The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2021

34 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Certainly, our Civil Service ranks are filled with outstanding experts who can bring continuity and depth to the nuclear field. But if there is no career track for FSOs in the “T” fam- ily, the nuclear field will miss out on the particular skills and perspectives that they can bring, whether it be negotiating and language skills or knowledge of our nuclear partners and competitors. If we do not re-create the FSO slots in “T” that have been either dropped or converted, we will miss the next generation of such nuclear stars as Stephen Ledogar, Mark Fitzpatrick, Greg Thielmann and Steve Pifer, to name but a few. In fact, we brought John Ordway out of retirement in 2011 because his diplomatic skills, coupled with deep knowledge of Russia and Russian, made him a superb head of the Bilateral Consultative Commission established to deal with New START implemen- tation. To draw excellent FSOs to the “T” family, we will need to re-create in these bureaus a career ladder for the Foreign Service, which is now virtually nonexistent in AVC and has lost many rungs in ISN, as well. Ideally, the Director General (in consultation with “T”) would review the staffing charts of the relevant offices to ensure that there are opportunities for FSOs to serve in mid- and senior-level positions to the benefit of both the bureaus and the Service. (Such a review would also be useful for other functional bureaus. More broadly, State should look at ways to lessen the concentration of FSOs in the geographic bureaus to the relative exclusion of service in the functional bureaus.) FSOs typically staff our Vienna and Geneva arms control/ nonproliferation missions but not the complementary offices at State. Why not link these overseas jobs with the domestic counterpart offices? Geneva and Vienna will always be draws, but the diplomats filling the specialized slots there will sub- stantially benefit from prior work in AVC and ISN in addition to being prime candidates for future senior positions in the “T” family. And they will bring those same skills to assignments in the geographic bureaus, whose regional affairs offices should include a solid focus on arms control issues as, for example, the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs traditionally has. The State Department will benefit overall from developing officers better grounded in nuclear and other arms control issues (The Hague for chemical weapons and Geneva, again, for biosecurity issues). Drawing effectively on both the Civil Service and Foreign Service will enhance our ability to tackle such specific issues as the North Korean nuclear challenge, as well as reengaging on the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Both highly complex nuclear issues were negotiated by multilateral coalitions and reflected historic and political issues for which area experts could be especially useful as team members. Our civil servants should continue to be offered relevant posts overseas, as well. We should look for opportunities to detail both FS and CS person- nel to international nuclear organizations such as the IAEA, just as we have to NATO. This could enhance our influence in key institutions in addition to contributing to the professional development of our international security experts. In the Multilateral Sphere Developing synergy between the State Department’s Foreign and Civil Service will be more important than ever in today’s increasingly complex and multipolar world. Some of the world’s multilateral nuclear institutions are showing strains, some of which are long-standing. The Conference on Disarmament, the world’s sole standing multilateral disarma- ment body, for instance, has not been able to negotiate a treaty since the CTBT in 1996 because its consensus rules allow any one state to hold up even the start of a new negotiation. The IAEA is, by contrast, a highly evolved institution that is open to all states and has successfully accommodated new nuclear tasks over time, such as nuclear security, which got a major push from the Obama administration’s Nuclear Security Sum- mit process. But even the IAEA has governance challenges, such as the inability of new members to join the regional groups, which are the ticket to election to its Board of Governors. Are there ways we can help strengthen or reform these multilateral bodies to more effectively agree on new nuclear arrangements and implement those already in place? Is it time to think of new bodies, a series of existing informal groups of states or ad hoc coalitions to deal with particular issues? These are some of the institutional issues that should be examined by the new State Department leadership. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review process, To draw excellent FSOs to the “T” family, we will need to re-create in these bureaus a career ladder for the Foreign Service, which is now virtually nonexistent.