Nicholas Burns at the Christian Science Monitor wrote a great piece on the future of U.S. diplomacy.
Money quote(s):
"During these last 10 years, the US has fought two major land wars simultaneously. It has conducted an aggressive, controversial, and dangerous military campaign against terrorist groups from Iraq to the Afghan/Pakistan border to Somalia and Yemen. And America has transformed the way it defends itself from the terrorist threat at home and overseas.
The US has relied on the military to hit back when attacked or even threatened, to place first priority on building up defenses, and to sometimes shoot first and ask questions later. Much of this made sense in the months immediately following the shocking new threat that appeared with such sudden and terrible force in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001."
Students of strategy, grand or otherwise, already know that both military force and diplomacy are only two of the dimensions in which state (and non-state) actors operate.
DIME, anyone?
"(U)nlike the years following 9/11, the most difficult challenges ahead will require greater reliance on a combination of diplomacy and traditional statecraft and all that comes with it. That includes negotiating with odious regimes, threatening and cajoling them – but more often overcoming them through the strength of our political alliances – to get our way in the world.
This return of diplomacy to center stage in American foreign policy will take many different forms.
First, diplomacy is ascendant in the costly, ill-defined, and inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that will end not on the battlefield but at the negotiating table. President Obama’s decision to remove combat forces in Iraq and ask the State Department to lead at the end of this year is sensible and long overdue. The US will also need to negotiate its way out of Afghanistan in the next few years as a conventional military victory there is unattainable."
Note the "conventional" qualifier on "military victory" in that last sentence. Still an arguable proposition, not quite a foregone conclusion, and there's lots of room for discussion as to what "conventional" warfare actually involves.
"This renewed commitment to diplomacy is critical for America’s national strategy. It is the most practical and effective way to coalesce with allies and friends as well as to confront foes in the decade ahead. That is why leaders in Washington should make the same commitment to rebuild the State Department as they did with the Pentagon, CIA, and Homeland Security in the years following 9/11. Congress fully funded those three pillars of national security but starved the fourth and equally important pillar – diplomats and USAID professionals."
Strangely, the fourth pillar tends to be the least expensive of them all; which is ironically one reason it's so politically easy to call for cuts in diplomacy and (because they're not actually the same thing) foreign aid budgets.
Let me walk you through that thought: not only are the dollar amounts smaller, but since they tend not to be spent in any congressmen's districts, employing more than a handful of their constituents, there's no immediate political price to be paid by any individual congress person.
It's not that U.S. diplomats and USAID staff don't vote, even when assigned overseas, but they're so relatively few, so difusely dispersed throughout the U.S., that no single politician has more than a handful in their district.
Not only that, but those deployed abroad have to cast absentee ballots, which (along with military overseas ballots) tend to get tossed out on technicalities or only counted long after the election results are actually announced.
"After 9/11, President Bush essentially put the military on the front lines of America’s international engagement all over the world, with the diplomats in reserve. The military became in the minds of politicians and in the public imagination the default choice for dealing with international problems."
And Pres. Bush was, fairly obviously, correct to have done so, disagree though you may with how he prioritized those military campaigns or implemented them.
Of course, even with the military in the forefront, there was action in most of the other dimensions of national policy, if only in support of those military efforts.
"America will face in the next few years the most dangerous and complex set of international challenges in recent memory. As it returns to diplomacy, political leaders at home must also resist the pernicious allure of isolationism so evident on the extreme right and left of the political spectrum. Americans must instead renew their global leadership role as the country moves further away from the tragedy of 9/11 and encounters the more complex times ahead."
Isolationism is a sucker's game, even for relatively insular Americans, and the voters know it. The real question is to what degree U.S. will be engaged internationally and in what arenas.
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Who is the writer?
"Nicholas Burns is professor of the practice of diplomacy and international politics, and director of the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He served as under secretary of State for political affairs from 2005 to 2008. Previously, he was US ambassador to NATO."
Also:
"Burns served in the United States Foreign Service for twenty-seven years until his retirement in April 2008. He was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2005 to 2008; the State Department’s third-ranking official when he led negotiations on the U.S. – India Civil Nuclear Agreement; a long-term military assistance agreement with Israel; and was the lead U.S. negotiator on Iran’s nuclear program. He was U.S. Ambassador to NATO (2001–2005) and to Greece (1997–2001) and State Department Spokesman (1995–1997). He worked for five years (1990–1995) on the National Security Council at the White House where he was Senior Director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia Affairs and Special Assistant to President Clinton and Director for Soviet Affairs in the Administration of President George H.W. Bush. Burns also served in the American Consulate General in Jerusalem (1985–1987) where he coordinated U.S. economic assistance to the Palestinian people in the West Bank and before that, at the American embassies in Egypt and Mauritania.
Professor Burns has received twelve honorary degrees, the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award, the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service from the Johns Hopkins University, and the Boston College Alumni Achievement Award. He has a BA in History from Boston College (1978), an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (1980), and earned the Certificat Pratique de Langue Francaise at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (1977). He was a visiting Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in summer 2008."
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As the Foglio's might say, he's a "schmat" guy.
9/9
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