Talking to Strangers

Improving American Diplomacy at Home and Abroad

Monteagle Stearns

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400828463
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

In this discerning book, Monteagle Stearns, a former career diplomat and ambassador, argues that U.S. foreign policymakers do not need a new doctrine, as some commentators have suggested, but rather a new attitude toward international affairs and, most especially, new ways of learning from the Foreign Service. True, the word strangers in his title refers to foreigners. However, it also refers to American foreign policymakers and American diplomats, whose failure to "speak each other's language" deprives American foreign policy of realism and coherence. In a world where regions have become more important than blocs, and ethnic and transnational problems more important than superpower rivalries, American foreign policy must be better informed if it is to be more effective. The insights required will come not from summit meetings or television specials but from the firsthand observations of trained Foreign Service officers.Stearns has not written an apologia for the American Foreign Service, however. Indeed, his criticism of many of its weaknesses is biting. Ranging from a description of Benjamin Franklin's mission to France to an analysis of the Gulf War and its aftermath, he offers a balanced critique of how American diplomacy developed in reaction to European models and how it needs to be changed to satisfy the demands of the twenty-first century. Full of examples drawn from Stearns's extensive experience, Talking to Strangers addresses the problems that arise not only from an overly politicized foreign policy process but also from excessive bureaucratization and lack of leadership in the Foreign Service itself. Anyone interested in our nation's future will benefit from reading Stearns's pull-no-punches analysis of why improving American diplomacy should be a matter of urgent concern to us all.

CHAPTER ONE

The New Frontiers of American Diplomacy

Foreign policy can raise or lower the cost of your home mortgage, can give you a job, and can take it away. Foreign policy can affect the air you breathe. Foreign policy can determine the future of American security and the fate of American values.
(Winston Lord, National Press Club, July 22, 1992)

THE LOSS of an enemy can be as disorienting as the loss of a friend. The collapse of communism has revealed a world that existed virtually unseen while the attention of Americans was riveted on the superpower confrontation. It is a world as unfamiliar to generations schooled in the cold war as the universe revealed by Copernicus was to generations schooled to believe that the Earth stood motionless at the center of the universe while other bodies in the Solar System revolved around it. And just as the heliocentric universe of Copernicus transformed the science of astronomy, so the post-cold war world requires a new approach to international relations and to diplomacy.

Nations are not constellations and diplomacy is not a science. The best we can hope to develop is an international system centered on the proposition that on a shrinking globe the common problems of nation-states deserve as much attention as do their individual problems. The frontiers of American diplomacy will have to undergo significant expansion, even as the core skills of the diplomatic profession—representation, management, communication, and negotiation—are significantly improved.

American diplomacy struggled to meet the needs of the old world. It will require drastic reform to meet those of the new. The United States may be the only remaining military superpower, but in its approach to diplomacy it too often looks like the only remaining banana republic. There is a great deal that is wrong with the way we formulate, implement, and manage U.S. foreign policy. Ingenuous zeal replaces knowledge of the history and dynamics of other cultures; enthusiasm and frenetic activity replace patience and intelligent skepticism; and the illusion that foreign affairs is a series of excellent adventures replaces the reality that it is a turbulent but flowing process of change and synthesis. In the American vernacular, “diplomatic” usually means insincere and evasive, “undiplomatic” honest and straightforward.

Professionalism is prized in the United States in virtually all professions except diplomacy. So are the rewards of merit. The reason that neither is thought essential to the conduct of U.S. foreign policy lies in our history, our national temperament, and our form of government. It also lies in misconceptions we have about what diplomacy is intended to achieve, how it is most effectively employed to protect our national interests abroad, and what the proper relationship should be between professional diplomats and political policymakers.

Our closest allies take diplomacy more seriously than we do. So do our adversaries. In its day, even the Soviet Union, not a state that relied on diplomacy if intimidation was an option, managed its foreign service less cavalierly than do most American administrations. In the training they gave their young diplomats, especially language training, the Soviets were light years ahead of us. Typically, promising candidates for the Soviet Foreign Service were identified in secondary school and, after passing their entry examinations, spent five and a half years in a diplomatic prep school (the Moscow State Institute for International Relations). The orientation training of U.S. Foreign Service officers, including language training, is less than a year. Officers are lucky to get more than a year or two of additional training in their entire careers.

Much will have to be changed in our diplomacy to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world, starting with our mistaken assumption that, under the skin, all peoples are just like us and are prevented from agreeing with us, when they do not, only by their misguided leaders. This appealing but simplistic view of human nature helped put us up the Mekong without a paddle in Indochina and later into the Somali desert to feed starving children, some of whom ended up shooting at us or being shot. It complicates our efforts to place American relations with Russia on a new, more constructive basis because it fails to take sufficiently into account a fundamental truth expressed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn when he returned to Russia in 1994 after twenty years of exile. National renewal, he said, would not result from simply grafting onto Russia the experience of the West because “Our life, spiritual and otherwise, must be formed from our own tradition, our understanding, our atmosphere.”¹

Indeed, American tradition, understanding, and atmosphere are not universally applicable. Consider how the national ethos is embodied in the American western film genre, a native art form that carries within it, as one critic has observed, “habits of perception that shape our sense of the world.”² The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, for example, a 1962 John Ford film that often turns up on late-night television, perfectly reflects what might be termed the iconographic American view of conflict, conflict resolution, and diplomacy. It is also unique among westerns in that the protagonist actually becomes a diplomat. James Stewart returns in retirement to the town of Shinbone, where years before he first hung out his shingle as a lawyer. A lawless cowtown when he first arrived, Shinbone has grown and been civilized in the years since Stewart was beaten up and humiliated by a gang of ruffians, led by Lee Marvin, whom the young lawyer tried ineffectually to bring to justice. Stewart had finally redeemed his honor when he shot it out with Marvin and was credited by the townspeople with killing him. The renown Stewart achieved as the man popularly supposed to have “shot Liberty Valance” is sufficient, we are led to believe, to launch him on a brilliant career of public service that includes terms as governor and United States senator and is crowned by his appointment as ambassador to the Court of St. James. Only at the end of the film, in a flashback, do we learn that law and order was brought to Shinbone not by Stewart but by John Wayne, the film’s true hero, who had arranged for a sidekick to shoot the villainous Marvin from a concealed vantage point and for Stewart to get the credit.

The film is an expression of the abiding American distrust of those whose professional goal is compromise—usually lawyers or diplomats (or, in the case of the Stewart character, both). By temperament and tradition, we are less likely to regard diplomacy as the achievement of national objectives by means short of the use of force than as compromising objectives that the use of force would more reliably achieve. In the circumstances, it is not surprising that presidents and secretaries of state so often resort to images of the western frontier when they discuss American foreign policy. Dean Rusk said of the Cuban missile crisis, “we were eyeball to eyeball and the other guy blinked”; in an interview with an Italian journalist Henry Kissinger compared himself to the “lone cowboy”; spokesmen for the Nixon administration described its withdrawal strategy from Vietnam as “backing out of the barroom shooting.” The language in each case is intended to suggest uncompromising diplomacy and the ability to go it alone.

During the period of the cold war, American foreign policy focused on the containment of the Soviet Union and its satellites. As long as the United States was able to maintain the level of preparedness that defense and intelligence analysts said was necessary for military parity with the Soviet Union, the objectives to be achieved by diplomacy, except in the field of arms control, were distinctly secondary. In a pinch, as Kissinger once said, we could “overwhelm problems with our resources.”

In a different world, whose ground rules have yet to be defined, our ability to achieve national objectives by means short of force—by means that do not require disproportionate expenditure of our resources—will be of prime importance. The military success of the United States in the Gulf War does not invalidate this estimate. In the first place, the financial cost of the war was defrayed by substantial contributions extracted from our allies by a diplomatic effort as intensive as the military campaign it supported. In the second place, President Bush’s claim that military action against Iraq was necessary to create “a new world order” looks decidedly premature and has not, in any event, been followed by action on an equivalent scale in other trouble spots.

DIPLOMACY OF THE GULF WAR

We do not know whether the Gulf War will prove to be the first police action of the new world order or, as now seems more likely, the last of the old. Whichever it is, the Bush administration showed that it was far more comfortable waging the war than defining its precise objectives and the outcome that would fully justify it. Having wooed the Iraqi dictator with agricultural export credits and conciliatory words up until the eve of his invasion of Kuwait, the administration never quite recovered its balance. The impression was unavoidable that in withdrawing the hand of friendship it had extended to Saddam Hussein and turning it into a clenched fist, the administration had failed to take into consideration all of the consequences of military intervention and all of the alternatives to it.

The Gulf War, in fact, illustrates the tendency of American foreign policy to define military actions not in the Clauswitzian sense of a “continuation of policy by other means” but as the final phase of policy beyond which there is only victory or defeat. Our diplomacy was most effective when it was working to create and sustain a consensus supporting military action. When it came to the diplomatic and political ends to be served by the Gulf War, the attention of senior administration officials seemed to wander and their voices to become more discordant. Diplomatic planning to anticipate the likely effect of the war (on the Iraqi Kurds and Shiite Moslems, or on Saddam Hussein himself) appeared to be almost nonexistent. The problems created for Turkey, first by the massive influx of Iraqi Kurds, then by stirring up the grievances of Turkish Kurds, seem to have taken the administration by surprise. One need not conclude from this that the administration’s failure lay in its refusal to march into Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein. On the contrary, it can be argued that such an outcome would have saddled the United States and its allies with responsibilities for the occupation and governance of Iraq that they were incapable of discharging. What can be said is that having prudently chosen more limited objectives, the administration should have shunned the language and tactics of total warfare and better weighed the political consequences of the policy it adopted.

While a fresh approach to the Arab-Israeli problem emerged from the dust of battle, it seemed to come almost as an afterthought and to capitalize too slowly on the altered balance of power in the region. There were signs that the State Department’s Middle Eastern specialists, several of whom had received more public censure than their political superiors for carrying out the administration’s policy of improving relations with Saddam Hussein before the Gulf War, were not consulted by the administration’s leadership or informed of its intentions.

Foreign policy cannot work in this fashion. The absence of trust and the increasingly cluttered and obstructed lines of communication between top administration officials and their career staffs at home and abroad contribute greatly to the lack of foresight and follow-through that characterizes many of our recent foreign policy initiatives. They account as well for the often spasmodic and superficial quality of American diplomacy after the triumphs of the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine.

THE VIENNA CONVENTION AND AMERICAN MORALITY

The traditional purpose of diplomacy is succinctly expressed in the preamble to the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations in which the signatories, including the United States, after affirming their respect for the principles of the United Nations Charter “concerning the sovereign equality of States, the maintenance of international peace and security, and the promotion of friendly relations among nations,” go on to express their belief “that an international convention on diplomatic intercourse, privileges and immunities [will] contribute to the development of friendly relations among nations, irrespective of their differing constitutional and social systems.”³ The scope of diplomatic action is carefully circumscribed by Article 41:

Without prejudice to their privileges and immunities, it is the duty of all persons enjoying such privileges and immunities to respect the laws and regulations of the receiving State. They also have a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of that State. All official business with the receiving State entrusted to the [diplomatic] mission by the sending State shall be conducted with or through the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the receiving State or such other ministry as may be agreed.⁴

No attempt is made to distinguish moral shades of sovereignty—whether power was acquired democratically or by inheritance or by coup d’etat—nor between just and unjust laws. The assumption behind the Vienna Convention is that diplomacy is the method by which sovereign states, equal under international law, conduct business with each other. This same assumption underlies all diplomatic conferences since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 that have sought to codify the rules of international conduct. Westphalia created a “states system,” which, it was thought, would improve the prospects for peace in Europe by acknowledging the sovereign powers of rulers within their own borders and restraining them from interfering in the internal affairs of other states. It was hoped that this would prevent a recurrence of the religious wars that had convulsed Europe for more than a century. If confessional issues were treated as domestic affairs they could be removed from the diplomatic agenda and there would be one less casus belli to trouble the peace of Europe.

The American diplomatic method, which will be examined in detail in subsequent chapters, has never fully embraced so limited a view of the scope of foreign affairs. From the time Woodrow Wilson justified American entry into the First World War on the grounds that it would make the world “safe for democracy,” to Ronald Reagan’s denunciation of the Soviet “evil empire,” American presidents have insisted, and the American public has expected, that foreign policy serve some purpose larger than regulating the nation’s external affairs. The United States has been, in other words, resolutely pre-Westphalian in declaring the aims of its foreign policy even as it has accepted the restraints on diplomatic practice embodied in the Vienna Convention and its predecessors.

The tension this produces in the relations of American policymakers and American diplomats has been evident in every administration since Wilson’s and has appeared to grow rather than abate. While congressional attitudes on individual foreign policy issues vary, the weight of congressional opinion has also tended to be pre-Westphalian in the sense that moral judgments on the conduct, whether internal or external, of foreign states come easily to members of Congress and carry few political liabilities at home. When Congress in 1976 charged the State Department with the responsibility for preparing annual public reports evaluating the human rights record of each country receiving U.S. military or economic assistance, the Carter administration welcomed the move as consistent with its own desire to make respect for human rights in other countries a prime objective of U.S. foreign policy. It was American diplomats who were unenthusiastic about what they called “human rights report cards” and who predicted (correctly) that the administration would have trouble coming up with an accurate yardstick and applying it with consistent objectivity.

In carrying out U.S. foreign policy, American diplomats need to square the restraints of the Vienna Convention with the expectations of the political leadership and the public. The fit is never comfortable. It contributes to the ambivalence with which the profession of diplomacy is viewed in the United States and to the amount of fiddling with the machinery of foreign affairs that goes on in the name of making American diplomacy “responsive” or bringing it “up-to-date.” Viewed from the standpoint of the Vienna Convention, American diplomats have generally been more up-to-date than foreign policy commentators and opinion leaders who seemed to be advocating a return to the religious warfare that Europe had abandoned in the seventeenth century as too Manichaean and too costly.

LIMITATIONS OF TRADITIONAL DIPLOMACY

The thesis of this book is not by any means, however, that the world would be a safer place and its affairs more easily regulated if only states uniformly observed strict adherence to the rules of the Vienna Convention. Traditional diplomacy, well intentioned though it is, civilized as it tries to be, is simply not equipped to address the kinds of international problems that are emerging or, more accurately, are becoming visible after the cold war. The Vienna Convention, with its convenient distinction between internal and external affairs, leaves too many problems uncovered, including perhaps the most important one taught to us by World War II, that the punishment foreign tyrants mete out to their own people eventually will be extended to the rest of us if they are given the chance.

On a more practical and immediate plane, the way states deal with each other and the problems they need to solve have probably changed more in the last forty years than in the previous four hundred, since the time, that is, when the rudiments of modern diplomacy first began to take shape in Renaissance Italy. Diplomatic forms have changed too, of course, but surprisingly little, in either the last forty years or the last four hundred. Diplomacy now as then is basically the conduct of a dialogue between states through their authorized representatives. The principal difference is not in the centra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter One: The New Frontiers of American Diplomacy
• Chapter Two: The Diplomacy of Reason
• Chapter Three: The Diplomacy of Doctrine
• Chapter Four: The Diplomacy of Process
• Chapter Five: Diplomacy as Representation
• Chapter Six: Diplomacy as Management
• Chapter Seven: Diplomacy as Communication
• Chapter Eight: Diplomacy as Negotiation
• Chapter Nine: Improving the Reach of American Foreign Policy
• Chapter Ten: Improving the Grasp of American Diplomacy
• Notes
• Index