Interviews > Frank Wisner
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Please discuss the conduct of American Diplomacy
The work of American diplomacy is among the highest and most intellectually, physically and emotionally challenging of professions. I enjoyed and profited from every year of my 36 years in the Foreign Service and was honored to serve again for three years during the George W. Bush Administration, when I represented Secretary Rice in securing the independence of Kosovo. Diplomacy is an absorbing preoccupation; its calling remains with me every day since I left the Foreign Service in 1997.
Especially at this time when America faces fundamental questions about its role in the world, I am convinced, diplomacy offers a toolbox of instruments which can help us make our way to the necessary adjustments in America’s foreign affairs. Furthermore, I recognize the successful pursuit of diplomacy requires the highest quality professionals. They must be motivated by tremendous discipline, expertise, a sense of balance, nuance and deep patriotism. Indeed, the oath we take when we join the Foreign Service pledges us to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. That commitment has always been above politics and transient administrations and their policies.
In the pursuit of national policies, we must be clear about the role diplomacy plays. Diplomacy is about accomplishing objectives important to the United States without using force. In other words, it falls to an American diplomat to persuade others to do what is in our interests—making it possible for others to see that agreements reached with us serve their interests. Smart diplomacy is about building and maintaining alliances and coalitions, shaping international institutions to meet the needs of our times and offering platforms to accommodate fresh challenges—climate change being a leading example.
Lord Salisbury captured the spirit of the practice of diplomacy when in 1862, he wrote about Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, who took his life, after steering Britain’s fortunes through the Napoleonic wars. Salisbury said, “there is nothing dramatic in the success of a diplomatist, rather his successes are microscopic successes derived from sleepless tact, irrevocable calmness and a patience that no folly, no provocation, no bluster can shake.”
Salisbury’s remarks also capture why the practice of diplomacy is so ambiguous, ill-understood and little heralded. Diplomacy rarely results in the triumphs attributed to victory on military battlefields but it is every bit, indeed more, important.
With these words of introduction, let me address several points:
First, strategy. No diplomatic undertaking can succeed in the absence of strategy and strategy means a definition of goals, objectives, and the identification of the necessary resources to accomplish these. Strategy is grounded in a recognition of basic assumptions—our own and those across the table. An Indian diplomat once told me “he who controls the assumptions, controls the conclusions.” Conclusions are the raw material of strategy.
Foreign Service officers must identify basic assumptions and then define strategy or drive their political masters to set clear strategies. As the saying goes, in the absence of a defined destination, all roads will get there—as we have discovered—or nowhere.
In my lifetime, the absence of strategy in Viet Nam, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan contributed mightily to policy failure—failure which compromised American influence in the world and cost us dearly in blood and treasure. The issue is central to the future of the practice of American foreign policy. We must always ask ourselves were our assumptions correct and grounded in reality; did we have clear objectives; did we have a strategy to accomplish those objectives; have we devoted the resources sufficient to achieve the goals of our strategy; have we brought along our Congress and public and can we achieve what we set out to do in the time available to us. The last point is worth underscoring; many policies we pursue have a short shelf life and do not last beyond a single administration.
In personal terms, it became my habit each time I accepted an ambassadorial assignment to think through what I needed to accomplish during the years of my mission. I found it useful to draft a personal letter of instructions to accompany the official one which routinely accompanies an Ambassador to post and defines his authorities. To the best of my abilities, I sought to build consensus around strategy among the members of our country team, siloed as we were and I suspect you continue to be.
The issue of analysis, strategy, and matching goals with resources—both time and material—were thrust upon me in a more tangible way. Many in my generation of Foreign Service officers began their careers in Viet Nam; a majority of us were assigned to the pacification mission, just as the careers of many Foreign Service officers of your generation were asked to become nation builders in Iraq and Afghanistan— and with similarly disappointing results. We learned to cope with danger and we learned to make decisions. But it was my experience to assume, wrongly, pacification could contribute to the end we sought in Viet Nam—the defeat of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. Pacification was defined as taking advantage of a screen of main force units to reinsert intelligence, militia, administrative and economic development services, thereby winning back the political loyalty of populations hitherto lost to the enemy. Once an area was pacified, main forces would expand the area further—like an “ink spot” as the analogy went. We were told pacification was the way to win the war in Viet Nam and even to rebuild Vietnamese society. In a word, we sought to remake Viet Nam in a time of war, with insufficient appreciation of local history, realities and alliances. In addition, our pacified zones proved to be porous. The strategy was as wrongheaded in Viet Nam, as similar exercises were in Iraq and Afghanistan. No foreigner can succeed in changing another society, especially an ancient one, and certainly not in the time and with the resources the United States was prepared to devote.
Our failures of strategy in Viet Nam, Afghanistan and Iraq have undermined our influence in the world, depleted our resources and diminished domestic public support for America’s role in the world.
So my first lesson in American foreign policy is to define strategy.
Second, engaging Congress and the public. It was my experience throughout my career that my colleagues and I spent more time designing policy and executing it than we did in explaining ourselves to Congress and the public. I left my years in government convinced that the pursuit of any policy must entail constant attention to building support on Capitol Hill and with the American public. I entered government with the memory of World War II’s national and bipartisan consensus still alive. I failed to realize in time that Viet Nam destroyed that consensus. My generation did not understand our assumptions about the postwar order and America’s place in it had to be reorganized, reshaped and re-explained to our Congress, public and political leaders. We assumed that responsibility of maintaining the inherited order was sensible and achievable.
The pursuit of every policy must entail a significant percentage of time educating our domestic audiences. In a word, diplomacy is not only about convincing foreign audiences, it is also about building domestic support. The responsibility lies as much with America’s diplomats as it does with the Secretary of State and an administration’s political appointees.
One of the best policies of my career was the pursuit of constructive engagement in Southern Africa – Chester Crocker’s brilliant invention. Over the years, the United States had attempted to bring an end to South Africa’s apartheid and at the same time rid the region of Soviet and Cuban influence which intruded in the 1970’s. By aiming to accomplish multiple objectives, we succeeded in time to contribute to the end of apartheid, expelling the Cubans from Angola and securing Namibia’s independence. As smart as our approach was, we missed a big point – US public and congressional opinion. We hit huge opposition from Capitol Hill, the media and public, precisely because we failed to convince our own side that our policy was consistent with American ideals and interests. Our willingness to work with South Africa for it was - the dominant force in the region - left us tainted with the stain of apartheid. As a result, our diplomacy was weakened and the example of it was lost on successive generations of officers responsible for Africa policy.
Smart policy must include a pact between government, our elected representatives, and our people. We face today a huge gap between those of us who argue America has challenges and responsibilities abroad and a deeply skeptical American public and its elected representatives.
Third, the practice of diplomacy. These observations are neither all encompassing nor do they begin to cover all of what an aspiring diplomat needs to know. The practice of delivering instructions is one that comes to mind. A diplomat faces no more important task than convincing a foreign government or leader to accommodate the policy s/he is instructed to convey. When an Ambassador engages foreign leaders, s/he must do so without mincing their words or shading their message. An envoy need not fear that they will offend; rather they should remember a responsible foreign official wants to hear a clear, unambiguous message of the United States views. Of course, a diplomat must choose their words carefully and avoid insult or condescension but forthrightness should be the guiding principle.
Not all instructions are clear; too often they result from bureaucratic compromise and lack coherence. Here again, responsibility falls to the diplomat on the ground. S/he must produce a clear message which conveys the intent of the sender. The diplomat can be forgiven if s/he takes creative liberty in shaping their instruction.
I found practicing the delivery of a message with embassy colleagues in advance of meeting foreign officials so that I could anticipate the questions I would face.
In promoting human rights, especially in countries where they were abused is a tough job for American diplomats. On the one hand, a diplomat must remember defense of human rights is a core American principle and responsibility. On the other hand, s/he needs to understand our advocacy of human rights may be seen as undermining another government’s authority or its public perception of that government’s relationship with the United States. Unless skillfully and sensitivity handled, a human rights message may appear to call into question American support for a friendly regime. In addition, our definitions of human rights may run counter to deeply felt local habits and practices.
There is no perfect way to message human rights. I found that it was always best to deliver sensitive human rights messages to foreign leaders privately, eschewing public criticism which is, more often than not, seen as undermining a foreign leader’s authority. In public’s messaging, we are more successful with deeds – helping build institutions devoted to advancing the rule of law, for example, through leader grants and judicial exchanges.
Last on my list of observations – negotiations is at the heart of a diplomat’s profession. To negotiate successfully, an envoy must first understand the assumptions on which their opposite number bases their position. S/he is certain to be starting from a position of principle distant from our own and their views are certainly respectable. A clear reading of the other person’s assumptions is an important starting point in negotiations; most importantly it points to where eventual agreement can be achieved.
Our representative must also master their brief, including its technical details, the past negotiating record and the history of the issue under consideration. Our negotiators cannot afford to let their counterparts have a better command of facts and arguments than we have.
Frequently, negotiations hit dead ends. When this occurs, I found it is useful to change the framework of the negotiation and enlarge its circumference. For example, the United States tried unsuccessfully for years to persuade South Africa to live by Security Council resolutions which called for Namibia’s independence. Only when we enlarged the area of the negotiation and introduced questions of importance to South Africa did we succeed. The key to Namibia went through Angola and the elimination of the threat of Soviet and Cuban pressure on South Africa. Assuring South Africa its interests would be taken into consideration won us UNSCR implementation in Namibia and in turn contributed to the eventual end of Apartheid.
Can you expand on how you wrote your strategic letter before each ambassadorship?
Les Gelb always said that no diplomat should ever take a piss without a strategy. So he used to say that he applied this principle in practicing all aspects of diplomacy. When ambassadors go out to post, you're given a sort of boilerplate letter of instruction that tells you what you're responsible for but it doesn't offer you a strategy or a clear way to address the objectives of your mission and the way you should implement them. So that's what occurred to me particularly when I was getting ready to go to Egypt in late 1980s, so I decided to sit down and sort out objectives and a strategy to carry them out. And so I started preparing my own letter of instruction with a very careful study of the file before leaving Washington. I asked several questions: What was on the table? What has been done before? What were the key issues?
I looked at the history of the relationship to understand what we were trying to accomplish. I bolstered that study with intense briefings throughout the interagency, going to the NSC, Commerce, talking to the Intelligence Community, Agriculture, DOD, etc and getting a list of what each agency felt needed to be accomplished. I then sat down with former Chiefs of Mission to ask them about their experience and what issues they had worked on and wrestled with. Finally, I went and found as many external interlocutors with expertise on the country of my future assignment to get their views.
After that, I closed the door and wrote myself a letter of instruction, which I then took to the regional bureau Assistant Secretary (A/S) and said, here's what I am to do and here are the issues I want to work on. Once I had the A/S’ clearance, I had a strategy that set out my priorities and my plan of action so that when I got to the post I knew where I was headed. The next step was to mobilize the country team to implement the strategy. When arriving in my post of assignment, I would discover that there are only one or two people on the country team who think about everything as most people are focused just on their portfolio or area of expertise.
However, the key for a Chief of Mission as he/she begins his work is to enable people to get their particular jobs done and support them, but also to get them to understand the broader mission and context within which they are working. So selling the country team on the letter became very important. My next step virtually without exception was to ask even before I got to post was for the country team to outline a six-month plan of action for how I should use my time. So I arrived at post with a roadmap of how to approach my job from the country team’s perspective—what government officials and political leaders I needed to touch base, which former foreign ministers and what other key diplomats I should meet would be outlined. I asked for who I should meet among the local press and requested the team recommend several symbolic visits that would identify in the local mind the care and concern of the United States for the country and the relationship. I would in the first weeks give a speech at the local American Chamber of Commerce or some other body to spell out what I thought were the aims of American policy under my tutelage while I was there as Ambassador.
Once the six months were up, I would review our progress and see if I should revise the initial letter of instruction. Subsequent to that, each year of my assignment, I would do a review to ensure I still had a strategy that made sense. To supplement this strategic work, I would also sit down with the country team and review very carefully the staffing and resources to determine what each section saw as their job and ask what they needed to accomplish their goals. I would then offer my overall assessment to Washington along with requests for additional resources or changes in focus via reduced or increased staff.
When I left post, I would take the initial letter of instruction that I had wrote and assess how I had done, highlighting what remained to be done as a letter to my successor.
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