Twenty-Five Year Apprenticeship

What would you do to shape a stronger future State Department?

It is important to think ahead about what you could do to shape a different environment in the department. There’s no substitute for people who are willing to take the initiative and that needs to be acknowledged. We become our own worst enemy when we do not take initiative and that’s a shame. We have a lot of really smart, hardworking, dedicated people, but our department should be more than the sum of its parts. At the end of the day, we are an institution that is about people and so it matters what people you put in what places, especially in the regional bureaus. It is critical to put people there who have enough self-assurance and initiative that they’re going to push the policy limits.

How do you encourage a less risk-averse approach among leaders and more junior officers?

You have to learn from the generation before you. I learned from Pickering, for example, who never liked getting an instruction from Washington and that was his approach during an era when you actually got instructions.

Is there a formula for success in the foreign service?

I’ve always been skeptical of any formula for success or of proscribing a particular job or job path. I used to talk to all the A-100 classes and I was always surprised how many of the most junior officers in the service had come in already thinking they need to have a 15-year plan. I would tell them that I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but serendipity counts for a lot and that there’s no perfect pathway. I came into the service in 1982 and one of my first bosses was Dick Murphy, who was the Assistant Secretary for NEA. Dick had spent 34 out of 37 of his years in the foreign service outside of Washington. He was very proud of it—almost all of it in the Arab world. That model has shifted a lot. Now most successful officers have split time between overseas and Washington because I don’t think you can function in either environment well unless you know the other. That’s changed from a couple generations ago. I think also instead of just investing entirely in one hard language or in one part of the world, more common is that people have worked in or focused on two parts of the world. That’s a very healthy thing. It’s more common now to get experience outside of the Department itself which is also a positive. It partly depends on numbers in how flexible you can be. I worked as a relatively junior FSO on the NSC staff and you learn a lot there—about how the White House and the executive branch in general works, how it should work, how it shouldn’t work.

If you look at the Foreign Service of the future, I think the same will be true in terms of people getting experience in the world of technology; while I’m not one of those who thinks you can move away from the model of having a cadre of career officers who spend their whole careers in the service, but the Department should become more flexible as it looks ahead at encouraging opportunities for people to serve for a couple of years. This could encourage more creativity, but for new models and to allow for more out-of-state experiences like on the Hill, and budgets matter because you need funding for personnel at state first.

So, do we need more specialized officers and move away from the career generalist track?

Having experts on technology and climate does not mean we should move away from the generalist model. It still will be valuable to have a distinction between the civil and foreign service. There’s a reason there is a foreign service and have people willing to go back and forth overseas and make sacrifices for their families and that’s important, but we need to be more flexible. Civil service flexibility is important as well, and that’s changed over the past 20 years as a function of 9-11 and the conflicts that followed it. Trying to retain flexibility for the civil service is important but I do think there’s a healthy distinction between the two services.

How does our service compare to some other countries’ diplomatic corps?

The Chinese have been expanding pretty dramatically and some smaller services such as the Irish are also expanding their service. Some countries have historically punched above their weight due to their excellent services, such as the Singaporeans. The Foreign Service has nothing to be apologetic about. We still attract good people. Probably in hard languages we could do better. The Russian diplomatic service fell on hard times in the 90s but still there’s an emphasis on hard languages that you don’t always get in our service. But by and large, the US Foreign Service competes with anybody. I don’t think the answer is always in numbers. Where I think certainly you could expand it a bit is in funding so you have the space to do training, to do all the things like provide the opportunity to serve in other parts of the government that you don’t always get right now. Overseas, quality always matters more than quantity.

Any lessons from other organizations on training we could or should apply?

There are some things the U.S. military could teach us, as they are particularly good at after-action reports and in learning from successes as well as mistakes. We’re not so good at that. There’s this conceit—that I at least was always guilty of—which is we react well to shifting circumstances but don’t look at the past case studies of negotiations or otherwise and incorporate these lessons into our training. We’ve been starved for a budget and so that’s as much as anything made it hard to take a more serious approach to training. The military also focuses more on leadership. There are way too many people who rise to pretty senior levels of the foreign service and who are subpar leaders because they’re good at managing up and occasionally managing over, but they’re lousy at managing down. I don’t know if training is the solution to that, although it’s probably part of it. But it’s more being careful about who you put where and then holding them to account. Successful diplomacy is not just a measure of what agreements you reached during your tenure as Ambassador to country X or the eloquence of your cables, or whatever. It’s how you treat people; how you mentor; how you manage morale at post; how you manage families. You know, there are lots of really good Chiefs of Mission out there who do all that. But all too often people rise too high without developing these skills.

How did you determine how widely to share your approach to sensitive negotiations?

With Iran, and to the extent I was involved in the Bin Laden stuff, the tightness of the circle regarding information sharing was enforced from the White House so there wasn’t really a multiple choice test in terms of how you expanded the circle. My own bias is towards being more transparent just because I think you always have to be conscious of the day after an agreement is reached and how you sell it to people. I can remember how pissed off some of our European colleagues were when they found out we had been negotiating on Iran for quite a while. So I actually stretched the bounds in a couple of cases and told people who I trusted because I thought they should hear it from me before they heard the news elsewhere. So that’s where initiative matters. In other negotiations that are more open and not so secretive as those ones were, it’s really important to err on the side of transparency. Just because you’re trying to be mindful of the fact you’re going to have to sell an agreement afterwards, so whether it’s with regard to the Hill—during the U.S.-Soviet arms control negotiations in the late Soviet period, there were Senate observer groups, and such a program may seem small but can be a really good investment when it comes time for a vote or when you need support. We should be more structured in investing time with members of Congress or others to inform them about what we are trying to do.

You mention Capitol Hill, how about managing relations with the press and sharing with them?

I always found if you can’t explain a policy publicly, generally that means you’ve got a problem with the policy. You need allies and friends not just on the takeoff as you head to negotiations, not so much because you need them for the negotiations, but you need them for the landing. That’s a mistake we consistently make generation after generation that we try to get the press and the public on board after we have already made a decision or a deal.

What can or should we do about relations with Russia?

I don’t think you’re going to “fix” it or “solve” the problem of Putin’s Russia, but you can manage it and that’s the best you can hope for. I have a narrow point and then a broader point. The narrow point on Russia is realistically that for some time, we will be operating within a pretty narrow band in dealing with Putin’s Russia from the sharply competitive to the nastily adversarial. Now within that band, you can be creative. For example, we ought to be negotiating right now an extension of the New START agreement. There’s things we ought to be talking to the Russians about on Arctic issues, Afghanistan, and so, you need guardrails even in the most adversarial relationship. Putin’s Russia is not ten feet tall. We should be confident enough that if we manage our relationship within those guardrails well enough that over time you will get the upper hand. The broader point beyond Russia is that we’ve also got to be honest though and recognize the landscape is in the process of transformation. This is not the world I knew throughout most of my own career. It’s a world in which we are no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block, with the rise of China. With huge, overarching challenges like climate change, and efforts ongoing to maximize the benefits in the revolution in technology while minimizing the dislocations. You know, that’s actually exciting for American diplomacy but it’s a lot different than the world we knew before. And we always had a tendency to think we could restore the status quo ante. It’s a balance between recognizing we have a better hand to play than anybody else, but that our window for playing it is not going to stay open forever. And therefore, diplomacy, in that process, actually matters more now than it did in the post-Cold War era—the first 25 years after the Cold War—or even during the Cold War itself because it’s a much more competitive and contested international landscape. So that’s sort of the broader backdrop against which we have to try and manage—and I do think that’s probably the right verb—relations with a resurgent but certainly revisionist major power like Russia or a rising power with its own internal challenges in China.

Most Americans don’t need to be persuaded of the value of American engagement, but they don’t entirely buy that we are disciplined or can be disciplined in our approach because they’ve seen too many examples: Iraq 2003, management of the 2008-9 global financial crisis. Mistakes we’ve made in administrations of both parties have caused people to be skeptical. It is a mistake to assume that it is other people’s responsibility to manage domestic support for our diplomacy and engagement. The good news is there are people you can connect with and make allies with that we didn’t always think of in the past. Every Secretary of State I’ve known goes out and does these heartland speeches, going all the way back to Kissinger—it’s a good thing—but you know, it’s just a start. So that’s also something they should look at—how to connect more with mayors and governors and people across the United States.

What can the State Department do to be more strategic?

Good question, as traditionally we’re crappy at being strategic and that’s where we get criticized historically from the White House and that’s part of the reason you’ve seen so much centralization of authority and decision-making. It’s a rare combination in the foreign service to find someone who can think strategically and also be operationally effective. You get people who are one or the other; mostly the operationally effective part. But you need to do both and you need to be able to navigate effectively in Washington and overseas. You want Chiefs of Mission to take the initiative. How do you devolve authorities downward in the building and outward overseas to make this possible? That depends almost entirely on the quality of people you put in positions, but the reciprocal obligation is for those Chiefs of Mission or those desk officers to have a sense of initiative. Leaders have to accept the fact that (a) sometimes people are going to do things in a different way than you would and (b) they will sometimes screw up and you’re going to get heat for it. You’ve got to be able to stand up for people when you know that they went about this in the right way. As long as when people make mistakes, they were honest ones or they were difficult to foresee ones, we should support people and encourage that initiative, but all too often in the Department, people head for the hills and you’re on your own if you screw up.

It’s a mark of effective leadership to empower the people who work for you and then to make the right choices so that you’re putting people who are capable of doing well in those positions. Our personnel system works best when you invest in people and have Assistant Secretaries who have to make the case for people. It is important to take a step back and not look at personnel choices in the narrow way of filling X post and here are the four people on the list, but to look at here are the 40 people that we think are going to rise to really responsible positions that just crossed the senior ranks. Let’s think about what are the next two or three things that each of them needs to do so that ten years from now they’re going to be in a position where they can be undersecretaries or ambassadors. We don’t do that very well. We are a small enough institution that it shouldn’t be hard to do. But the great thing about all of this is these are not impossible tasks. This is not like having to move the U.S. military here or there or the intelligence community. There’s a virtue in being a small institution. Or there should be anyway.