The Foreign Service Journal, February 2004

department, I had to look around for people. I had no time to go out- side the department, so I gathered together a small group of seven or eight from within it. And we threw ourselves into this work, which we completed in the time given and submitted a report to the Secretary. And the significant wording of that whole report appeared unchanged in his Harvard speech and did set in certain very fundamental ways the whole framework of the Marshall Plan. I also wrote the “X” article for Foreign Affairs at this time. Almost Isolationist FSJ : How do you see the Foreign Service as having changed over the years? GFK : Though people talk about the modern Foreign Service having started in 1924, there was, in the present sense of the word, nothing modern about it. It was, in fact, very old-fashioned by modern standards. The mod- ern Foreign Service, to my mind, dates from the imme- diate aftermath of World War II, and has very little rela- tion to what had been established before the war. For example, ours was a Service where we were all known to the top people in the department. The under secretary, the assistant secretaries, had participated in examining us, and we were not ciphers for them — we were real people. They followed our careers with inter- est and read our efficiency reports. They were moved by all this in their promotions and the nature of the assign- ments they gave us. I don’t think that anybody can expect that today. Whatever may be the virtues of the Foreign Service, it’s part of the vast Washington bureau- cracy today, and you can’t change that. FSJ : If you were talking to some bright young people today, college graduates, would you recommend the Foreign Service to them? GFK : No. A number of youngsters have come to me to ask my advice about this. What I have said in recent years was: Look, if you are going to regard life in the Foreign Service as a prolongation of your education, as a remarkable and unique opportunity to live in a foreign city with a respectable entree to the whole place, includ- ing the government — if you take it that way, then by all means. But if you’re fiercely ambitious, and you want to get ahead, and you’re interested in getting promot- ed before anybody else, then I wouldn’t join it. I would have to say also that I’ve gradually become per- suaded that this is not a thing one should join for life. That’s for two reasons. First, if one had a wife, she would now want a professional life of her own. But also, the fact that top ranks of the Service are so blocked by White House appointments means that you’re apt to be cut off just when you’ve achieved the peak of your usefulness to the government. FSJ : You are identified as a scholar and a writer with the realist, as opposed to the idealist, school of foreign affairs. We seem to be moving further away from that in the current period — getting more idealistic, perhaps more altruistic. From the realist perspective, which emphasizes the pursuit of specific American interests in the conduct of foreign policy, it’s difficult to understand what the American interest in Somalia or Bosnia might be. GFK : This is difficult to say in a few words. I feel that we are greatly overextended. We claim to be able to do more than we really can do for other people. We should limit our contributions, and let others take the initiative. I’m close to the isolationists, but not entirely, because I’ve always recognized that those alliances to which we belong and which the Senate has approved as provided for by the Constitution, we must remain faith- ful to those. That includes the original NATO alliance, our alliance with Japan. Our complicated relations with Latin America contain elements of long-term assur- ances, in the Monroe Doctrine sense. Beyond that, when other countries come to us asking for help, we should ask, “Why do you need it?” and “Why should we provide it?” Within our time, I don’t think that democracy is going to be the universal form of government. I’m very hesi- tant about our pushing democracy and human rights on other countries, whose democracy in any case would be rather different from our own. We can’t ask other coun- tries to be clones of America.  F O C U S 20 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 4 The day [the new ambassador] came, all of us who were Foreign Service officers met and asked ourselves if we should resign.