The Foreign Service Journal, January 2009

30 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 ficers (in APPs or any other kind of post) in cities outside our established consulates and embassy. This is not to say that those other cities are being aban- doned in the mission plans. Instead, the Xiamen officer is based in Guangzhou, the Nanjing officer is based in Shang- hai and the Zhengzhou officer is based in Beijing and will also cover Xi’an. They are called “officer designees” and travel to their cities on a regular basis. They have also cre- ated newsletters and Web sites for their regions. “Consulate General Guangzhou has made a real effort to use the new positions to raise the visibility and profile of the U.S. government in areas outside of Guangzhou,” says Gary Oba, an APP officer based there. “These areas in- clude multiple cities with multimillion populations. … China’s refusal to accept APPs has meant that the APP of- ficers assigned there are faced, first, with the task of ‘trans- forming’ their own positions. In addition to requiring a good deal of flexibility, creativity and initiative, the job also requires a high degree of tolerance for ambiguity. The job is not well understood even within our own bureaucracy— much less in the wider world.” Looking Ahead A re-evaluation and realignment of positions at posts where staffing hadn’t changed since the Cold War made good management sense, as does the notion of reassess- ing the U.S. diplomatic posture worldwide. However, the GRP was essentially half-baked: new positions in emerging nations came with little or no resource sup- port, and at losing posts there was no commensurate re- duction in workloads. Moscow was the biggest loser in the GRP exercise, with a total of 13 positions eliminated. Germany also lost a sig- nificant number, six in Berlin and six from the consulates. Other losing posts included London, Tokyo, Warsaw, Oslo, Budapest, Paris and Hong Kong. These posts are among the most visited and busiest mis- sions in the world. Many of the other eliminated jobs were in Washington, where overburdened desk officers, espe- cially those responsible for small European posts, have be- come even more overburdened and have difficulty keeping up with the mandatory work. “The next step, on which more needs to be done,” ex- plains John Heffern, “was for the department to seek re- lief from non-essential embassy duties so that all officers and staff overseas could focus more on outreach and other transformational tasks.” This critical piece of the program is still pending. Overall, however, the difficulties with the GRP have been tied primarily to the lack of resources devoted to sup- porting the new positions and to the reality of staffing shortages worldwide. In a February 2008 reprise at Georgetown— two years after launching the GRP—Sec. Rice finally asked for 1,100 new State positions and 300 for USAID in the FY 2009 budget proposal, although most of those new positions were for functions unrelated to the program. In the absence of any sustained lobbying effort by the Bush administration, Congress did not fund the re- quest for a major staffing increase, but did fund a minor one, pending finalization of the FY 09 budget after the new president takes office. The impact of global repositioning has varied widely from post to post. Extra positions seem to prove useful where the post has a budget that can support them, espe- cially with domestic travel funds; the front office and ad- ministrative team support them; and the host-country environment allows for more “transformational diplomacy” activities. Some believe that the push to get more FSOs out of capitals should continue. “The APP concept collided with budget realities, security constraints, issues of diplomatic reciprocity and other requirements, but it is still the right one and I hope it will survive into the next administration,” says Geoff Pyatt, who was Embassy New Delhi’s deputy chief of mission from 2006 to 2007. Many agree that despite the problems, repositioning is necessary. “When the dust clears,” says an officer close to the OIG review, “we may actually have helped get our overworked political, economic and public diplomacy of- ficers out from behind their desks and back to doing the kind of internal political and outreach work, including travel outside the capital, that they want to do but were finding it harder and harder to do.” If the next administration is inclined to leave in place these initial rounds of global repositioning and move fur- ther in that direction, it will have to tackle the problems that have been neglected thus far. It will need to take a hard look at the overall concept and practicality of trans- formational diplomacy and define in concrete terms the new roles of FSOs who are being shifted from developed countries to developing countries. Most importantly, it will need to match the level of Foreign Service funding, staffing and material resources to the ambitious tasks im- plicit in “transforming” the world. F O C U S