The Foreign Service Journal, March 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2023 29 be sure exactly how a policy will affect events on the ground— nobody expects perfection. But when the State Department neglects to examine a policy’s effectiveness, bureaucratic inertia will sustain a misguided approach for far too long. Strong organizations learn from today’s successes and failures to improve the likelihood of success tomorrow. Fortunately, there are well-developed and tested tools to build a culture of learning. Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems, which are already ubiquitous in the programming space, are a good start- ing point. The U.S. military leans heavily on after-action reviews, and most government foreign assistance programs already incor- porate M&E tools. Yet, strategic-level policymakers rarely use M&E systems to track the impact of their policies. The relentless pursuit of policy success—and an honest accounting of inevi- table failures—can help restore trust between the Department of State, White House, and Congress. The Department of State’s new “Learning Agenda” offers an exciting opportunity. Mandated by the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018, it is a systematic plan to answer a set of policy-relevant questions critical to achieving the department’s strategic objectives. Atop the agenda is study- ing the effectiveness of senior-level diplomacy. Can you imagine how much the State Department would change if it were discov- ered the circumstances under which senior-level visits were and were not impactful? Can you imagine how much time, money, and resources would be suddenly made available? The State Department should set a goal to become the most highly trained decision-makers in the U.S. government. Diplomacy’s competitive advantage in the interagency cannot derive from the number of its tanks or the size of its political constituency. Curriculum for Vital Skills . Fourth, any improvement of the foreign policy process must begin and end with our most valu- able resource: the officials who staff the organizations every day. But the skills associated with foreign policy expertise are ambiguous. Take Ambassadors William Burns’ and Linda Thomas-Green- field’s description of diplomacy’s “fundamentals,” for instance,