The Foreign Service Journal, April 2005

barriers such as customs practices, technical regulations and government procurement policies; • Financing issues , including new, more aggressive policies for our export credit and project finance agen- cies; and • Small businesses , by identifying companies with some previous international experience as a key customer of federal programs. This new initiative increased emphasis on areas where failure was believed to have affected the ability to compete overseas — e.g., market intelligence and business contacts. During my own service as the commercial attaché in Guatemala from 1988 to 1990, I not only was charged with working to advance U.S. commercial interests, but spent an equal amount of time working with the U.S. Agency for International Development and nongovern- mental organizations to assist in the delivery of assistance designed to create a more diversified and competitive local economy. This did not simply mean promoting U.S. exports, important as that function was; in fact, my role in facilitating U.S. imports from Guatemala was seen as a crucial component of our top foreign policy objective at the time: facilitating the transition to democratic govern- ment. Similar programs emerged throughout the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR. By the time it left office in January 1993, the Bush administration had developed for the first time a public policy rationale for commercial diplomacy that provided an answer to the question of why it was in the national interest for taxpayer money to be spent in support of pri- vate interests. That rationale rested on the need for fed- eral advocacy to counter aggressive efforts by other gov- ernments to advance their own economic interests, as well as an increased understanding of the needs of the small business sector in terms of information and con- tacts. A corollary of the main commercial diplomacy ini- tiative also had begun to emerge during this period, relat- ed increasingly to our international economic develop- ment objectives. Reflecting its bipartisan underpinnings, the Clinton administration built on these inherited rationales and programs, aggressively establishing its own commitment to commercial diplomacy. The crown jewel of the initia- tive was the Commerce Department’s new Advocacy Center, which opened in 1994. Equally important, President Clinton and virtually his entire Cabinet pub- licly and consistently pushed for inclusion of U.S. com- panies in mega-projects in Asia and Latin America. As Jeffrey Garten, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s under secretary for international trade, noted in a speech in London in mid-1995: “This is not the first time that American foreign policy focused so heavily on its com- mercial goals. However, in the past … we subordinated economic to traditional foreign policy and national secu- rity concerns. In fact, whereas in the past we have often tried to use economic instruments to achieve traditional foreign policy goals, today, and in the future, we increas- ingly will be using traditional foreign policy instruments to achieve our economic objectives.” Discussion of the role of commercial diplomacy with- in the framework of overall foreign policy enjoyed a sim- ilar prominence at this time, both within the diplomatic profession and outside it. During the 1993-1994 period alone, the Foreign Service Journal ran four articles on the subject, including two cover stories. In a January 1995 Washington Post op-ed, columnist Jim Hoagland praised the administration’s “zealous approach to making trade the center of its foreign policy.” And in March of that year, Newsweek International ran a cover article declar- ing that “to a greater extent than at any time since the 19th century … U.S. foreign policy has become one with American commercial interests.” Similar analyses appeared in The Economist , Foreign Affairs and many other prestigious periodicals during the 1990s. Interest Fades Again Yet by the Clinton administration’s second term, com- mercial diplomacy had become an item for the inside pages once again. As with other foreign affairs programs, a sense of drift and retrenchment set in, leading to fewer resources and less vigorous promotion of strategic objec- tives. By mid-1998, Nancy Dunne was writing in The Financial Times that “the concept of placing U.S. busi- ness interests at the center of foreign policy has suffered severe blows. …With the Asian financial crisis, problems of nuclear diplomacy and geopolitical shifts in China and Russia, a more traditional foreign policy has reasserted itself.” Despite its complexity and its trade and econom- ic development dimensions, commercial diplomacy as a topic of policy discussion became identified only as advo- cacy on behalf of individual U.S. companies. In retrospect, it seems clear that one of the main rea- sons for the lack of a comprehensive definition of com- mercial diplomacy that fully explains its foreign policy C O V E R S T O R Y 24 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 5