The Foreign Service Journal, May 2014

40 MAY 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL How do we rescue U.S. foreign policy from creeping militarization? How can we resurrect diplomacy from the musty archives of the past? A diplomatic practitioner offers some answers. BY ROBERT HUTCH I NGS OF Diplomacy T wo decades ago, the late historian Ernest May imagined a visitor from a foreign land coming to Washington, D.C., and being shown the West Wing of the White House, with its Situation Room in round-the-clock operation, and next door, the Old Executive Office Building housing the ever-expanding National Security Council staff. “Across the Potomac, [the] visitor sees the Pentagon. With a daytime population of 25,000, it is the crest of a mountainous defense establishment, which employs almost two-thirds of THE AMERICANWAY Robert Hutchings is dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Af- fairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining the LBJ School in March 2010, he was diplomat-in-residence at Princeton University, where he had also served as assistant dean of the WoodrowWilson School of Public and International Affairs. Among many other posi- tions, he chaired the U.S. National Intelligence Council in Washington, D.C., from 2003 to 2005, and has served as director of international studies at the WoodrowWilson International Center for Scholars, director for European affairs at the National Security Council, special adviser to the Secretary of State with the rank of ambassador, and deputy director of Radio Free Europe. the nearly five million persons who work for the U.S. govern- ment. Farther out in Virginia, at Langley, the Central Intelligence Agency has more office acreage than the Pentagon. At Fort Meade in Maryland sits the even larger, more mysterious, and more expensive National Security Agency,” wrote May. The visitor might return from his visit, May concluded, to describe the nation’s capital this way: “Yes, a city. But, at heart, a military headquarters, like the Rome of the Flavians or the Berlin of the Hohenzollerns.” Twenty years later, the city is much the same. As J. Anthony Holmes, a former ambassador and AFSA president from 2005 to 2007, observed in Foreign Affairs a few years ago, the defense budget is roughly 20 times as great as the combined budgets of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. There are more lawyers in the Pentagon than diplomats in the State Department. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned in 2008 that the United States risks the “creeping militarization” of its foreign policy by giving such overwhelming priority to our military ser- vices and paying so little attention to the diplomats who work to advance American interests through non-military means. Gates reminded Americans that current and future wars are likely to be “fundamentally political in nature” and that military means always need to be harnessed to political ends. FEATURE