The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004

Thus, while hardly a hostile envi- ronment, Malaysia is a potentially difficult and lonely place for a political officer pursuing U.S. national interests. That it wasn’t so for me or my colleagues in the political section was in large mea- sure thanks to our fantastic FSN political adviser. First off, the range of his con- tacts is enormous, cutting across all the important ethnic, religious, political party and social-sector groups. Remarkably, he appears equally comfortable in all of these milieus, diverse as they are. (To use an imperfect cul- tural parallel, imagine an American equally at ease with European-Americans, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans, and with a similar breadth of contacts across the spectrum from lefty Democrats to hard-line Republicans.) Equally impressive, almost everyone genuinely appears to like him and to enjoy his company, and many folks seek him out to exchange views on the developments of the day. To put it another way, he is a consummate diplomat. He knows how to make people feel intelligent and important and worthwhile, which facilitates an unhin- dered flow of opinions and ideas. As an information seeker, he knows that what one knows is secondary to what one doesn’t know, and (to paraphrase an excellent former boss of mine) that one sometimes needs to play just a little bit dumb to do the political officer role well. I often thought we should hire him to teach junior offi- cers a special “What they don’t teach you in A-100” class on the interpersonal side of diplomacy. And to the extent that his skills “rubbed off” on the rest of us, he opened doors that may well have been shut to us with- out him. I have already noticed a similar kit of tools in the pos- session of our political FSN here in Bolivia, though adapted to the different cultural circumstances. Let me cite just one example. Not long after I arrived here, I watched my colleague with a mixture of amazement and admiration as he moved in to meet, and charm, an inter- nationally-known Spanish jurist who was the star attrac- tion of a conference in which we had no role. Even though a crowd of conference participants was also flocking to the dignitary, in just moments he and our FSN were absorbed in friendly conversation. And before moving on, the jurist requested a copy of the State Department’s human rights report on Bolivia, implying the possibility of ongoing contact. CAJE cannot, and does not attempt to, account for these kinds of “immeasurable” skills. Import- ant as advanced university degrees, work experience and technical competence all are, such attributes are inert and meaningless without considering the character, the human spark, the all- important internal resources, of the individual in ques- tion. A Modest Proposal I have a twofold fix for this problem. First, the CAJE matrix needs to make explicit allowance for the individ- ual’s interpersonal skills in determining the rank of the position, especially for those jobs for which such “human” skills are crucial. Second, the system needs to ensure that the all-important “immeasurable” abilities are also duly taken into account — somehow. I recog- nize the inherent difficulty of adding such factors to the calculus, but I am confident our intrepid human resources experts can meet the challenge. Perhaps there could be some provision for “bonus points,” for example. To seasoned observers of the bureaucratic mindset, this proposal must seem the very picture of tilting against windmills. Those of psychoanalytic bent may attribute the motive behind this critique to a thinly veiled fear that were the CAJE approach applied to the rest of the Foreign Service, it would come down hard on yours truly. Both could well be right, at least in part. But I am willing to run that risk. Our FSN colleagues deserve an evaluation system that recognizes all their valuable con- tributions to our overseas missions — not just the ones that can be easily quantified and assigned to snug bureaucratic boxes. Otherwise, we may end up sacri- ficing some of our best people to an overly rigid sys- tem, defeating the very purpose of CAJE. F O C U S 32 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 4 One doesn’t have to be a cynic to understand the fear that the CAJE system is an elaborate scheme designed to save Uncle Sam money.