Career Diplomacy: Life and Work in the U.S. Foreign Service, Second Edition

6. Politics and Professionalism

118 6 Politics and Professionalism Tension between the professional foreign service and its political masters is inevitable. It can be invigorating or corrosive. The professionals are proud of their knowledge, skill, and experience, but it’s the elected officials and those they appoint who set the policies and vote the taxes and budgets to carry them out. Foreign service professionals must give effect to the policies of the administration and the laws of the land, even as the policies change and the laws are revised. To maintain the flexibility they need, many professionals try to hold themselves above politics. If they succeed, they succeed just barely, for try as they may they are in politics up to their eyeballs. There is no way around it. As members of the foreign service advance in their careers, they take on jobs of increasing responsibility and public presence . Whatever their position in closed-door debates, when ambassadors, their deputies, their press officers, and their senior aides deal with foreign officials or the public, they have to follow the official line and defend it vigorously . So do assistant secretaries, their deputies, and their office directors. All foreign service officers (FSOs) are commissioned by the president and, at least notionally, serve at his pleasure. They speak not only for their country but also for their government, which means for the administration in power. Once upon a time, the adage goes, politics stopped at the water’s edge. The adage belongs to Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who abandoned isolationism to support the Marshall Plan and the United Nations during Truman’s presidency. But bipartisanship in foreign policy was a bit of a myth even during Senator Vandenberg’s ascendancy (he died in 1951), and in recent years it has been rare and fleeting. One reason surely is that foreign policy is no longer foreign. Ambassador L. Craig Johnstone wrote in 1997, “Almost every international issue has a domestic consequent, more visible and direct than ever before. Almost Politics and Professionalism 119 every major domestic issue has an international component. The distinctions between domestic and foreign are gone.”1 The past decade has proven him right. How we respond to international terrorism affects our civil liberties, and how we define our liberties affects our response to terrorism. Taxing and spending decisions made in the US Congress affect the value of the trillion dollars of US bonds held by the Bank of China, and what China does with its holdings affects US economic welfare. How we deal with global warming affects spending by domestic business, and vice versa. Political differences over privacy, health care, bank regulation, or almost any other domestic issue have powerful implications for our foreign relations as well. Political clashes over foreign policy pose two questions for the foreign service: First, how does the foreign service remain professional while carrying out policies that may change radically with each election? Second, how can each new political leadership comfortably entrust its policies to a foreign service that had worked hard and effectively for the policies of its predecessor? Staying Professional The first question is less difficult than it seems. Diplomats represent their governments the way lawyers represent their clients. They do not speak for themselves. The placard on the green baize table says “United States,” not “Ambassador Patterson” or “Ms. Woods.” An FSO conducting official business always says “my government believes” or “the position of my government is.” An officer’s personal views are of no consequence and should never enter an official discussion. The result of this self-effacement is that when policies change, the foreign service—both as a whole and as individuals—can remain zealous advocates. It is still “my government believes” and “the position of my government is.” An FSO below the rank of ambassador or assistant secretary who becomes personally identified with a policy has probably let ego interfere with professional detachment. Sudden or radical changes in foreign policy may pose problems for the country’s international credibility and influence, but foreign service personnel have to cope as best they can. Henry Kissinger wrote that “frequent gyrations in our national direction demoralize the Foreign Service, as they do foreign nations.”2 But Tony Motley, a political ambassador and assistant 120 The Profession secretary of state in the Reagan administration, says partisan struggles over foreign policy should not be an issue for the foreign...