Foreign Policy
Most of us don’t think we are cut out to be doctors or engineers. Then why do so many of us believe we can be diplomats? Does one need training or a particular background to become a U.S. ambassador? I find myself asking these questions every time I hear about a failed non-career ambassador.
President Obama promised change in Washington, but he continued the decades-long tradition of dishing out ambassadorial posts to people whose only “qualifications” were their big donations to his election campaign. As I’ve written before, the American Academy of Diplomacy and the American Foreign Service Association have called him out on this disgraceful practice.
Many of those political appointees actually do a fine job. Although the two weeks of training they get at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute are grossly insufficient, they work hard to understand what it takes to handle the international relations of the United States, and what the daily conduct of diplomacy requires from them as civil servants.
But then there are those who think they already know what an ambassador should do and care little about tradition and bureaucracy. None of us admits to liking bureaucracy and we all express disdain for bureaucrats from time to time.
That’s exactly what Douglas W. Kmiec, the U.S. ambassador to Malta, did last week. He blasted a report by the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which criticized him for neglecting his overall duties and engaging in “outside activities [that] have detracted from his attention to core mission goals.”
Instead of focusing on broader foreign policy and national security issues, Kmiec has been spending most of his time promoting his Roman Catholic faith, mainly by writing various articles and speaking about religion, as well as issues such as abortion.
Following the OIG report, Kmiec offered Obama his resignation, vehemently rejecting the investigation’s findings. “I doubt very much whether one could ever spend too much time on this subject,” he wrote in a letter to the president.
Unwittingly, Kmiec hit the nail right on the head. No single issue, with the exception of very few vital national security matters, deserves the time and attention the ambassador has apparently spent on religion. He is certainly not the first political appointee to make one issue the sole emphasis of his tenure.
Previous ambassadors have dedicated themselves to very noble causes, including raising awareness about terrible deceases. A prime example is the focus on fighting cancer that marked Nancy Brinker’s stint as ambassador to Hungary at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration. While that was enormously helpful, many of Brinker’s subordinates and other State Department employees felt that other important issues suffered as a result.
Kmiec is a well-respected law professor and former legal adviser in the Reagan White House. I don’t know him, and I usually try to avoid criticizing people who are my father’s age for no good reason. But just because he has been successful in his field and donated a lot of money to Obama’s 2008 campaign doesn’t necessarily make him a good ambassador by default.
The U.S. Embassy in Malta, which I have visited, may be small, but it still has representatives of many federal agencies with sometimes competing interests and needs to be run by the ambassador in the best possible way. Supporters of appointing political ambassadors often laud their personal relationship with the president, but what good does that relationship do if it’s not put to an effective use?
Obama deserves credit despite his failure to end the longtime practice. He has just launched his re-election campaign and needs support from conservatives like Kmiec, so his resignation is an unnecessary distraction. However, Obama has not tried to defend Kmiec, who said he would leave his post in the summer.
One would hope that the president will think twice before rewarding campaign donors with embassies if he wins the 2012 election. Kmiec is not Obama’s first political ambassador to be embarrassed by an OIG report. As I wrote in February, Cynthia Stroum, ambassador to Luxembourg, was forced to resign because of her poor management style and serious damage done to her embassy.
Kmiec has said he was not pressured to resign and made the decision without outside intervention.
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The silver lining for U.S. diplomats of this week’s WikiLeaks release of secret State Department cables is that there is more buzz about their work than there has been in years. Even though it’s for the wrong reasons, it provides a chance to use the public attention for a serious debate on modern diplomacy.
The general public usually hears about diplomats when there is a spy scandal, or when a diplomat is arrested for selling U.S. entry visas to foreigners — for money or sex.
Members of the U.S. Foreign Service often complain that it’s an unknown entity to the very people diplomats represent abroad. My extensive research in the last seven years confirms that concern. Most Americans have no idea what their representatives do every day — and many have no interest in learning about it, either.
How can that change? Although individual diplomats sometimes give talks at universities and other venues, there is much more the State Department can do in a concerted effort to educate Americans. For decades, the department was banned from interacting with domestic audiences — not to be seen as engaging in propaganda — but times have changed, and the substance of the outreach I have in mind would be very different.
My press colleagues and I have witnessed many excellent town-hall meetings Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has done around the world. It’s easy to see the tremendous impact those exchanges have on the people in those rooms. Why not hold such events in the United States? The interest in Clinton’s persona could translate in more curiosity about diplomacy and the Foreign Service.
In fact, this is a good time for a public discussion of the future of diplomacy and the Foreign Service.
The duties of Foreign Service officers have changed so much in the last two decades that they no longer truly reflect the traditional job description of a diplomat — helping to defeat an insurgency is certainly not what most people expect when they join the service.
The Oxford English dictionary provides two definitions of diplomacy. The first is “the (skill of) management of a country’s affairs by ambassadors and ministers living overseas,” and the second is “(the skill of) dealing with people so that business is done smoothly.”
During my visits to more than 50 U.S. embassies and in interviews with hundreds of Foreign Service officers, I got the sense that many of them were confused about what exactly they were supposed to be doing and why. The problem was not that they were sitting around with nothing to do, but that there was a lot to be done, and to prioritize well, they needed to know what exactly was expected of them.
In recent years, diplomats have been asked to prevent conflicts, broker peace, drum up support for war, sell unpopular policies, help build nations and improve America’s image abroad. They have stretched the definition of a diplomat to include everything from a diligent bureaucrat with good analytical and writing skills who knows the workings of Washington, to a charming and persuasive socialite, to a fearless mover and shaker venturing into war zones.
But should all Foreign Service officers be doing all those things? If the answer is yes, the State Department should make significant changes in the way it recruits, trains and promotes American diplomats.
More broadly, what kind of Foreign Service should the United States have in the 21st century?
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As U.S. and other NATO troops continue to die in Afghanistan, one of the main questions being asked in foreign policy circles is this: How committed are Arab governments to defeating al Qaeda and the Taliban? The United Arab Emirates showed last week that fighting violent extremism is less important than its commercial airlines’ well-being.
Most governments around the world help their carriers in various ways, not only out of national pride, but because a strong airline has a positive impact on a country’s economy. One of the missions of every U.S. embassy is to promote trade and commerce that benefit American companies. That has become an organic part of modern diplomacy.
The UAE, however, has gone farther than most countries do by kicking Canada out of Camp Mirage, a military base used to support operations in Afghanistan. Why? Because Ottawa refused to succumb to the tremendous pressure Abu Dhabi applied in the last several months to secure a significant expansion of flights to Canada for the UAE’s two largest airlines, Emirates and Etihad.
By doing so, the UAE has not only shown that its carriers’ profitability is more important than maintaining good foreign relations — it also risks harming the security of NATO members, and in fact regional and global stability.
The UAE’s ambassador to Canada, Mohammed Abdullah Al-Ghafli, expressed frustration with Canada’s rejection of his government’s demands, saying that “will only negatively impact the populations and economies of both countries.” His prediction may be correct, and some Canadians no doubt share it. Among them is Calgary Mayor David Bronconnier, who said in February that “airlines such as Emirates have an enormous ability to add to our economic vibrancy, business and tourism activity.”
Both Emirates and Etihad have an excellent reputation, and many travelers are happy about their success and wish them no ill. Their well-being is actually good for consumers, because it boosts competition and pushes other carriers to improve. Their competitors, on the other hand, feel differently, accusing Emirates and Etihad of receiving unfair assistance from the UAE government.
However one feels about the two carriers’ growth, holding defense and security hostage to commercial aviation is questionable at best.
The UAE sought to increase the current three flights a week to Toronto by both Emirates and Etihad to daily, and to add flights to Calgary and Vancouver. Air Canada naturally objected, though other airlines would have been affected, too. Many passengers traveling from the Middle East and South Asia to North America now fly first to Europe on Air Canada’s Star Alliance partners Lufthansa, Swiss International Airlines, Britain’s BMI and Austrian Airlines, and some of them connect to Air Canada.
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The Obama administration is shifting the focus of U.S. public diplomacy efforts to play down the past emphasis on countering violent extremism in order to avoid offending foreign audiences opposed to terrorism.
Judith A. McHale, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, said in an interview with The Washington Times that “a very narrow segment” of the world’s population is at risk of turning to extremism, and the policies adopted by the Bush administration should be broadened.
“Looking back, there was such a focus on countering violent extremism that everything got swept into the same category or the same bucket,” Ms. McHale said. “So if you were teaching English in many countries around the world, it was described as part of our [counter-extremism] effort, whether or not the individuals you were teaching were ever at risk of becoming violent extremists”…
Continue reading about U.S. downplays extremism in foreign outreach
Part 1: Powell: ‘I am on the president’s agenda’
Part 2: Diplomats fight stuffed-white-shirt image
Part 3: Diplomacy adapts to new threats
Part 4: Cultural diplomacy pays off, envoys say
Part 5: Consular services changed after 9/11
Part 6: Embassy bombings spur security boost
Part 7: Diplomatic reorientation
Part 8: Ups and downs of diplomatic life
Continue reading about Foreign Service: America’s other army
