Foreign Service
President Obama is very smart and highly intelligent man who knew more about the world than most presidential candidates do before taking office. So why did he appoint a political ambassador whose tenure has been nothing short of a disgrace, just because she was a significant contributor to his election campaign?
There are some excellent political appointees, but Cynthia Stroum, ambassador to Luxembourg, wasn’t one of them. She was forced to resign last week, following a scathing report of her management style and the damage she did to her embassy by the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG).
I’ve covered the department for a decade and have rarely seen such a categorical, pointed and harsh document. Obama has every reason to be embarrassed.
“Most employees describe the ambassador as aggressive, bullying, hostile and intimidating, which has resulted in an extremely difficult, unhappy, and uncertain work environment,” the OIG report said after a two-month investigation last fall. “The bulk of the mission’s internal problems are linked to her leadership deficiencies, the most damaging of which is an abusive management style.”
Since Stroum assumed her post in December 2009, “most of the senior staff, including two deputy chiefs of mission (DCM) and two section chiefs, has either curtailed or volunteered for service in Kabul and Baghdad. Other U.S. staff members have also departed early,” the OIG said. “Of the seven permanent and temporary staff who served” as DCM, “only one has remained for longer than 6 months.”
Many ambassadors and their wives indulge in costly renovations of their residences, but Stroum apparently went too far. The OIG “believes that too many of the limited resources of this embassy have been allocated to issues related to her personal support,” the report said.
During a six-week period in 2010, an embassy employee spent 80 to 90 percent of his time searching for a temporary residence for Stroum. “In late summer, he and several other staff members, as well as the management officer, spent several days locating and purchasing an umbrella” for the ambassador’s new patio, it said.
Most career diplomats — and many others — think the practice of awarding campaign donors with ambassadorships, which began in the Kennedy administration, should be ended. The infamous WikiLeaks cables showed the general public how complex and intricate the work of U.S. diplomats is. Why do people think that anyone can do it? Would you let someone operate on you if they don’t have the necessary medical training?
In July 2009, I broke a story that the White House, unaware of historic norms, had been on track to give more than the usual 30 percent of ambassadorial posts to political appointees until objections from career diplomats forced it to reconsider. Overall, that number still holds, but according to a list of ambassadors maintained by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), so far Obama has appointed 60 percent career and 40 percent political ambassadors.
Although campaign fund-raising is not a sufficient qualification for being a U.S. ambassador, there is a case to be made that political appointees are useful from time to time. I’ve met several good ones over the years, including Howard Baker, a former Republican senator and White House chief of staff under President Reagan, who was President George W. Bush’s ambassador to Japan.
Even Foreign Service officers say that they need an outsider’s point of view and a fresh perspective on things every once in a while. Someone with Baker’s political skills, stature and connections in Washington can actually be a huge asset to an embassy and the country where he serves.
On the other hand, Stroum wasn’t quite qualified for the job — even in tiny Luxembourg — but it seems the White House didn’t much care about that. She is by no means the only one. Bush’s ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, Roy L. Austin, was the subject of two OIG reports. Before his appointment, Austin was a sociology professor at Pennsylvania State University — but his best achievement was that he befriended Bush when both studied at Yale University. He changed five DCMs during his tenure, but amazingly he survived all the eight years of the Bush administration.
So while I don’t expect political ambassadors to disappear, the White House should take their appointment much more seriously and consider their knowledge and skills before they start acting like kings and queens around the world.
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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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I began the week reminiscing about my travels with four secretaries of state, so I thought I’d end it by answering another question I’m frequently asked: What happened to the three secretaries I covered before Hillary Clinton? Starting with the most recent, they are Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright.
I’ve also been asked often about the differences between those former chief U.S. diplomats, especially during travel. I usually point out an obvious similarity among them first: None of them is a white male. In fact, the last secretary to fit that description was Warren Christopher, who left office in January 1997, when Albright ended the centuries-old tradition.
So here is a brief summary of my impressions and experiences with three people who had very different backgrounds but rose to the highest levels of the U.S. government and became household names around the world.
Condoleezza Rice
After handing the job over to Clinton in January 2009, Rice returned to Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., where she has spent most of her career, and where I first met her in January 2000. We did an interview for the Financial Times over a long breakfast at the famed Ricky’s Hyatt hotel, after which we drove — in our separate cars — to her office at the Hoover Institution.
I was a student at Harvard at the time and was first introduced to Rice indirectly through a book she co-authored with Philip Zelikow, “Germany Unified and Europe Transformed.” I thought she had a great story, and my editor in London agreed, so I sent Rice an e-mail message requesting an interview and she agreed to do it. I flew to San Francisco a day after my last final exam for the semester.
Condi, as she introduced herself, was utterly charming and exhibited great confidence while responding to my questions about various foreign-policy issues.
The next day, I was in New York to interview Barbara Walters, and I told her about the fascinating woman I’d just met, who might be national security adviser or secretary of state some day. Barbara’s reaction was, “She is not big enough for me yet.” In 2005, Barbara included Rice in her “10 Most Fascinating People” ABC special, but Rice declined to be interviewed. I take absolutely no credit for that decision.
In her first year as secretary, Rice was far from the confident woman I’d met five years earlier. On the plane, she appeared closed off and a bit insecure, which had a lot to do with getting used to the sudden and overwhelming public attention focused on a very private person.
That, of course, changed, and eventually she became one of the most influential secretaries of state in history, mainly because of her closeness to President George W. Bush. She recently published a book about her parents, which she has been promoting in the media, including on the “Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. A book about her experience in the Bush administration is planned to next year.
Colin Powell
I didn’t meet Powell until he was already secretary of state. I always had deep respect for him, but what impressed me on trips with him more than anything was his rare ability to hold meaningful conversations with various kinds of people — from a handyman or a cleaner to presidents and kings.
While Rice couldn’t wait to get back to her private cabin after a briefing on the plane, Powell spent a lot of time with us, often joking — and teasing me for being the youngest in the press corps. Looking back, perhaps that was an escape from the fierce battles he was fighting with Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who would often use his absence from Washington to outmaneuver him.
In 2004, I did an interview with Powell for an eight-part series on the Foreign Service, and he expressed anger with detractors who accused him of undermining Bush’s agenda — in fact, he called those accusations “bullshit,” but we couldn’t print that, even though he’d said it was “quotable.”
Still, I built the whole story around that theme, and he wasn’t happy about it. He told me so himself on a flight from Islamabad to Kabul, and that moment was captured on the above photo.
I’ve seen Powell several times since he left office, though not since last year’s White House Correspondents Dinner at the Washington Hilton. I’ve also been to his office in Alexandria, Va., from where his trusted assistant Peggy Cifrino runs most of his post-government life. He is on several boards and often gives speeches around the country and abroad.
From time to time, he resurfaces in the media — usually, on Sunday morning TV shows, as he did to endorse Barack Obama for president in 2008, or on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” where he appeared this week.
He stays very informed about current events and reads most foreign-policy stories in the press. Sometimes, he sends the reporters he knows comments about their articles, mostly to correct what he perceives as inaccuracies.
In 2008, I was surprised to receive an e-mail message while I was in Singapore with Rice, covering the annual meeting of foreign ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In one of my stories, I’d mentioned in a brief sentence at the end of a paragraph that Powell met with the North Korean foreign minister in Jakarta in 2004. My editor had changed “met” to “had coffee,” and Powell thought that inaccurately diminished the meeting’s importance.
Madeleine Albright
I have a soft spot for Albright, not only because she was the first secretary of state I knew personally, but also because she has been very helpful to me — and she is a lot of fun.
I first met her in an ornate suite at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel in 2000, while working on a profile of her for the Financial Times. Then I went on a trip with her to Europe and the Middle East — the first time I traveled on the secretary’s plane. We were flying when word came that Slobodan Milosevic had been driven out of power in Belgrade. I was surprised when she winked at me during a press conference in Egypt, but later I learned that she had winked at other reporters before.
When I got a job offer from the Washington Times in 2001, I was concerned about the newspaper’s affiliation with the Unification Church, so I asked Albright for advice. She pointed out that the Times had a stellar foreign coverage, and she didn’t see anything wrong in working there.
Over the years, she’d send me her newly published books with lovely inscriptions, writing “You are a star” in one and calling me “one of the outstanding journalists of our time” in another. In 2002, we had breakfast in her native Prague during a NATO summit.
At 73 — the same age as Powell — Albright is astonishingly active and extremely busy. She owns and runs two companies, travels around the world all the time and is involved in many projects. She recently chaired an expert group tasked with drafting a new NATO strategic concept. She is also chairman of the National Democratic Institute.
In October 2008, a couple of weeks before the last presidential election, I invited Albright to meet with the Washington Times editorial board. We left together from her office and she drove to the Times’ building in Northeast D.C.
During the ride, she said she was tired of people asking her who would be Obama’s secretary of state, because she wasn’t close to him and had no inside information. I suggested it would be fun for the press corps if Hillary Clinton got the job. Albright, who has been a good friend of Clinton’s since the mid-1990s, said: “It’s not gonna happen.” Of course, Clinton herself was shocked when Obama offered her the position weeks later.
We had a wide-ranging discussion about various foreign-policy issues during the meeting, and one of the things Albright said was that she opposed a deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. The Clinton administration’s experience in the Balkans had taught her that the president shouldn’t commit to a specific date not to tie his hands.
The Times’ executive editor at the time, John Solomon, thought our headline should be that Albright disagreed with Obama, who had proposed a deadline. I tried to write a story based on the facts without a “gotcha” element, but Solomon thought my lede wasn’t strong enough and wrote it himself.
Albright, who flew to Nevada to campaign for Obama the next day, was furious. Even though she and her aides have assured me it’s all in the past, things between us haven’t been the same since then. As thick of a skin she claims to have, she clearly still holds a big grudge against me, which she seems to have shared with other people.
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If anyone had any doubts that putting together the European Union’s new diplomatic service would be an utterly messy task, that is now an undisputed fact. A high-profile ambassadorial list released this week provoked publicly aired quarrels rather uncharacteristic of diplomats, and it raised questions about the future effectiveness of the EU corps.
The long-anticipated list, unveiled by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton in Brussels, was apparently based not on merit, but on what Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski called “esoteric considerations.”
What are those? A quick look at the list shows that the most important ambassadorships are going to diplomats from the oldest EU members in the West — China was given to the Germans, Japan to the Austrians and South Africa to the Dutch. What about less important but plush posts? Of those, the Spanish got Argentina and Singapore went to Luxembourg.
So the considerations Sikorski referred to had more to do with where the diplomats come from, rather than what they can accomplish in their respective positions. “Appointments should be made on merit,” he said. “We in the new member-countries have people who speak the languages of the former Soviet Union, we have expertise there.”
Four posts out of 29 went to diplomats from Central and Eastern Europe. Despite Sikorski’s protest, Poland did better than any other former communist country, winning South Korea and Jordan. The Bulgarians got Georgia, and Afghanistan had gone to the Lithuanians earlier.
“I have appointed the best people for the right jobs,” said Ashton, whose official title is EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, as well as vice president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive body. She was also criticized for choosing only eight women.
“We have made a start to address the important issues of geographical and gender balance,” Ashton said in an apparent admission that those problems are not yet resolved.
The nominees, who have to be approved by the European Parliament, may be the “best people” for the jobs from their country, but it’s questionable whether they are the best from any EU state. It’s not clear, either, that the top criteria during the selection process were actually skills, qualifications and experience.
“We are deeply disappointed,” said Slovenian Foreign Minister Samuel Zbogar. “We expected more transparent decisions and that geographic balance would be taken into account, in particular for those states, like Slovenia, which have no presence at all in the EU’s foreign institutions.”
Creating the European External Action Service — the diplomatic corps’ official name — is a daunting task, and Ashton has an impossible job. She won’t be able to please everyone even if she really wants to. But more consultation with Eastern European members would go a long way.
If there is hostility among diplomats from different countries even before the foreign service’s launch, which is expected in December, it will likely affect trust and their ability to work together at the dozens of missions they are setting up around the world.
Here is the full list released by Ashton’s office on Wednesday:
China — Markus Ederer (Germany)
Japan — Hans Dietmar Schweisgut (Austria)
South Africa — Roeland van de Geer (Netherlands)
Afghanistan — Vygaudas Usackas (Lithuania)
Albania — Ettore Sequi (Italy)
Argentina — Alfonso Diez Torres (Spain)
Macedonia — Peter Sorensen (Denmark)
Bangladesh — William Hanna (Ireland)
Jordan — Joanna Wronecka (Poland)
Uganda — Roberto Ridolfi (Italy)
Senegal — Dominique Dellicour (Belgium)
Angola — Javier Puyol Pinuela (Spain)
Botswana — Gerard McGovern (Ireland)
Burundi — Stephane de Loecker (Belgium)
South Korea — Tomasz Kozlowski (Poland)
Gabon — Cristina Martins Barreira (Portugal)
Georgia — Philip Dimitrov (Bulgaria)
Guinea-Bissau — Joaquin Gonzalez-Ducay (Spain)
Haiti — Lut Fabert-Goossens (Luxembourg)
Lebanon — Angelina Eichhorst (Netherlands)
Mozambique — Paul Malin (Ireland)
Namibia — Raúl Fuentes Milani (Spain)
Pakistan — Lars-Gunnar Wigemark (Sweden)
Philippines — Guy Ledoux (France)
Singapore — Marc Ungeheuer (Luxembourg)
Chad — Helene Cave (France)
Zambia — Gilles Hervio (France)
China (Deputy) — Carmen Cano de Lasala (Spain)
Papua New Guinea — Martin Dihm (Germany)
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The middle of the summer is a good time to review the balance of political appointees vs. career diplomats in ambassadorial posts around the world. Not surprisingly, the familiar 30-percent quota for political appointments of the last several decades remains largely intact.
Actually, for some people, continuing the tradition of awarding presidential campaign contributors with embassies may be surprising, given President Obama’s promise to change the way Washington works during the 2008 election.
However, as I wrote a year ago, reality set in soon after Obama took office. According to a list maintained by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), the diplomats’ union, of all ambassadors Obama has nominated so far, about 40 percent are political appointees.
That number, though, is a bit misleading, because almost all political appointees change when a new president moves into the White House — unlike career diplomats, who typically remain in their posts for another year or two. It’s more appropriate to look at all embassies around the world — not just Obama’s nominees — and the AFSA list shows 29.7 percent political appointees out of 185 positions globally. That number is slightly lower than it was during the last years of George W. Bush’s presidency.
Another interesting number is that of the nominated but not-yet-confirmed career diplomats under Obama — there are 40 in each category. In contrast, of 55 political appointees, 52 have been confirmed by the Senate.
This issue is understandably controversial for Foreign Service members, and there was a time last year when the White House was on its way to nominating more than 30 percent political appointees. As I reported then, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to interfere.
“Why is ours the only profession where it’s considered acceptable to appoint someone without any experience?” Steven B. Kashkett, AFSA’s acting president, said at the time. “Would you appoint someone to head a hospital without medical experience?”
Continue reading about Political ambassadorships hold at 30%
