The Foreign Service Journal, April 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2018 45 section about professional responsibility in the face of directives with which one funda- mentally disagrees: Is it more principled to stay on the job and try to steer policy in the right direction, or resign from the Foreign Service so you can speak out publicly? Iraq was far from the first controversy to stir such arguments, of course. Nor, as we are seeing today, was it the last. But wherever you come down on any of those particular challenges, I trust we can all agree that it is vital for the Journal to be a forum for discussing them without fear or favor. The Foreign Service community was hopeful that Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Diplomatic Readiness Initiative would revitalize the Foreign Service after a decade of neglect, and worse. With the end of the Cold War, legislators had come to believe that wholesale cutbacks in the international relations budget were appropriate. DRI did indeed repair a lot of that institutional dam- age, as did Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Diplomacy 3.0 program later, and our coverage highlighted those encouraging developments in the midst of so much angst about the future. Unfortunately, the “Iraq tax”—the evocative shorthand for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s policy of pulling resources from overseas posts and Washington bureaus to support the growing U.S. presence in the Middle East—and her championing of “transformational diplo- macy” undid much of that progress. Nor did it help that resent- ment within the Foreign Service of such ill-conceived policies, which the FSJ faithfully reported, fueled perceptions of disloy- alty—which we also covered. But short of turning into a cheer- “Transformational Diplomacy” was the focus of the July- August 2006 FSJ .