All the Presidents' Men

Michael Fullilove

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2005

Article preview: first 500 of 2,567 words total.

Summary:  In its first term, the Bush administration all but ignored a powerful diplomatic tool that had served Washington well in the past: the special envoy. With the State Department now under new management, it should start dispatching emissaries again.

Michael Fullilove is Program Director for Global Issues at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia. A former adviser to the Australian prime minister, he is writing a book on Franklin Roosevelt's envoy diplomacy.

In the first month of his presidency, George W. Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 1, setting out how the country's national security machinery would operate under his leadership. Notably, the document signaled that the new administration would eschew the use of special diplomatic envoys. It abolished half of the existing emissary positions, including those covering peace in the Middle East and ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. In the four years since, the Bush administration has mostly stuck to its bureaucratic guns. Aside from a few high-profile missions--such as the appointment of former Treasury Secretary James Baker to deal with Iraq's war debt and former Senator (and later UN ambassador) John Danforth to help make peace in Sudan--the White House has generally steered clear of diplomatic troubleshooters and special representatives.

This approach was consistent with both the means and the ends of Bush's early foreign policy. His team viewed the deployment of outsiders as an inappropriate method of implementing foreign policy; it was no way for grownups to govern. Bush, the CEO president, preferred clear reporting lines and administrative tidiness. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was a presidential emissary to Haiti in 1994, complained in his confirmation hearings before the Senate about the "very large number of envoys running around" and vowed to "empower the existing bureaus to do their jobs."

If the proliferation of special envoys under President Bill Clinton struck the incoming administration as evidence of organizational ad hockery, it also spoke to them of weakness and an overreliance on diplomacy. For most of his first term, Bush showed little sustained interest in deep diplomatic engagement with the world. The hard-line wing of the Republican Party was dominant, and it neglected the tradition of working with other nations to project U.S. influence abroad and share the burden of policing the world. The administration withdrew from multilateral agreements that the United States had helped advance and undermined institutions that the United States had helped build. It retired from the post of Middle East peace broker. It marketed Libya's renunciation of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction as the fruit of the neoconservative vine, rather than as the result of dogged diplomacy. Its temper was unilateralist; it barely questioned the utility of force.

The Bush strategy was tested in the Iraq war, of course, and found to be wanting. In retrospect, it seems that Washington badly underestimated the value of international support for its undertakings. But although diplomacy's stocks have risen in the past year, some in the administration remain unconvinced by Winston Churchill's dictum that it is better "to jaw-jaw than to war-war."

So far, then, the administration has been down on diplomacy and, in particular, on special envoys. It has ignored a powerful diplomatic instrument that has served the United States well in times of crisis. With the State Department under new management and the benefit of four years of experience, it is time for Washington to reconsider its use of special emissaries.

End of preview: first 500 of 2,567 words total.