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.

How, we may ask, could a professional service subject to these pressures be much other than what we know it now to be? If the United States had no foreign service at all, and if the effort were made to create one from scratch, bearing in mind the power of these influences, could anyone realistically design one radically different and expect it to live and thrive? The present service is, for the task at hand, just about the best that the American civilization of our day is capable of providing.

ENVOYS TO THE FUTURE

So the United States will do well to make the best of the foreign service it has. But there is one other consideration, which might prove to be the most important. The domestic conditions affecting the foreign service may be relatively static, but the international ones are not. Witness the unpredictable but surely not negligible effects on the diplomatic process of computer technology and the worldwide revolution in communication. Changes are now under way that make it extremely difficult to predict the future of diplomacy or prescribe its conduct.

Such have been the oddities of international organization that a formidable number of political entities (a majority, probably, in the United Nations) have in recent decades been cast onto the surface of international life under the somewhat misleading designation of sovereign and independent states. Their resources, human and otherwise, are inadequate to the demands of their new status. New modes of interaction with the international community, ones more in keeping with the realities of their situation, will have to be found for them.

Conversely, the world's major powers, especially the United States, are finding the strains of governing far-flung territories from a single center, including interaction with other governments, increasingly hard to bear. In the United States, the coming apart of the institutional facilities for controlling such interaction is a function of the coming apart of the federal level of government generally. States and regions of the country, in fact, have already opened their own mini-foreign offices, which directly conduct aspects of their relations with other countries, often bypassing Washington. As with the newer, less developed, and less experienced members of the United Nations, they too will require modes of international interaction at levels less than full sovereignty and independence.

These are some of the uncertainties making themselves felt on the international scene. They are challenging the calculations of recent decades, pro and con, about what institutional arrangements a great country ought to have for its diplomatic interaction with the rest of the world in the coming age. As the point of departure for adjustment to these uncertainties, perhaps the present foreign service, lacking the rigidities of earlier conceptions, will do as well as any.