The Foreign Service Journal, May 2015

38 MAY 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Getting Real Value for Risks Taken When we decide to put diplomats and other civilian workers into a country, we need to ensure they have the tools they need to accomplish the tasks set for them. And because risk can never be eliminated, it must be managed. Somehow few challenge the risks we face from tropical disease or endemic crime, only frompolitically motivated violence. For that, host governments have the primary responsibility to protect our official facilities under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Dip- lomatic Relations and the parallel 1963 Convention on Consular Relations. As politicians and pundits club each other with talk of The net effect of this security-first posture was to reduce the U.S. government’s presence and operational effectiveness in Tunisia at a crucial time. “sending in the Marines” (or the 101st Airborne), let’s admit that it is almost never practical or desirable to apply purely military solutions to diplomatic security issues. We need tomaintain good “force pro- tection,” of course, and we need tomini- mize mistakes, but we also need to get out of our offices to do our jobs. That means tolerating a certain level of risk. As the recent knife attack onMark Lippert, our ambassador in Seoul, demonstrates, we can never completely take the danger out of diplomacy. What we can do is take a critical look at security’s increasing share of our limited resources, and ensure that we get real value for the risks we do take. If, as I have read, our overall budget for security is now four times our budget for public diplomacy, let’s reexamine our goals. Just “staying safe” cannot be primary. Let’s transmit to our next generation of diplomats those virtues and values Amb. Stevens gave his life for—and achieve real benefits for the nation. n