less than 800 to nearly 8,000 members may safely be attributed to sheer bureaucratic inflation. In addition, there has been a great increase recently in the number of entities enjoying the formal status of fully independent and sovereign states and thus seeming to demand the full panoply of personnel without which the U.S. government cannot conceive of maintaining diplomatic relations. The growth of the service is also partly due to the more recent incorporation into its ranks of almost all of what were once its supporting and technical personnel. Yet even allowing for all this, it is still a very large body.

Second, the service is, in the human sense, a very mixed bag. It is the product of no single set of standards or motivations. It contains some fine officers surviving from earlier stages of the service's development, and a no smaller number of impressively able people who joined in later years. But it also, and of necessity, includes many others from whom such exceptional qualities could not normally be expected.

The service maintains that almost all its personnel have at one time or another been exposed to the rigors of some sort of examination, and that the great majority of them entered at, or somewhere near, the bottom of the scale. How this was contrived in the cases of those who transferred at mid-career from other official hierarchies or who had risen in professions outside government before their admission to the foreign service is not readily apparent. But there is no reason to doubt that serious efforts have been put forward to meet the standards of early entrance and some sort of personal examination. The great majority of current members of the foreign service are honorable and faithful public servants doing their best in the jobs with which they have been entrusted. They cannot be blamed if the official framework in which their efforts are exerted suffers from distortions or absurdities of organization. They deserve all that can be given them in the way of job security for work well performed.

Such, then, in a few words, is the foreign service as we know it today. And for all its distance from the original dream, there is much to be said for it. For one thing, it exists; it is there; it is now anchored in habit and usage. Beyond this, it must be asked whether the service could, in light of the prevailing circumstances, be expected to be much other than it is. Consider the external forces that bear on it. There is, first, the perennial resistance of the Washington bureaucracy to the creation or operation of any civilian government institution not fully amenable to its influence, and its jealousy of rivals that might share in its privileges and prestige abroad. Then there is the widespread ignorance, throughout the government and beyond, of the traditional institutions of diplomacy, along with a sweeping unawareness of even the reasons why a professional diplomatic and consular apparatus for representation of the U.S. government abroad should exist at all. These deficiencies of knowledge and understanding affect the press and other media no less than they do wide circles of the government.

Finally, there are the strong egalitarian tendencies in contemporary American society, tendencies that prefer a relatively low level of uniformity -- if necessary, even mediocrity -- to any hierarchical differentiation that suggests one person might be better than another for any particular government job. And on top of this, Americans persist in the notion that the diplomatic service is dominated by effete snobs from monied and socially distinguished backgrounds, serving in places where there ought to be only "real Americans" attached exclusively to popular standards and scorning diplomatic niceties and conventions. (There was little truth in the notion when I entered the service some 70 years ago. There is none at all today. But it will be long before many Americans can be weaned of their belief in it.)