Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower

This review first appeared on WhirledView.

Brady Kiesling’s Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower (Potomac, 2006) is a book which, as Harvard University’s veteran international relations professor Stanley Hoffman wrote in the August 10, 2006 New York Review of Books, should be required reading for anyone contemplating a career as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer.

I also think it should be required reading for students of international politics and American foreign policy as well as on the list of any American concerned about the direction of our national security policies.

Why? Because this readable, 277 page book demonstrates—through myriads of examples drawn from Kiesling’s own experiences to illustrate his points—the Byzantine complexities of U.S. foreign policy making, its too often tortured implementation and the short and long term repercussions when mistakes are made.

In so doing, Diplomacy Lessons demonstrates the dilemmas and limitations of a career professional service and its talented members when run over and beaten down by an arrogant administration with no respect for their expertise—preferring instead to take the ill-founded “advice” of a coterie of idealistic political ideologues lacking real world experience and self-serving Iraqi con men. Together they led an inexperienced and unqualified president down the path to nowhere and caused—among other things—Kiesling to resign in protest years before his time.

When I taught international politics several years ago, I described the U.S. foreign policy making process to incredulous university students who had no idea how “the sausage was made.” Eyes grew wide. Yet, none of the international relations texts I had reviewed in preparation for the class—including the one I used—provided even a hint at what really happens in Foggy Bottom, at the National Security Council or behind Embassy walls.

It seems to me, therefore, that those of us who have experienced the real world of US diplomacy owe such explanations to the American public if we want our citizens to understand how the U.S. operates overseas and why it is perceived abroad the way it is. Kiesling’s new book does just that—and more because he also debunks—but sometimes supports—the underpinnings of international relations theories through real world experiences of U.S. diplomats including his own.

Kiesling also characterizes the operation of the State Department and its relations with other foreign affairs agencies very well indeed. He tells of a professional service that fails to value the area and linguistic expertise of its officer corps in favor of Washington bureaucratic operatives. Exactly so. That’s the reason we have so few Arabists and Arabic linguists capable of handling this difficult language and culture at a professional level. State’s assignments and promotion policies work against both. The “end of history” foreign affairs agencies downsizing in the 1990s forced a vast majority to retire prematurely. It takes years to replace their expertise and we’re paying for it now. This is true for virtually every other difficult to learn language as well. Ambassador Monteagle Stearns documented the problem clearly in his landmark book on the U.S. Foreign Service Talking to Strangers in the1990s.

Further, this administration’s empty gestures to change these ill-founded policies through vastly under-funded, vastly over-publicized initiatives are a drop in the ocean.

Democacy-building ain’t easy

Kiesling’s firsthand recollections of the problems of democracy-building in post-Soviet Armenia and Romania after Ceaucescu should make anyone who believes waving a magic wand and holding elections will metamorphose a dictatorship into a democracy think more than twice. It just doesn’t work that way and Kiesling tells us why.

US-Greek Relations: a case study in the long term effects of bad policies

I also have other reasons for liking Kiesling’s book. Kiesling is a Greek specialist who spent several years at different times assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Athens. I too devoted chunks of my own Foreign Service career to Greece. I know Brady Kiesling and it turns out that we have several friends and acquaintances in common—although our paths did not cross until October 2004 and months after his resignation.

Like Kiesling, I had worked in Greece before entering the Foreign Service. Kiesling began his Greek odyssey as a classics major. He still lives in Athens. And he is still involved in archeological digs. He draws upon these experiences for his book. Fresh out of college, I worked as a Teaching Fellow at Anatolia College in Thessaloniki from 1965-66 where I delved only minimally into the classics—although I did visit numerous archeological sites. Instead, I immersed myself in the history and politics of the Balkans—Macedonia and Greece in particular—which I ultimately drew upon for my MA and PhD theses and which began my life long fascination with this complex multi-ethnic checkerboard in Europe’s southeast.

This is also where and when I witnessed the increasing political instability that resulted in the April 1967 Greek military colonels’ coup which Kiesling correctly points to as the first of three cataclysmic events which Greeks blamed on the US and that soured US-Greek relations for years thereafter.

The second problem was the close relations between the hated junta and the U.S. government between 1969 and 1974 when the junta collapsed due to its own ineptitude over Cyprus. I am not convinced that the US was behind the 1967 coup for a variety of reasons. Kiesling supports my convictions.

I worked at the Embassy (actually at USIS) as a first tour officer during 1970-71. I know, therefore, that after Nixon became president in 1969, the relationships between his political appointee ambassador Henry Tasca and the junta were so cordial we felt the seismic reactions to this ill-begotten policy for decades thereafter. Not only was the Greek public outraged at our fawning support for the hated military rulers, but also our mistaken policies provided a rationale for a small, homegrown, scraggly, ideologically bizarre Greek terrorist group called November 17(N-17) to murder American officials stationed in Athens from 1975 until June 29, 2002 when they were arrested.

America’s public diplomacy debacle

Kiesling sees the relevance of robust public diplomacy, but realizes—unlike our current Secretary of State—that not everyone in an Embassy is cut out to engage in or has the time to do public diplomacy and as importantly that even the best public diplomacy and public diplomacy diplomats cannot sell bad policy. In addition, he accurately describes the disappearance of the U.S. government’s public diplomacy specialists after the destruction of the U.S. Information Agency in 1999. What this will portend for the future is an excellent question—but I am convinced that nothing will begin to change until at least January 2009.

There are a few places where I disagree with Kiesling’s analyses or recommendations. But here is the major one: a suggestion near the book’s conclusion that the CIA be integrated into the Foreign Service and that State and CIA’s research and analysis arms be combined. On the one hand, I think Kiesling is right that we should be thinking now about rearranging the foreign affairs deck chairs after the current administration, but I question this proposal’s efficacy. Why?

It seems to me that built-in redundancy in the analytical capabilities of our civilian intelligence services is a safeguard we can well afford even in a post-Iraq belt-tightening. Further, from what I’ve observed, the personality traits, training, career patterns and expertise needed to make successful spies versus successful diplomats are not the same.

I still think, however, that Diplomacy Lessons is well worth the time, effort and money invested in reading it, and if possible, meeting and hearing from its author if you have the chance.

Originally posted on WhirledView by Patricia Kushlis on Friday, 13 October 2006