Washington foreign policy circles are gearing up to propose and contest reforms to the State Department, in a recently mandated Congressional Commission on Reform and Modernization of the Department of State.
The various parties carry a range of interests and concerns, some focused on federal personnel policies, others on coordination among policymaking functions, a number on State Department skillsets, quite a few on foreign policy as a discipline.
Most agree that the Department and the U.S. Foreign Service have been weak, or weakened, over some time. A “listening report” launched by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson generated some significant findings, starting with the lack of a basic mission for the department, with which current advocates broadly agree. The lack of mission leads to a culture of diffuse programs and campaigns, which differs from the conduct of diplomacy. Again, interested parties tend to agree.
This site has argued that there is a natural role for the professional diplomatic service, tied to the fundamental nature of the American sovereign. Diplomacy is the expression, clarification, and exercise of a nation’s sovereign interest, to express amity or opposition, to announce courses of action and explain them, and, as events may call, to fashion agreements or other terms of engagement with other actors.
America’s sovereign interest is unusual. Our sovereign is not the governing ruler, but “we”, the people who promulgated the Constitution. This is the same “we” who conceived ourselves a nation in 1776, as holders of the truths of unalienable rights and government tasked to secure them. We do elect chief executives and boards of directors, aka President and Congress, but they are actually agents for the sovereign.
We, the “we” who constitute the sovereign, need a voice for our sovereign interest. Career diplomats fit a long standing function, historically performed in service to a different kind of sovereign, to carry that voice for us. Even as they follow elected officers’ directives, they need to keep the overarching national purpose and ethos in effect. Formal organizational and legal mandates will be needed. But, if the diplomats know this function and this sovereign properly, natural logic and diplomats’ good performance can place a political consensus behind any requisite legislation.
This purpose, this duty, and this understanding, is not cut and dried. Its nature is not grasped by instruction manuals, and competence not demonstrated in an online multiple choice test. The American sovereign, by its nature, imposes a constant need for judgment calls on its representatives. So the professional diplomat needs to understand the paradoxes of government by, of and for the people, especially a people that defined itself by an abstract, aspirational creed.
To start, that creed’s abstract, aspirational nature raises major paradoxes. No other nation has identified itself by abstract belief in personal rights. The notion is still bizarre to billions of people – hence the acquiescence to less-than-free regimes in so many countries. There is no pure democracy anywhere, nor any society that completely respects all the rights of all. Divergences of the past are shocking, as in the American practice of slaveholding. The creed is an ideal standard to guide growth by our aspirations, not a template for instant, mechanistic compliance. Where shortfalls constitute a need for progress and where they risk hypocrisy, debunking our creedal commitment, becomes one of those matters of judgment.
A creedal nation also must meet constituents’ less-aspirational needs. Rights are unusable for the murdered and degraded for the starving. Any nation needs a vessel to secure people’s profane interests. Pragmatic or Real-Political national conduct, of war and even aggression at times, of craven and even exploitative economic policies, may be necessary. A nation that houses a creed of rights must also determine when such practices undermine our moral commitment, and when are they compromises necessary for the material survival of our worldly creedal vessel.
So representing this nation entails a constant mental wrestling, which requires suppleness in our bedrock creedal commitment. No shallow set of rules or codes will capture the creed in such a fully articulated spirit. A new American diplomat must be steeped not only the creed’s terms and the texts of precursor and derivative expressions, but in the course of its development, the state of the world through its lens, and in the possibilities for it to grow in scope and influence. The carrier must digest the ideas that support or counter its rigor and its worldly usefulness, and must know how current conduct does, or does not, carry it.
This capacity, in this rigor and depth, carries a kind of art, which is an expertise. It is an expertise that, as noted, a creedal nation needs. In particular, those Americans who would shape and represent our collective conduct must, at the same time, obey the mandates of those chosen by the sovereign to govern, yet hold constant to the common sovereign interest through changing electoral mandates. This art is difficult, but the paradox is not without parallel. Military experts also pledge to obey the orders of civilian authority, but exercise independent authority of their expertise, in their recommendations for or against military action and in determining its operational shape.
A professional diplomatic service that knows this sovereign base not only keeps that sovereign interest in view through the permutations of policy, but it carries that view into the public discourse. Again, this is a parallel to the military’s ability to carry that perspective in the discourse. But we have not had such a voice for the sovereign interest before; we have felt comfortable to date, just assuming that everyone shares some unarticulated allegiance to something we all agree on. Today, in a world of upheaval, where all certainties have faced credible doubts, clarity in our shared bedrock premises is essential to comity, and thus to our national existence.
Clarity also allows us to declare our nature to the world, stating our purposes in our terms. Without such clarity we leave others to devine our purposes, which they will do by their own lights, often to distort our intentions to serve their worst interests. In this sense, a body of professional diplomats fluent in our creed is essential. Validating our creed validates our national reason, the deepest requirement of national security.
To be this carrier of sovereign interest, then, is a proper, essential – and rewarding – mission for the Department of State. It comports with State’s function as the administrative agent for the state: President Nixon addressed his resignation to the Secretary, and the Department is the custodian of the National Seal. While the official relation of a cabinet department to the elected President is that of a subordinate, a working body that carries an independent expertise can, if equipped for the paradoxes and judgments, represent the sovereign, even in obedience to bureaucratic superiors. In this role the State Department can re-establish its place in the federal government; professional diplomats can enhance their own professional status; and influence and the United States gains an invaluable function. We just might develop continuity and coherence in our conduct. We ourselves, and the world, will see afresh just what America means.
Common Conviction 