The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2015

24 JANUARY FEBRUARY 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL a airs, etc. Or, equally damaging, it is dismissed as little more than good manners and a pleasing, if overly cautious, personal style. For this article, I will take “diplomacy” to mean the process of the formulation and the implementation through o cial channels of the broad elements of national strategic policy, to include public diplomacy, development policy and security strategy as much as core diplomacy and, in some circumstances, track-two diplomacy. It includes the following, in unequal parts: • History and an appreciation of the “persistence of political culture” • Area and cultural competence, including language skills • Economics, at least familiarity with political economy and macro-economics • Governmental structure and process of policy and decision- making • Organizational management: resources and personnel • Leadership: the skills to manipulate processes, both formal and informal, to attain goals • Writing and presentation skills. Few practitioners are competent to e ectively teach all those components with equal depth and sophistication. Fortunately, we don’t have to. Scholars—the faculty—devote their careers to these disciplines, and students have the option to craft interdis- ciplinary courses of study. A senior professor of American foreign policy at West Point once described “diplomacy” to his cadets as the negotiation of bilateral and multilateral treaties. Not inaccurate, but certainly insu cient. Ross Perot, in his presidential run, suggested that diplomats be replaced by fax machines—as though we were no more than the sum of our demarches. Finally, emphasis on crisis management reinforces the perception of diplomacy as events. For practitioners, active and emeriti, as well as the think-tank crowd, simulations, games, role-playing and tabletop exercises can be invaluable mechanisms to work through issues. I am a strong supporter of tabletop exercises/simulations, and moved the State Department’s crisis management exercises to the Foreign Service Institute when the Diplomatic Security Bureau opted to shut them down in the early 1990s. In 2008, there was a cottage industry of “Day After” exercises in the run-up to the change in administrations that did seem to inform policy choices. But to be useful, they must assume a certain level of familiarity with the issues and understanding of the dynamics. Since students rarely have either, such exercises are of limited use in a classroom setting or for the apprentice practitioner. “Games” that work well at war colleges or at defense consulting firms like SAIC or Booz Allen Hamilton, on a college campus devolve rather rapidly into theater, and too often into high camp. With little frame of reference, students take on what they believe is the persona of a Cabinet secretary or a foreign leader based on their perception of a current incumbent. As demarches, press releases and meetings y back and forth, orchestrated with a deus-ex-machina quality by Control, a “gotcha” quality can creep in, at times egged on by team advisers. Bright students become policy divas. In an unscienti c survey of graduate stu- dents, the consensus was that the games were “fun but silly.” Few saw them as constructive lessons on the practice of diplomacy. Simulations reinforce the notion of diplomacy as an event or series of events, of crisis management or negotiations done in a matter of days. ey leave students with an unrealistic expec- tation that diplomacy is fast-paced, the clever resolution of a crisis or conclusion of a short-fuse negotiation, rather than an appreciation of the incremental process that precedes and fol- lows crises or negotiations, and inevitable disappointment when they become practitioners. Diplomacy is to simulations as the practice of medicine is to the TV show “ER.” Finally, simulations place an emphasis on the what or the how of diplomatic practice at the expense of the why. e skill set the next generation of policy players needs is to understand the role of public diplomacy, or of public a airs, not practice in drafting a press release. Practitioners-in-residence need not rep- licate the role of FSI or the apprentice stage in their new careers. e value-added of the practitioner-in-residence is to work with students to understand how the parts can successfully be brought together to make and implement a policy, to bridge the divide between theory/research and policymaking/implementa- tion above the level of the Gullah storyteller. e substantive components—history, economics, political There is a lack of clarity whether diplomacy is the process, the tool or means of the process, or discreet events.