The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2015

28 JANUARY FEBRUARY 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL relations theory and practice. Something else is going on here that we need to understand. What the two communities teach in terms of skills and procedures, as well as the beliefs that inform them, the values that sustain them and the theories that lie behind them, di er signi cantly. ese di erences get at the heart of whether diplomacy in the United States is a unique profession with a de ned body of knowledge and skill set, or merely a practice by a collection of experts with assorted technical knowledge and skills. Who is a diplomat in today’s world? e U.S. Foreign Service has a vital stake in the answer to that question, given the displacement of the State Department as the central axis of o cial American external relations and the encroachment by politically well-con- nected Americans, intent on replacing members of the career Service. The American Fabric e main institutions of American society do not support diplomacy as either a professional practice or a eld of study. Many Americans have no idea what diplomats do. Others think diplomacy is no longer necessary because the fabric of global society is one felted whole, so densely matted together that sov- ereign boundaries are irrelevant and slight national di erences can be managed. ey see no need for a corps of uniquely skilled professionals, deeply knowledgeable in the histories, languages and cultures of foreign societies. In this rosy vision of attened, brous, global unity, where there is no “foreign,” foreign policy is optional, and diplomats are unnecessary. Instead, private individuals, with technical knowledge, functional expertise and global reach, network to x the problems created by rapid compression into global oneness. Readily available in civil society, such expertise is best assem- bled around issues of concern to bind societies one to another apolitically, without distrusted national governments getting in the way. e corresponding academic track in APSIA schools is human development, including public health. By contrast, those Americans who view today’s newly felted world as a pathological mess want protection from it, not engagement with it. ey want military and intelligence options to prevent, shape and win con icts that they believe threaten the continued existence of the exceptional American way of life and the global order that sustains it. e corresponding academic track in international policy schools is security studies, including intelligence. Academic and societal embrace of the boundary-less term “global,” instead of the boundary-crossing term “international,” erases the very idea of the “foreign.” Without that concept, interdisciplinary area studies—the focus on the particularities of regions and nations with palpable histories, cultures, languages and concerns of their own—diminish in value. As a subject of study, diplomacy, which provides understanding of the political means needed to achieve any foreign policy goal, given those complex external realities, is barely visible. Nor is there much demand for it. In the American system of higher education, students are consumers who choose to ll the seats in the classrooms. Research shows that members of the millennial generation, shaped by 9/11 and the 2008 recession, are hyper-individualistic, identify as global citizens, and distrust government and large bureaucratic institutions. ese characteristics drive their career goals and, therefore, course preferences. eir identity as global citizens also might explain why courses on public diplomacy, in which they imagine themselves as technologically empowered individual actors, are more subscribed than those on diplomacy itself. Over the last decade, while diplomacy has been sidelined, foreign a airs job growth in America has been in the intel- ligence/security sector and in nongovernmental human rights and development organizations. American students who are inclined toward international a airs want to acquire the skills and concepts that will qualify them to get the jobs that American society has on o er. International students, by contrast, many of whom are already diplomats or aspire to become diplomats for their countries, do want to study the eld. ey comprise, on average, a third of students in all the classes I surveyed. Diplo- macy course instructors also frequently mention the subsidized Diplomacy has been squeezed out of the course catalogs in American higher education by the two master frames driving American views of how to deal with the world: defend against it, or transform it.