The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2017

18 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The new administration’s challenge is to sustain U.S. leadership in an increasingly unhinged world. BY KE I TH W. M I NES MR. PRESIDENT, You Have Partners at State to Help Navigate the World’s Shoals Keith W. Mines is a Senior Foreign Service officer currently serving as an Interagency Professional in Residence at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, he was a U.S. Army Special Forces officer. He has served throughout the Western Hemisphere, as well as in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Africa and Europe, in diplomat- ic, United Nations and military assignments. The views expressed here are the author’s alone and not necessarily those of the U.S. government. F or the past two years, we have engaged in a raucous national debate on the state of the world and America’s place in it, all against a dramatic backdrop that includes the rise of radical Islamism, the collapse of nations, a resurgent Russia, unprecedented refugee flows and a more assertive China. History, it would seem, has returned with a vengeance. Your challenge boils down to engaging an ambivalent U.S. public to take on the task of sustaining American leadership in an increasingly unhinged world. I offer the follow- ing assessment of that challenge, and some thoughts on how your partners at the State Department can help. FOCUS NOTES TO THE NEW ADMINISTRATION Shoring Up the Home Front Before getting too far along, you will need to have a conversa- tion with the American people about our place in the world. The election showed that Americans are skeptical of our engagement abroad and unclear about our interests. As Robert Kagan recently put it, “They favor the liberal order in so far as they can see how it touches them. But they are no longer prepared to sacrifice much to uphold it.” This shows up most clearly in the debate over globalization, of which The Economist has written: “There is a widespread sense that an open economy is good for a small elite but does nothing for the broad mass of people. ... The storms inflicted by a more integrated economy were underestimated, and too little effort went into helping those who lost out.” The editors also remind us, however, that “half of America’s exports go to countries with which it has a free-trade deal, even though these countries account for less than a tenth of global Gross Domestic Product.” You’ll need to implement domestic programs to help globaliza- tion’s losers and enable all Americans to compete more success- fully, all the while expanding access to the global markets that will be at the heart of export-led economic growth. In the security arena, the American people feel similarly betrayed, primarily by the uneven progress in Iraq and Afghani-