The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2021

20 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL at the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project and a senior adviser at the Foreign Service Institute’s School of Leadership and Management, who served for 37 years in the Foreign Service and is a three-time chief of mission. This is a moment in history where we have a chance to rebuild, reshape, redirect, reform the Foreign Service for the 21st century. Some might argue we’re 20 years late. I would agree with that assessment, but I also believe that better late than never is a very important principle in life, and it’s time to get going on this. And I believe most of our members agree. Ambassador Nicholas Burns: What we want to do today is present our argument that the United States needs to invest more in the State Department and lift up diplomacy. Let me just tell you a little bit why we conducted this project. We’ve been concerned for years that the State Department is underfunded; that it hasn’t had, maybe especially in recent years, adequate leadership; that diplomacy in effect has been sidelined since 9/11 by respective administrations, not just the Trump administration; and that if we could do something to help the current Foreign Service officers, specialists and civil servants, we wanted to do that. We argue in this report that the United States needs a stronger Foreign Service, a more high-performing Foreign Service. In other words, a more effective Foreign Service. And we also argue that as President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President–elect Kamala Harris prepare to take office, diplomacy is going to be a more important tool in the American national security arsenal. If we have to end the war in Afghanistan, American diplomats will end the war at the negotiating table as they are trying to do now. If we’re going to deal with these very difficult competitor, adversarial countries, China and Russia, we’re going to have to have diplomats at the table, in our embassies and consulates deployed to deal with them. Once in a generation, you have to look within yourself in a ser- vice like the military or intelligence community, or like the State Department, the Foreign Service and Civil Service. And you’ve got to be honest about your failures, honest about what’s not working. And you’ve got to commit to reform. We held 40 workshops andmet withmore than 200 people. We talked to lots of active-duty Foreign Service officers at the entry level, at the midlevel, at the senior level; we talked to specialists, we talked to civil servants, and we talked with high-level military and intelligence colleagues. And, of course, we’ve reached out to members of Congress, Republicanmembers of the Senate and House, Democratic members of the Senate and House, and staff members of the important committees. We met with senior State Department officials; with Secretaries Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton; with two former CIA directors; and two former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. We learnedmuch from all of them. We believe there’s a possibility of a bipartisan consensus that State needs to be strengthened. We wanted to reach out to citizens, too, because after all, everything we do in government is on behalf of the citizens of the United States. And we met with more than 800 people in World Affairs Council meetings. ACTION #1—REDEFINE THE MISSION Ambassador Nicholas Burns: Recommendation number one: The new president, Joe Biden, and the new Congress, Repub- licans and Democrats, should work together on a bipartisan basis to define a new 21st-century mission and a newmandate for the Foreign and Civil Service. We think the State Department should be restored to play a major part in policymaking in Washington, D.C. State’s been sidelined in many respects from that role. The State Department, our embassies and consulates—275 of them around the world— are the lead executors of any administration’s foreign policy. Also restore the role of our ambassadors as the president’s personal representative and the leader of the country team in embassies around the world, because that role is being undercut in many parts of the world. ACTION #2—REVISE THE FOREIGN SERVICE ACT Ambassador Marc Grossman: The second recommendation is to revise the Foreign Service Act. I’ll give you five reasons that, in the end, we decided that it was time now to see if we could get a new Foreign Service Act. First, 40 years is a long time since 1980. We honor the people who brought that Foreign Service Act of 1980 into being, but there’s been an enormous amount of change since then. Second, there are principles that we believe should move unchanged from the act from 40 years ago to today—a career in Foreign Service, a nonpolitical Foreign Service, criteria for ambassadors, up-or-out, worldwide availability, peer review, all the things that are so important to that 1980 Act. Third, we listened carefully to our colleagues in the military, who said: “If you don’t get this in writing, if it isn’t in legislation, you will never succeed at doing this over the long term.” Fourth, this is the foundation for so many of the other recom- mendations that we’ve made. And fifth, very importantly, we’ve found a very great reservoir of people on Capitol Hill and in our community, as well, who