by Ronan Farrow
break. So Clancy had caught a flight out of DC that morning, to see her mother.
When Yuri Kim, the deputy secretary’s chief of staff and a fellow Foreign Service officer, came on the line, her voice was solemn. “Great,” she began, in a tone that suggested this would not, in fact, be great. “Thanks everyone for your time. We just found out that we’re all being asked to move on.” The entire deputy secretary’s staff was assembled: five in the room back on Mahogany Row, two on the phone. Everyone spoke at once. “How?” they asked. “Why?” They should go to their union, one suggested. They should go to the press, offered another. “Your assignments are broken,” Clancy remembered being told. “Who knows if you have your next job, maybe you don’t. It’s utter chaos. And it’s out of the blue. No reason.”
Kim, usually a fierce advocate for her team, became mechanical. They had forty-eight hours. There would be a meeting with the office of human resources the next day to walk them through next steps. They should use the little time they had left to start making preparations.
When the call was over, Clancy hung up and turned to her partner, dumbfounded. “We’re all being fired.”
Like a lot of young diplomats, Erin Clancy had joined the Foreign Service after 9/11. She wanted to make the world safer. She moved to the Middle East for six years. She’d been in Damascus when the American embassy there was overrun by protesters. She’d narrowly avoided kidnapping. She’d worked long hours with low pay. As with Countryman, the Foreign Service officers on her team couldn’t be fired altogether. But they could be removed from their jobs. This wasn’t just a career setback. For many, it was the difference between making ends meet and not. Foreign Service officers don’t earn overtime. Instead, assignments with backbreaking hours get a pay differential, a bonus of 18 percent for the deputy secretary’s team. No one goes into this career expecting riches. Including the differential, Clancy was making $91,000 a year. But they bid on these jobs knowing they were guaranteed for a year. Many had planned their family’s lives around that income. The dismissals felt wanton and without regard for their service.
Offices across the seventh floor of the State Department were having identical emergency meetings that day. The deputy for management’s staff learned their recently departed boss would not be replaced. They too, would be let go. The same went for the office of the State Department counselor, a role some secretaries of state have maintained, and others not. According to several people present that day, Margaret Peterlin, chief of staff to incoming secretary of state Rex Tillerson, sat down in counselor Kristie Kenney’s office for their first one-on-one meeting that Valentine’s Day. Peterlin’s first question to Kenney, a veteran ambassador and one of the most senior women in the Foreign Service: How soon could she leave?
By some back-of-the-napkin calculations from insiders, the jobs of more than half of the career staff on Mahogany Row were threatened that day. At the eleventh hour, Erin Clancy and the deputy’s team got a reprieve: Acting Deputy Secretary Tom Shannon had put his foot down. They’d live to see another day. But the other teams moved on.
When I met up with Clancy, she was in her T-shirt and jeans again, sitting in the sun outside a Los Angeles café. She still had her job, but she was back home, regrouping, thinking about next steps. Maybe she should run for office, she mused—it might be a better way to make a difference at this point. Eventually, she decided to stay, going on to a posting at the United States Mission to the United Nations. She, like many still working at the State Department, wasn’t giving up. But her confidence in her profession had been shaken. “The culture of the State Department is so eroded,” she remarked. It was an institution more than a dozen career diplomats told me they barely recognized, one in which their expertise had been profoundly devalued. Squinting into the afternoon sun, Erin Clancy paused. “We are truly seen as outsiders,” she said.
Members of Rex Tillerson’s team were adamant that they hadn’t been aware of the firings, which, in some cases, took place after the Trump transition team had begun to interface with the Department, but before Tillerson was confirmed. (Other dismissals or attempted dismissals, like Clancy’s, took place after Tillerson’s confirmation.) In the first days of 2018, when I asked Tillerson about Countryman and the wave of forced retirements, the secretary of state stared at me, unblinking, then said: “I’m not familiar with that one.” A little over a month later, Tillerson was gone too: another casualty of a fickle president and a State Department in disarray.
IN SOME WAYS, the world had changed and left professional diplomats like Countryman and Clancy behind. A strain of populism that, from America’s earliest days, opposed and denigrated internationalism, was on the rise across the Western world. The foreign policy establishment that underpinned diplomatic acts of creation from NATO to the World Bank after World War II had long since disintegrated into vicious partisanship. Technology had made the work of the diplomat less meaningful and special. For the basic function of delivering messages in foreign lands, email was more efficient than any ambassador. The prestige and power of the Foreign Service were in decline.
Some of the skepticism of American diplomacy was earned. The State Department was often slow, ponderous, and turfy. Its structures and training were outdated in the face of modern tests of American influence from cyberterrorism to radical Islam. Eyes in many a White House have rolled when the subject of “State’s objections” has been raised. But for a complex set of new challenges—penetrating cultural barriers in a fraught relationship with China; pulling North Korea back from threats of nuclear war; containing a modern Iran pursuing regional hegemony—specialized experts trained in the art of hard-nosed negotiation remain indispensable. Evolving technology and a rising military offer no substitute. In these crises, sidelining diplomacy is not an inevitability of global change: it is a choice, made again and again by administrations Democratic and Republican.
“Unprecedented,” blared Foreign Policy and a host of other publications on what was being described as the Trump administration’s “assault” or “war” on the State Department. But for all the ways in which the developments were shocking, to describe them as unprecedented was simply not true. The Trump administration brought to a new extreme a trend that had, in fact, been gathering force since September 11, 2001. From Mogadishu to Damascus to Islamabad, the United States cast civilian dialogue to the side, replacing the tools of diplomacy with direct, tactical deals between our military and foreign forces. At home, White Houses filled with generals. The last of the diplomats, keepers of a fading discipline that has saved American lives and created structures that stabilized the world, often never made it into the room. Around the world, uniformed officers increasingly handled the negotiation, economic reconstruction, and infrastructure development for which we once had a devoted body of trained specialists. As a result, a different set of relationships has come to form the bedrock of American foreign policy. Where civilians are not empowered to negotiate, military-to-military dealings still flourish. America has changed whom it brings to the table, and, by extension, it has changed who sits at the other side. Foreign ministries are still there. But foreign militaries and militias often have the better seats.
These relationships are not new, nor are they inherently a negative. “America’s military might, used judiciously and with strategic precision, is a critical tool of diplomacy,” James Baker, George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state, said, embodying a more hawkish strain of foreign policy. “I’ve always said ‘diplomacy works best when it comes in a mailed fist.’ ” The question is of balance. In many of America’s engagements around the world, those military alliances have now eclipsed the kind of civilian diplomacy that once counterbalanced them, with disastrous results.
These trends have been apparent since 2001, but their roots stretch even further back. By the time terrorists toppled the Twin Towers, the stage had been set for this crisis of modern diplomacy for at least a decade. Bill Clinton ran on the promise of domestic rein
vestment—it was, as Clinton’s strategist James Carville noted in a statement that became the indelible brand of their campaign, “the economy, stupid,”—and quickly set about slashing America’s civilian presence around the world. When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 and Jesse Helms—he of the jowls and the racism and the fevered isolationism—became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the nosedive accelerated. Clinton’s first secretary of state, the late Warren Christopher, championed what he called a “tough budget for tough times.” Christopher’s successor, Madeleine Albright, defended Clinton’s personal commitment to international engagement, but conceded that, in the wake of the Cold War, “there really was a sense that we needed to pay attention to domestic issues.”
Over the course of the 1990s, the United States’ international affairs budget tumbled by 30 percent, on a par with the cuts requested years later by the Trump administration. Here’s what happened then: the State Department pulled the plug on twenty-six consulates and fifty missions of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The timing could hardly have been worse. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the United States needed a slew of new outposts to stabilize the region and gain footholds of American influence in spaces vacated by the Soviets. While some were indeed created, by the mid-1990s, the United States had fewer embassies and consulates than it did at the height of the Cold War. Even remaining outposts felt the shift—Christopher sheepishly told a congressional committee that the embassy in Beijing reeked of sewer gas, while in Sarajevo, diplomats desperate to receive news had to jerry-rig a satellite dish to the roof using a barbecue grill.
In 1999, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the United States Information Agency were both shuttered and their respective mandates folded into a shrinking and overstretched State Department. The Cold War was over, the logic went. When would the United States possibly need to worry about rising nuclear powers, or information warfare against an ideological enemy’s insidious propaganda machine? Two decades later, Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear aspirations and the Islamic State’s global recruitment are among the United States’ most pressing international challenges. But by then, the specialized, trained workforces devoted to those challenges had been wiped out. Thomas Friedman raced to the scene with a visual metaphor, lamenting that the United States was “turning its back on the past and the future of U.S. foreign policy for the sake of the present.” (The point was certainly valid, though one wondered where the nation’s back was now facing. Maybe we were spinning? Let’s say we were spinning.)
So it was that on September 11, 2001, the State Department was 20 percent short of staff, and those who remained were undertrained and under-resourced. The United States needed diplomacy more than ever, and it was nowhere to be found.
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION SCRAMBLED to reinvest. “We resourced the Department like never before,” then–secretary of state Colin Powell recalled. But it was growth born of a new, militarized form of foreign policy. Funding that made it to State was increasingly drawn from “Overseas Contingency Operations”—earmarked specifically for advancing the Global War on Terrorism. Promoting democracy, supporting economic development, helping migrants—all of these missions were repackaged under a new counterterrorism mantle. “Soft” categories of the State Department’s budget—that is, anything not directly related to the immediate goals of combatting terrorism—flatlined, in many cases permanently. Defense spending, on the other hand, skyrocketed to historic extremes, far outpacing the modest growth at State. “The State Department has ceded a lot of authority to the Defense Department since 2001,” Albright reflected.
Diplomats slipped to the periphery of the policy process. Especially during the early days of the Iraq War, Bush concentrated power at the White House; specifically, under Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney built a close rapport with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but had little time for Powell. “The VP had very, very strong views and he communicated them directly to the president,” recalled Powell. The Bush White House had “two NSCs during that period. One led by Condi [Rice, then the national security advisor] and one led by the VP. Anything going to the president after it left the NSC went to the VP’s NSC and the problem I’d have from time to time is that . . . access is everything in politics and he was over there all the time.” It was a challenge former secretaries of state invariably recalled facing, to one extent or another. “There is the interesting psychological fact that the secretary of state’s office is ten minutes’ car ride from the White House and the security advisor is right down the hall,” said Henry Kissinger, recalling his time in both roles under presidents Nixon and Ford. “The temptations of propinquity are very great.”
During the Bush administration, those dynamics cut the State Department out of even explicitly diplomatic decisions. Powell learned of Bush’s plan to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change only after it had been decided, and pleaded with Rice for more time to warn America’s allies of the radical move. He raced to the White House to press the case. Rice informed him that it was too late.
But State’s exclusion was most profound in the Global War on Terrorism, which an ascendant Pentagon seized as its exclusive domain. That the invasion of Iraq and the period immediately after were dominated by the Pentagon was inevitable. But, later, Bush handed over reconstruction and democracy-building activities, which had historically been the domain of the State Department and USAID, to uniformed officers with the Coalition Provisional Authority, reporting to the secretary of defense. Powell and his officials at State counseled caution, but were unable to penetrate the policymaking process, which had become entirely preoccupied with tactics—in Powell’s view, at the expense of strategy. “Mr. Rumsfeld felt that he had a strategy that did not reflect Powell thinking,” he recalled. “And he could do it on the low end and on small. My concern was probably, yeah, he beat the crap out of this army ten years ago, I have no doubt about them getting to Baghdad, but we didn’t take over the country to run a country.” Powell never used the phrase “the Pottery Barn rule,” as a journalist later dubbed his thinking, but he did tell the president, “If you break it, you own it.” It was, he later told me with a heavy sigh, “a massive strategic failure both politically and militarily.”
More specifically, it was a string of successive strategic failures. The Pentagon disbanded the Iraqi security forces, turning loose hundreds of thousands of armed and unemployed Iraqi young men and laying the foundations for a deadly insurgency. Taxpayer dollars from the massive $4-billion Commander’s Emergency Response Program, which essentially gave military brass the authority to undertake USAID-style development projects, was later found to be flowing directly to those insurgents. The State Department’s legal adviser is typically consulted on questions of law regarding the treatment of enemy combatants, but Powell’s Department was not involved in conversations about the administration’s expanding use of military commissions—aspects of which were later found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
As the disasters of Iraq deepened, a bruised Bush administration did attempt to shift additional resources into diplomacy and development. The White House pledged to double the size of USAID’s Foreign Service, and began to speak of rebalancing civilian and military roles and empowering the US ambassador in Iraq. The supposed rebalancing was more pantomime than meaningful policy—there was no redressing the yawning chasm of resources and influence between military and civilian leadership in the war—but there was, at least, an understanding that military policymaking had proved toxic.
THE LESSON DIDN’T STICK. In a haze of nostalgia, liberal commentators sometimes frame Barack Obama as a champion of diplomacy, worlds apart from the pugnacious Trump era. They remember him in a packed auditorium at Cairo University offering dialogue and calm to the Muslim world. “Events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whene
ver possible,” he said in that speech. And the Obama administration would, especially in its second term, yield several examples of the effectiveness of empowering diplomats, with the Iran deal, the Paris climate change accord, and a thaw in relations with Cuba. But it also, especially in its first term, accelerated several of the same trends that have conspired to ravage America’s diplomatic capacity during the Trump administration.
Obama, to a lesser extent than Trump but a greater extent than many before him, surrounded himself with retired generals or other military officers in senior positions. That included National Security Advisor General Jim Jones, General Douglas Lute as Jones’s deputy for Afghanistan, General David Petraeus as head of the CIA, and Admiral Dennis Blair and General James Clapper as successive directors of national intelligence. Growth in the State Department budget continued to flow from Overseas Contingency Operation funds, directed explicitly toward military goals. Defense spending continued its rise. The trend was not linear: sequestration—the automatic spending cuts of 2013—ravaged both the Pentagon and the State Department. But the imbalance between defense and diplomatic spending continued to grow. “The Defense Department budget is always very much larger, and for good reason, I mean I agree with that, but the ratio between the two keeps getting worse and worse,” Madeleine Albright said.