by Parag Khanna
Be Proactive. Diplomats are often dispassionate messengers, reading démarches like stale B-movie scripts. But what if their promotions were actually linked to performance, as in the business world? If diplomats weren’t allowed the cushy job in London until they did something good for Liberia, we’d see a lot less talk and a lot more action.
Begin with the End in Mind. The most recent WTO negotiations, known as the Doha Development Round, carried on for seven years—then collapsed in 2008. Rather than focus on specific goals, the agenda was saddled (by the United States) with additional items like an overburdened mule. Meanwhile, many poor countries still don’t have the capacity to implement the earlier Uruguay Round’s aims. Credibility depends on results, even if they are small wins rather than grand breakthroughs.
Put First Things First. Inside the U.S. State Department, hoarding assignments and portfolios gets you more face time and status, with success a secondary consideration. Rather than delegating authority, Condoleezza Rice spent years doing North Korea on Monday, Israel-Palestine on Tuesday, NATO on Wednesday, Iraq on Thursday, and Pakistan on Friday. Leaders have to trust regional-expert diplomats to navigate and manage specific situations on their own; otherwise they will just spin in circles.
Think Win-Win. If you win one round and lose the next, has either side won? Some Americans who observe China’s resource-driven deal making in Africa and Latin America fear it will undermine democracy. But why not intensify anti-corruption efforts and budgetary assistance so that high growth rates can translate into greater welfare? The West’s new rivalry with China for influence could still be good for everyone.
Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood. The United States has learned the hard way that what others want for themselves trumps what it wants for them—always. From Iraqis fighting American occupation to Congo’s miners protesting Chinese contractors, everyone now has the power to resist if their needs aren’t appreciated. So-called public diplomacy has been given second-tier status, but it holds the key to learning what Muslim societies want prior to launching ill-informed and kitsch TV and radio stations.
Synergize. Diplomats are often generalists, and only the most experienced know a lot about a lot. Unfortunately, interagency processes quickly devolve into one dominating the others. But experts in development, combat, and governance must think and work in teams to make a whole policy greater than the sum of its parts. Bureaucrats need to focus less on turf wars and more on combining skills.
Sharpen the Saw. If diplomats ought to be pros in one area, it’s networking. But with whom? In fact, they spend too much time among their own kind, reinforcing stale information rather than learning from experts in business, academia, and NGOs. One digital diplomat is worth three analog ones.
Anyone who wants to be part of running the world—setting its rules, shaping its policies, and implementing its decisions—would do well to obey these principles. America and its diplomats have as much to learn as anyone.
America’s “Diplomacy in Action”
Diplomacy is a force multiplier: It is the style that changes the substance. The United States under George W. Bush presented an irony of diplomacy: a powerful state whose tin-eared diplomacy actually diminished its leverage in the world. By contrast, within his first one hundred days as president, Barack Obama reached out to the leaders of countries previously labeled adversaries, such as Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, Iran, Myanmar, and Syria—bursting the myth that isolation, either of America or its rivals, serves the “national interest.” But while Obama attempted to replace Machiavelli’s duality between fear and love with “tough love,” he has yet to prove that diplomacy is more than the lesser cousin of force. To do that requires putting much more muscle into the U.S. State Department’s new motto, “Diplomacy in Action.”
American diplomats today aren’t nearly empowered enough for the job. Instead of being nimble and resourceful, they often regurgitate such platitudes as “It’s a top priority”—and in the same breath follow them with deflating deflections like “We don’t know when it will happen.” The State Department’s archaic org chart separates economics, security, public diplomacy, and other areas from regional offices and has a catchall bureau for “Global Affairs” that covers everything from climate to disease to human rights and democracy. To span these stovepipes, posts for envoys, special representatives, and senior advisers are created for everything from the war on drugs to the war on terror—“enough czars to make Vladimir Putin jealous,” one commentator noted. Meanwhile, more and more ambassadors are political appointees chosen from the ranks of campaign donors who “serve at the pleasure of the president,” rather than career diplomats who can build continuity in relations. Between super-envoys grabbing the glory, an inner circle of the White House and National Security Council staffers making all the key decisions, and friends of the president occupying about half of all ambassadorships, it’s no surprise that so many American diplomats exist in a state of semi-depression.
Even worse, the embassies most diplomats work in often confine rather than empower. U.S. foreign service officers used to venture afield to survey land, build inroads with local populations, and learn vernacular languages. But since 9/11, diplomats have been barricaded inside fortified embassies—more and more of which are being moved from the center of capital cities out to remote suburbs behind barbed-wire fences. In Baghdad, nine hundred diplomats are hunkered behind sandbags in the world’s largest embassy. As Edward Peck, himself a former ambassador to Iraq, put it, “I don’t know how you can conduct diplomacy in that way.” The American embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, has been similarly built up, with little clarity as to what it will actually do.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Diplomats used to be granted immunity on the promise of not intervening in the domestic affairs of host countries. Today successful diplomacy requires exactly that. Few foreigners care anymore what American officials think—it matters far more what they deliver. Embassies must be outposts for economic, intelligence, military, development, and other experts to bring about positive change in societies, helping them provide services their governments might not. In Pakistan, for example, this means agriculture teams, education programmers, and culturally astute negotiators regularly ferrying in and out of troubled parts of the Pashtun tribal regions and working seamlessly with NGOs—both American and Pakistani—to deliver tangible benefits to villages that are more accustomed to military campaigns and corruption. In such places, diplomats shouldn’t lecture locals on natural resource management or child labor but actually roll up their sleeves and help them improve their standards. It’s not surprising that so many diplomats have admitted that Peace Corps volunteers are the best ambassadors America has ever had.
For the United States to even conceivably regain a global leadership role, it needs to think along three dimensions in all its foreign activities: which agencies to bring together (the “whole of government” approach), which nations to cooperate and coordinate with (the “multi-partner” approach), and how to leverage private sector and NGO resources and talent (the “public-private” approach). Combining public and private resources can generate a sophisticated diplomatic-industrial complex. America already has a military-industrial complex: the “iron triangle” of industry, politicians, and the military assailed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address. Now it must do the same for diplomacy. From oil companies to chambers of commerce to environmental activists, America’s corporations, civic organizations, universities, churches, youth groups, and charities already have their own foreign policies—and Americans are expressing their diplomatic voice through these channels more than any other.
No other country has such a deep pool of resources outside of its government to beneficially shape the world. The greatness of America lies in the talent, depth, wealth, and generosity of its citizenry. Its corporations have been the most innovative and respected in history. Its universities have educated much of the world’s elite, and
have now located campuses in the heart of the Middle East, potentially introducing free thinking and ideas more potently than any other force. The United States sent $192 billion to the developing world in 2006, most of it in foreign investment, portfolio capital, foundation grants, and philanthropic giving. No other large country (with a population of one hundred million or more) comes even close. In 2010, President Obama brought together big American companies with Arab entrepreneurs to partner up on job-creating investments across the Middle East, while the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Company boosted loans and insurance to Arab start-ups. Obama also hosted a “Citizen Diplomacy” summit to build connections among schools, companies, and communities in the United States and abroad “one handshake at a time.” This is the way to use mega-diplomacy to “drain the swamp.”
In the globalization age, states will prove themselves stronger if they can harness private forces rather than try to suppress or control them. The more open a society, the more ambassadors it has. America needs all the diplomats it can get, especially since the number of foreign service officers (approximately five thousand) is less than that of the crew of a single aircraft carrier.
Celebrity Diplomats: Does Life Imitate Art?
Some diplomats are also big celebrities. In France, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner—the 1960s Parisian radical and founder of Médecins Sans Frontières—is perennially the country’s most popular politician. In 1992, as minister of health, he marched up the Somali shore with sacks of rice donated by French schoolchildren. He browbeat Serbs as UN high representative in Kosovo in the late 1990s, and in 2008 he demanded that the international community intervene militarily if necessary to deliver essential supplies to the stranded Burmese victims of Cyclone Nargis. If a man of his stature were married with the resources of America, we might see more UN resolutions result in actual action.
Ever since the first American “celebrity-diplomat” Benjamin Franklin worked his charms in the court of French king Louis XVI, the terms have become increasingly de-hyphenated—but the concepts are merging once again. Celebrities possess one of the core ingredients of diplomatic success: prestige. They have a healthy skepticism of the rigidly defined acronyms traditional diplomats swear by, favoring instead an emotive appeal that transcends bureaucratic barriers. They represent not only themselves, but also the potential of millions of fans young and old whom they inspire, whether through songs or tweets. Hollywood raised as much money for Haiti’s reconstruction as any government, and Madonna has helped put Malawi on the map by adopting children from there. Madonna cites her resilience and tirelessness as the reasons why she remains at the top of her game. Regular diplomats should learn from her staying power.
For every current celebrity diplomat there is a predecessor. Audrey Hepburn’s success as a UNICEF ambassador inspired the birth of an entire industry of celebrity diplomacy featuring Princess Diana and Angelina Jolie, who has humanized the plight of refugees. Bill and Melinda Gates took their initial cue from Ted Turner, the CNN founder who pledged $1 billion to start the UN Foundation and support UNICEF and the UN Population Fund, and began partnerships with companies such as Vodafone to fight measles and AIDS. The UN Foundation has spent more than $1 billion and partnered with over one hundred NGOs to deliver ten billion doses of polio vaccine to two billion children. Now such partnerships are the norm, with Barcelona’s soccer club contributing $2 million to UNICEF projects and wearing its logo on its jerseys.
Turner was also something of an anti-diplomat, worrying less about numbers and protocol than about getting things done. Bono’s perhaps unconscious role model is Richard Gere, who as chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet worked with everyone from Senator Jesse Helms to the Beastie Boys to confront China’s smothering of Tibetan human rights both in reality and in UN debates. Bono launched the One Campaign through which he practices shuttle diplomacy between London and Washington to build trust with world leaders while nagging them about targets for increasing development assistance; he famously brought Helms to tears once on the issue of debt relief. He also never misses a chance to shame corporate executives, telling the Global Business Council for HIV/AIDS in 2004: “I’d like to talk about getting on the right side of history. If you thought this dinner was off the record, it’s not. History is taking notes right now. Frankly, history couldn’t care less what you or I say tonight. History only cares what we do when we leave, in the weeks, months, years even, that follow.”2 Corporate funding to combat AIDS has grown year after year. Bono’s sometimes partner in crime, British ex-rocker Bob Geldof, is known for a less subtle approach. At Live Aid in 1985, he simply screamed into the microphone, “Give us the fucking money!” As far as the people of destitute villages are concerned, it doesn’t matter if the person bringing freshwater, food, or vouchers is bug-eyed Bono or a stiff man in a suit—it’s what he delivers that matters.
Even absent an “Actors Without Borders” organization, the celebrity-diplomat model has rapidly spread from West to East. Yao Ming is not only China’s most famous export, but he has also promoted many charities across his home country as well. In India, Nobel Prize winner Rajendra Pachauri’s Lighting a Billion Lives solar power initiative received little attention until Bollywood starlet Priyanka Chopra got involved: Millions of dollars were raised instantly for solar electricity projects in one thousand villages. Global celebrities can do nothing more important than inspire their own kind in every country they can reach. The most important heroes are local ones.
It’s cynical to claim that celebrities divert attention from those truly responsible for atrocities or poverty when they attempt to shine the spotlight on precisely those who are in charge—and it’s naïve to think those who are responsible on paper will act responsibly in practice. Author and activist Naomi Klein dismisses the “Bono-ization” of protest because it is less dangerous and less powerful than street protests. But the trouble with this logic is that the rich have never stormed their governments on behalf of the poor. That some intellectuals and politicians feel insecure about the prominence of celebrities pressuring them while educating the masses is deeply disturbing. They should instead be encouraging anyone with resources and influence to chip in, since they know how little they are doing themselves. Stale and emotionless political debates have yet to mobilize more money from governments to tackle poverty, so why not let celebrities—who excel at insinuating themselves into people’s emotions—have a chance? Some actors are perhaps just doing what they do best—but even if that’s the case, we can still hope that life will imitate art.
Stateless Statesmen and Super-NGOs
Nobody tells George Soros what to do. The billionaire currency trader, fund manager, and philanthropist is one of the few individuals who seem to be a pole of power in their own right. Due to his destructive capacity, a Chinese military report once ranked him just behind Osama bin Laden—after all, he is also known as the man who “broke the Bank of England” in 1992 and is accused by former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir bin Mohamed of torpedoing Asian economies through his market speculations in 1997. Today financial markets react not just to G-8 declarations, but also to Soros’s response to those declarations. In economics, Soros boasts that he is rich only “because I know when I’m wrong.” He appreciates the principle of reflexivity, by which other market participants’ decisions are crucial to determining prices and trends. In other words, he is powerful but also knows he is not the only person in charge.
Soros’s view of politics is much more linear. In his parallel life as a postmodern diplomat, Soros vehemently believes in an inexorable path toward the “open society,” the phrase coined by his London School of Economics mentor Karl Popper. Unlike shadow elites with multiple business cards, Soros is entirely overt about what he represents. In the 1970s he began funding anti-apartheid students at the University of Cape Town, then turned his full attention to his native Hungary and Eastern Europe, from which he had fled Nazi occupation. As the Iron Curtain fell, building a new
education infrastructure was the only way to reverse decades of Soviet-Communist brainwashing. Soros therefore endowed the Central European University in Budapest and funded upgrades and reforms in dozens of other universities across the region and in Russia, focusing especially on ensuring access to the Internet. Between the Open Society Institute (OSI) and the Soros Foundation, he has given away close to $10 billion.
Some Russians view Soros as an agent of Western policy, but he is much more a “stateless statesman”: He sets his own global strategy. He funded UN operations to “save Sarajevo from Serbian fascism” in the early 1990s and financed legions of NGOs involved in the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003 and the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004. That same year, he spent $25 million trying to oust George W. Bush from the U.S. presidency. Believing that “global attention is the only lifeline available to the oppressed,”3 Soros opened offices focused in Haiti and Zimbabwe, as well as in Myanmar, which OSI-funded backpacking medics infiltrate to provide assistance to persecuted minorities in the country’s highlands. Rather than deal with the “spend or lose” funding that plagues such government agencies as USAID, OSI can recycle unspent funds, quickly regranting the money to where it’s needed most. Soros’s approach is the real “transformational diplomacy” America and Western powers seek: changing societies from the inside out.
Super-NGOs like Soros’s OSI are sometimes referred to as “diplomats with opinions,” shaping some of today’s most important questions, including whether to open dialogue with oppressive regimes, or whether investments in oil and gas should be encouraged or violently protested. They are among the shrewdest practitioners of mega-diplomacy. Oxfam uses its $500 million budget to supply radios to UN peacekeepers in Rwanda (who didn’t have any), buy shares of pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline to influence their vaccine policy, and publish key reports on how the WTO can manage climate-damage funds to subsidize clean technology for poor countries.