The Foreign Service Journal, June 2003

people say, “Well, there is a military alternative and there is a diplomatic alternative.” I say, nonsense! These are two things that go together. They’re not separate things; they’re things that benefit from each other. That’s the way you have to look at it. FSJ: Long before you became Secretary of State, you were already renowned as an economist. Do you believe economic and trade issues, particularly the promotion and advocacy of U.S. business interests, have received enough attention in U.S. diplomacy? Shultz: I believe the first mes- sage that I sent out to all posts after being sworn in as Secretary of State called to everyone’s attention the importance of supporting American business abroad. It’s one of our rea- sons for being there, after all. Obviously, you don’t support one U.S. company over another but you support U.S. business interests strongly. I think it’s important that our embassies do that, and my observation is that they now do. From all I can see, the trade issues are being worked very skillful- ly. Largely, it is the U.S. Trade Representative who carries the ball on that, but he gets support from all around, so that’s something that needs to be done. The economic issues involving exchange rates and things like that are mainly issues the Treasury Department deals with, but from my standpoint, I feel they have been working to improve the quality of work of the IMF and World Bank, and the sense of direc- tion in international economic poli- cy. Again, I’m not that close to it, but I know the State Department’s Economic Bureau plays its part in all that, too. FSJ: Perhaps more than any other Secretary of State, many FS personnel remember you fondly for your consistent support of the Foreign Service, citing your stand against random lie detector tests as just one example. What do you see as the particular value of the Foreign Service as an institution, beyond the many individuals you’ve worked with? Shultz: Well, the Foreign Service sits there as a body of talent that has taken pains to look about the world, the process of diplomacy, and has studied the history and pol- itics of it. People by and large have language capability — they not only have languages but they’ve learned how to learn languages rapidly. And when you’re abroad, and you’re serving somewhere, it’s a great advantage, obviously, to be able to speak the language in a reasonably fluent way. The Foreign Service is also a kind of repository of the history of our diplomacy and a pool from which you draw people with great skills. And so from that standpoint, the importance of recruiting able peo- ple, of giving them a variety of expe- rience and managing that experience so they get exposed to the things that matter, and having a training facility that develops their skills and which in itself carries the message that we care about your career and what happens to you — all those things, I think, are very important. FSJ: Amb. Thomas Pickering, last year’s recipient of this award, observed in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine a couple of years ago that senior career diplo- mats sometimes get in hot water for taking too high a profile in present- ing U.S. government policy too forcibly in public. Yet FSOs are also often criticized for being overly cau- tious. Do you think either criticism is fair, and if so, what can profes- sional diplomats do to counter such complaints? Shultz: Well, they have to be themselves, and probably those crit- icisms are fair under certain circum- stances. But I think it’s important for a diplomat to be a professional, to be able to understand what’s tak- ing place wherever they’re stationed, and provide not simply intelligence but interpretation of intelligence back to Washington, and then to stand firmly for whatever the U.S. position is. Sometimes that annoys people, but that’s what a diplomat is paid for. FSJ: In addition to your work at Stanford University and as a distin- guished fellow at the Hoover Institution, you have published sev- eral books, including a memoir of your time at State, since returning to the private sector. Any other pro- jects in the works? Shultz: I teach and give talks around and work on those. I keep nourishing the idea of writing a rela- tively short book around the subject of accountability and its importance in economic and in security matters. So I keep gathering material and thinking about it, and maybe one of these days I’ll get energetic enough to write this short book. I hope so. FSJ: We hope so, too. Any final thoughts? Shultz: I would go back to my image of the Great Seal, to recog- nize how important it is that we have a strong diplomatic corps able to conduct a global diplomacy, and that we have military capability, econom- ic capability and willpower in our country, so that the diplomacy and the strength work together. If you go somewhere as a diplomat and you have no strength, you are in many ways wasting your breath. At the same time, if all we have is strength, and we don’t build on that and use it, it tends to become debilitated. So the image of the eagle with the olive branch and the arrows should be a central feature of our thinking about this matter. FSJ: Thank you, Secretary Shultz. ■ J U N E 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 51