The Foreign Service Journal, May 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2019 19 FSJ Editor Shawn Dorman: You’ve spoken about how today’s Foreign Service faces a more “disordered” world. What do you see as the top priority issues the United States should focus on today? Ambassador William J. Burns: The overarching challenge for U.S. foreign policy today, it seems to me, is to adapt to an interna- tional landscape in which American dominance is fading. To put it bluntly, America is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block. That’s not meant to be a declinist argument. In fact, I’m still bullish about America’s place in the century unfolding before us. We can’t turn the clock back to the post–Cold War unipolar moment. But over at least the next few decades, we can remain the world’s pivotal power—best placed among our friends and rivals to navigate a more crowded, complicated and competitive world. We still have a better hand to play than any of our main competi- tors, if we play it wisely. That means doing a better job managing the return of great power rivalry, as a rising China asserts itself and Russia continues to demonstrate that declining powers can be even more disruptive than rising ones. We’ll have to deal with the breakdown of regional order in places like the Middle East, where conflicts can quickly metastasize and disorder seems contagious. And we’ll also have to deal more thoughtfully with the pace of technological innova- tion. Advances in artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, for example, could continue to outpace international efforts to maximize their benefits, minimize their downsides and develop workable international rules of the road. My argument in The Back Channel is that we will not be able to do any of that on our own or with big sticks alone. That makes diplomacy—backed up by military and economic leverage and the power of our example—more important than ever. FSJ: Are you concerned about the so-called “militarization” of foreign policy? What is the right balance between military force and diplomacy? WJB: We all ought to be concerned. Defense and military leaders are not shy about highlighting the debilitating tendency— across administrations of both parties—to invert the roles of force and diplomacy. We’ve all quoted Secretary of Defense Bob Gates’ line about the military having more musicians than we have For- eign Service officers, and JimMattis’ point about needing to “buy more ammunition” if we continue to underinvest in diplomacy. But that hasn’t made much of a dent, I’m afraid. Of course, we ought to ensure that our military is stronger than anyone else’s, that our tool of last resort is potent and durable. And of course, force or the threat of force has an important role to play in the conduct of diplomacy. We’ve all benefited fromhaving the U.S. military focus the minds of those who sat across the table fromus. The military success of Desert Stormwas a pretty effective backdrop for Secretary [James] Baker’s persuasive skills in the run- up to the Madrid peace talks, and the potential use of force was similarly essential to Secretary [John] Kerry’s diplomacy with Iran. But time and time again, we’ve seen how overreliance on military tools can lead us into policy quicksand. Time and time again, we’ve fallen into the trap of overusing—or prematurely using—force. That comes at much greater cost in American blood and treasure, and tends to make diplomacy a distorted and under- resourced afterthought. In the forever wars of the post-9/11 era, the “great inversion” [of force and diplomacy] also tended to thrust State Department profession- als into nation-building roles that are beyond the capacity of American diplo- mats, or any other external power. While our colleagues served with courage and ingenuity, the fact remains that we’re the American For- eign Service, not the British Colonial Service. FSJ: Do you agree with Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats who said recently that “we were asleep” during the last 15 years while China was rising rapidly? How should the Foreign Service manage competition from China? WJB: I wouldn’t say that we were asleep, but we were certainly distracted. One of the most significant opportunity costs of the post-9/11 period has been the failure to invest as energetically and imaginatively as we should have in places like the Asia-Pacific region, a region that will remain the geopolitical and geoeconomic center of gravity as far out as I can see into the future. The Asia rebalance in the Obama administration was a logical response, but we continually found ourselves sucked back into the morass of BRIGITTELACOMBE