The Back Channel

by William J Burns

  After the uprising of 2011 in Syria, many assumed mistakenly that the popular momentum that had swept away Ben Ali and Mubarak so quickly was bound to make short work of Assad. Even after the Syrian president demonstrated his staying power, there was a similarly flawed assumption that Syria’s bloodletting could be contained within its borders. Millions of refugees flooding neighboring countries, and eventually Europe, soon exposed the shortsightedness of that proposition. During the same period in Libya, there was too much wishful thinking about the independent capacity and will of our closest European allies, and too little appreciation of how hard it would be to put together any semblance of political order in a society that Qaddafi had stripped bare of modern institutions.

  It proved especially hard to imagine the pace of events in Russia after the end of the Cold War. Yeltsin’s Russia had shown the limits of American agency, but there was still a presumption that Moscow had little alternative to accepting a subordinate, if grudging, role in Europe. The expansion of NATO membership stayed on autopilot as a matter of U.S. policy, long after its fundamental assumptions should have been reassessed. Commitments originally meant to reflect interests morphed into interests themselves, and the door cracked open to membership for Georgia and Ukraine—the latter a bright red line for any Russian leadership. A Putin regime pumped up by years of high energy prices and wounded pride pushed back hard. And even after Putin’s ruthless annexation of Crimea, it proved difficult to imagine that he would stretch his score-settling into a systematic assault on the 2016 American presidential elections.

  Clairvoyance is an unattainable quality for any diplomat, but it pays to encourage rigorous questioning of assumptions. Informed by history and experience, diplomats have to be more unconventional in their thinking, and more assertive in testing accepted wisdom. Judgment, balance, and discipline remain the core qualities of diplomatic practice.

  * * *

  * * *

  IN TODAY’S WORLD of digital and virtual relationships, there is still no good substitute for old-fashioned human interactions—not in business, romance, or diplomacy. The ability to build personal relationships, bridging what the legendary CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow called the “most critical link in the chain of international communication, the last three feet,” remains at the heart of effective diplomacy.

  A reaffirmation of the core of American diplomacy, a business of human relationships, is necessary but not sufficient to make it effective for a new and demanding era. We also need to build modern capabilities and skills on top of that traditional foundation. Our efforts at transformation to date have tended to focus on the capillaries of institutional change, rather than the arteries—more on how we look than how we work. That has to change.

  We can begin by developing a clearer sense of diplomatic strategy, with a more rigorous operational doctrine.9 The U.S. military has long embraced the value of systematic case studies and after-action reports. Career diplomats, by contrast, have tended to pride themselves more on their ability to adjust quickly to shifting circumstances than on more systematic attention to lessons learned and long-term thinking. As part of a post-Trump reinvention of diplomacy, there ought to be new emphasis on tradecraft, rediscovering diplomatic history, sharpening negotiation skills, and making the lessons of negotiations like the Dayton Peace Accords or the Iranian nuclear talks accessible to practitioners.

  A reinvention of diplomacy would also mean updating American diplomatic priorities, with sharper focus on issues that matter more and more to twenty-first-century foreign policy, particularly technology, economics, energy, and climate. My generation and its predecessor had plenty of specialists in nuclear arms control and conventional energy issues; throw-weights and oil pricing mechanisms were not alien concepts. In my last few years in government, I spent too much time sitting in meetings on the seventh floor of the State Department and in the White House Situation Room with smart, dedicated colleagues, collectively faking it on problems and opportunities flowing from the technology revolution. The department, and the executive branch in general, should be more flexible and creative in order to attract tech talent, including through temporary postings and mid-level entry, just as we did at the dawn of the nuclear age.

  The same is true in matters of commerce and economics. In our memo to Warren Christopher a quarter century ago, I wrote that it was already increasingly “hard to separate economic security from national security.”10 It is impossible today. In that paper, we argued that economic diplomacy “has to be a central feature of almost every aspect of our policymaking; nothing will affect our prospects in the world over the rest of this decade more significantly than the skill with which we shape the international economic environment and compete in it.”11 Since George Shultz’s tenure, across my whole career as a diplomat, the State Department has been trying fitfully to step up its game on economic statecraft and commercial diplomacy. As an ambassador abroad, I spent a substantial amount of my time promoting American businesses and working to create a level playing field on which they could compete. There is much more that can be done.

  Updating our knowledge and skills is a critical factor in molding a new diplomatic doctrine. Applying that doctrine successfully, and building a stronger sense of strategic purpose, also means making State a more dexterous institution. Individual American diplomats overseas can be remarkably innovative and entrepreneurial. As an institution, however, the State Department is rarely accused of being too agile. We have to apply our gardening skills to our own messy plot of ground, and do some serious institutional weeding.

  State’s personnel system is far too rigid and anachronistic. The evaluation process is wholly incapable of providing honest feedback and incentives for improved performance. Retention, especially of the most promising junior and mid-level officers, is becoming tougher. Promotion is too slow, tours of duty too inflexible, and mechanisms to facilitate careers of families with two working parents insufficient and outdated.

  State’s internal deliberative process is just as lumbering and conservative, with too many layers of approval and authority. During my last months as deputy secretary, I received a one-page memo on a mundane policy issue—with a page and a half of clearances attached to it. Every imaginable office in the department had reviewed it, and a few that severely strained my imagination. Like a number of my predecessors, I failed in my efforts to streamline the clearance process. The problem was not just the time-consuming nature of the process, but also the tendency to homogenize judgments. If you’re the mid-level desk officer responsible for relations with Tunisia, for example, your sense of accountability for the quality of both the prose and the policy recommendations naturally tends to diminish in direct proportion to the number of other layers and officials involved. Responsibility needs to be pushed downward in Washington, and ambassadors in the field need to be empowered to make more decisions locally.

  Delayering is long overdue—in Washington and in our embassies. If the right people are put into the right places in a tighter organizational structure, the result can be a more nimble, more responsive institution, better able to make the case for a more central role for diplomacy. And if greater authority is pushed to the field and personnel allocated more strategically to critical posts, State ought to become more quick-footed, and chiefs of mission more adept at directing the work of their interagency country teams. Embassy reporting and analysis will still matter—but less for its volume and more for its distillation of meaning and policy implications from the avalanche of information that flows into the U.S. government.

  Smart adaptation to the realities of today’s world and policymaking environment will require diplomats to become even more effective at managing physical risk. Diplomacy is a dangerous business. As the walls in the entrance hall of the State Department remind us, with their long lists of names of diplomats who died while serving overseas, physical risks are not new. In the 1970s alone, four U.S. ambas
sadors were killed at their posts. At the end of the decade, the entire embassy staff in Tehran was taken hostage. Since the Beirut embassy bombings in the early 1980s, and even more so after the East Africa embassy bombings of 1998, American diplomatic facilities have been constructed to strict, often fortresslike specifications. Over the past two decades, the diplomatic security budget increased by roughly 1,000 percent.12

  Managing physical risk has become progressively more complicated in recent years, as policy choices have put diplomats in greater danger while absence of political courage at home has left them with less backing and support. With many members of Congress alternating between dismissiveness of diplomacy and political scapegoating when attacks occur, the department has inevitably become more risk-averse. As Chris Stevens knew, however, demanding zero security risk can mean zero diplomatic achievements. We have to learn and apply the painful lessons of Benghazi, and take every prudent precaution, but we cannot hole up behind embassy walls and still do our jobs.

  * * *

  * * *

  WHAT THIS MOMENT also requires—alongside the refinement of core skills and the adaptation to new realities—is a new domestic compact, a broadly shared sense of American purpose in the world, and of the relationship between disciplined American leadership abroad and middle-class interests at home.

  When I was a junior diplomat, George Shultz used to invite outbound U.S. ambassadors into his office for a farewell chat. He would walk over to a large globe near his desk (which many years later I had in my own office as deputy secretary) and ask each ambassador to point to “your country.” Invariably, the ambassador would put a finger on the country of her or his assignment. Shultz would then gently move their finger across the globe to the United States—making the not-so-subtle point that diplomats should always remember who they represent and where they come from. Not a bad lesson to reinforce today.

  As the 2016 U.S. presidential elections made vivid, the pews in the church of American global leadership have grown deserted. The preaching of the gospel by the foreign policy “blob” continues unabated—often unpersuasive and sometimes a little self-righteous. It’s time for some honest stocktaking and a more concerted effort to ensure that American diplomacy is more intimately connected and responsive to the needs and aspirations of the American people.

  This is not a novel challenge. One of the most significant, if least noted, passages in Kennan’s “Long Telegram” comes at the very end. After elegantly analyzing the sources of Soviet conduct and making the case for containment, Kennan emphasizes in a few dozen words at the conclusion of his fifty-three-hundred-word message that the key to success would be “the point at which domestic and foreign policies meet”—the resilience of our society, and its connection to a disciplined, fundamentally optimistic approach to America’s engagement in the world.

  The last four administrations have all begun their terms with a similarly sharp focus on “nation-building at home,” and a self-conscious determination to be rigorous about overseas commitments. Secretaries of state as different in their backgrounds and styles as Henry Kissinger and Jim Baker had a shared appreciation of the critical value of connecting with the American public, and constantly renewing a workable domestic compact. Kissinger spent much of his last two years as secretary delivering a series of a dozen “heartland” speeches around the country, laying out the case for careful international engagement to safeguard American security and prosperity. Baker understood that politics was as crucial an element of successful diplomacy as geopolitics. Every one of their successors has at one time or another emphasized the tight link between economic security and national security. Our transition memo to the Clinton administration stressed that the new administration would need to “spend considerable time and effort selling the inter-relationship of foreign and domestic policy to the American people. Few people will take that argument for granted any more.”13

  The challenge is that each successive administration often failed to marry its words with deeds, seemingly taking on more and more global responsibility and risks at greater expense and sacrifice for American society, with little obvious, direct benefit. If Martians landed in Washington and discovered that we are nearing our second decade of a military campaign in Afghanistan—despite all the issues elsewhere in the world and all the turbulence at home—they would likely get back on their spacecraft and look for alternative habitat. Most Americans share that sense of disbelief and exasperation about where and how we’ve invested our blood and treasure in recent decades.

  As a result, making the basic argument for diplomacy as a tool of first resort, as a key to realizing the promise of America’s pivotal role, will remain an uphill battle. Nevertheless, its main ingredients are straightforward. The starting point is candor and transparency about the purpose and limits of American engagement abroad. It’s more effective to level with the American people about the challenges we face and the choices we make than to wrap them in the tattered robe of untempered exceptionalism or fan fears of external threats. Overpromising and underdelivering is the surest way to undermine the case for American diplomacy.

  Another ingredient is demonstrating that diplomacy and international influence are aimed as much at facilitating and accelerating domestic renewal as they are at shoring up global order. That does not mean embracing narrow-minded, art-of-the-deal mercantilism. What it does mean is ensuring that the American middle class is positioned as well as possible for success in a hypercompetitive world, that we build open and equitable trading systems, and that we don’t shy away from holding to account those who do not play by the rules of the game.

  Our challenge is simply to underscore the powerful connection between smart American engagement in the world and our success at home. When the State Department plays a valuable role in nailing down big overseas commercial deals, as we did in a $4 billion Boeing sale in Russia more than a decade ago, it rarely highlights the role of diplomacy in creating thousands of jobs in cities and towns across the United States. There are growing opportunities to work closely with American governors and mayors, many of whom are increasingly active in promoting overseas trade and investment.

  A workable domestic compact also depends upon a healthy relationship with Congress. With rare exceptions, members of Congress do not see advocacy for diplomacy as a political asset. The State Department does not have military bases or defense production plants in their states or districts, and includes relatively few constituents among its seventy thousand employees—the majority of whom are in any case foreign nationals working at posts overseas.

  Members of Congress are mostly ambivalent about diplomats and diplomacy, although there are still probably a handful who sympathize with the unbridled hostility of Otto Passman, the legendary postwar congressman from Louisiana. “Son,” Passman told one of my State Department predecessors a couple generations ago, “I don’t smoke and I don’t drink. My only pleasure in life is kicking the shit out of the foreign aid program of the United States of America.”14

  I never had the pleasure of dealing with Passman, and most of my encounters with Congress were relatively positive (the Benghazi hearings in 2012–13 were a notable exception, a thoroughly politicized circus aimed less at thoughtful oversight and more at partisan score-settling). As a diplomat, I testified before congressional committees off and on for nearly two decades, never wildly enthusiastic about the experience, but always mindful of its significance.

  Like my senior colleagues at State, I also often briefed members informally. While serving as ambassador in Amman following the death of King Hussein, I returned to Washington regularly to lobby for increased financial assistance and support for the bilateral free trade agreement. Those trips always paid important dividends, and I found that ambassadors returning from the field had particular credibility with members of Congress and their staffs. That was particularly true as members traveled abroad less frequently, which was more
and more the case in my last decade or so in government, with a few deeply committed exceptions like Senator John McCain.

  Compared to the Pentagon and the CIA, however, State was generally far less persistent and systematic in making its case on the Hill. Defense and CIA would deploy significant numbers of personnel to troll the corridors of Congress and seek out opportunities to brief or answer questions. We were more cautious, reactive, and detached at State, and paranoia about missteps led the department to discourage young diplomats from building relationships with congressional staff. Building more effective ties to the Hill is tougher and more labor-intensive now than it was when I entered the Foreign Service, at a time when a relatively small number of senior members, in the congressional leadership and among committee chairs, could command the movement of legislation and budget resources. Power is more diffuse now, just like on the wider international landscape, but that makes congressional outreach all the more important.

  A new domestic compact on diplomacy involves reciprocal responsibilities. The State Department and the executive branch have an obligation to follow through on serious reform, streamlining structure, modernizing communications, and finding a rational balance for budgets and roles across the national security community. To make it a two-way street, Congress will need to provide more resources for diplomacy, and offer more flexibility in pooling funds and maximizing their utility. This partnership will only take hold if it’s embedded in a wider compact with citizens that restores their faith in the wisdom of American leadership and the significance and utility of diplomacy.