The Foreign Service Journal, March 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2021 35 Family Members f whose underlying dispute emerged from either not knowing the history or knowing a different one altogether. Providing background training is one way to strengthen historical literacy. The other is to expand the role of the Office of the Historian. Staff there prepare background papers, but far too few people in the field know of their existence. Even some- thing as simple as a required briefing from the Office of the Historian on the way to post would go far in instilling a culture of historical awareness. The strength of U.S. diplomacy overseas is understanding and interpreting the broad context in foreign environments to identify areas of common ground. Give us the tools to do this and serve the American people. Retired FSO John Dickson was a public diplomacy officer from 1984 to 2010. Make the Foreign Service an Official Profession The new administration should transform the Foreign Service into a formal government profession by: • Formulating and implementing a code of professional conduct for the Foreign Service. • Mandating a career-long, diplomatic educational continuum expressly designed for the Foreign Service that includes dip- lomatic knowledge: for example, cross-cultural negotiating behavior, “measures short of war,” diplomatic persuasion, multilateralism, grand strategy and select areas of interna- tional law. It is not enough for the Foreign Service to merely claim profession status. A profession—such as law, medicine or the military—is a distinct institution. Elements of a profession the Foreign Service lacks include a commitment to appropriate, defined values (found in a professional code of conduct) and career-long professional education. The Foreign Service Institute should be the repository and teacher of diplomatic knowledge, in addition to existing leadership, management, language and area studies training. Foreign policy and diplomacy are fundamentally ethical. Every day Foreign Service personnel make ethical decisions not only related to strategic foreign policy recommendation and imple- mentation, but also concerning consular and other operations. The Foreign Service should develop a code of professional respon- sibility and conduct that accounts for and amplifies its values. This professional code would be aspirational and practical. It would not overlap with compliance ethics administered by the Bureau of Global Talent Management and Office of the Legal Adviser. Such a code of professional responsibility would need to be fully inculcated by and within the leadership and the personnel of the Foreign Service. It would be studied throughout the careers of the professional Foreign Service at home and inmissions abroad. Foreign Service personnel who came forward to testify in 2019’s impeachment proceedings did so on the basis of values they understood instinctually. They should have been able to articulate values expressed in a Foreign Service code of conduct. The world is becoming ever more complicated. There has never been a greater need for a code to support the Foreign Service. Retired FSO Robert WilliamDry is adjunct professor of diplomatic and Middle Eastern studies at New York University’s Graduate Program in International Relations. Reverse the Centralization of Public Diplomacy America’s image abroad has been damaged greatly by the Iraq War, the Great Recession and the Trump administration. To improve the situation, some policy experts would like to re- create the U.S. Information Agency. They are nostalgic for the agency’s independent role of telling America’s story without constraints imposed by the politics of the moment. But this nostalgia ignores current realities: the declining budget for all diplomatic activities, the growing presence of the Pentagon in the gaps left by a receding State Department and the questionable viability of a small, independent agency being allowed by any administration to pursue a bipartisan approach to championing America’s virtues. Without the expense and political battles needed to re- create USIA, however, we can reproduce its effectiveness by reversing the centralization of public diplomacy in the hands of Washington-based political appointees. Cloth-eared, Washington-controlled messaging has reduced the nimble- ness, adaptability and effectiveness of State Department public diplomacy. The new administration must have faith in the profession- alism of its ambassadors and embassy teams. Ambassadors