The Foreign Service Journal, June 2017

38 JUNE 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL youth and global women’s affairs) that are dis- tinctly American over hard-power national secu- rity interests (e.g., strong international security and healthy economic systems that protect allies and provide opportunities for American busi- nesses)? Or is it, perhaps, simply that the Foreign Service is either late in arriving or missing from the field where the military is operating? The answer, of course, is all of the above. But there are two broad aspects of the problem that I believe are fundamental: first, the proliferation of priorities at the State Department following the end of the Cold War; and second, the missed opportunities at State during the past 20 years of joint operations with the military to institutionalize the kind of professional and personal relation- ships that would enable the smaller Foreign Service to exert lead- ership in the foreign policy arena at home and abroad. A Proliferation of Priorities The end of the Cold War and the so-called “end of history” marked a shift for the State Department. We hired a more diverse Foreign Service that, in turn, took on a broader range of narrower activities that more resemble small-picture social engineering than traditional, big-picture diplomacy. At the same time, State reallocated existing resources to create an alphabet soup of new under secretaries, functional bureaus, offices and special envoys. At its peak during the Obama administration, there were more than 50 of the latter. As Ambassador Jim Jeffrey observes in a March 3 piece in Foreign Policy , neither the 2010 nor the 2015 Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review focuses on “traditional” diplomacy. The department has diffused its energy too broadly to the neglect of fundamentals, and this, in turn, left a vacuum that the military has had to fill. New State Department priorities include such things as this, for example. In Muslim-majority Indonesia in 2014 and 2015, not long before the deadly January 2016 extremist terrorist attack on Starbucks and other locations rocked the capital, Jakarta, our consulate in Surabaya produced impressive His- panic heritage month YouTube videos of its celebrations, which included spending money to bring Los Angeles artists to paint murals on the walls of a local school and sponsor fun runs for local girls. Similarly, in March the U.S. embassy in Mace- donia—a country with simmering interethnic tensions and endemic corruption that hasn’t had a government since elec- tions in early December 2016—flew in a lawyer from the Office of the Special Counsel to lecture locals on the Hatch Act, even as refugees streamed north from Greece and European-born Islamic State group fighters returned from Syrian battlefields. In religiously conservative Uganda, a U.S. Army commander there to train units in combating the Lord’s Resistance Army and al-Shabaab in Somalia had to deal with backlash from an angry counterpart when the U.S. embassy flew the rainbow flag high over Kampala in a righ- teous response to that country’s persecution of the LGBTQ community. That subsequently set back efforts to combat other forms of vio- lent abuses of human rights in eastern Africa. One general commented, “If everything is a priority for the State Department, nothing is.” On its own, each example represents admira- ble commitment by the Foreign Service to human rights, social progress and good governance policy efforts. But collectively, that commitment ignores the opportunity cost of not prioritizing activities more immediate to countering violent extremism, promoting economic prosperity and strengthening the security necessary to address higher-order human rights and civic goals. The U.S. armed forces remain the only military establishment with global power projection capabilities and experience in managing multinational coalitions. Generals and admirals bestride the highly militarized foreign policy apparatus of the United States government. This caps a longstanding trend. Americans so thoroughly identify “power” as exclusively military in nature that it has been necessary to invent an academic concept of “soft power” to embrace measures short of war like diplomacy. —Ambassador Chas Freeman, March 9, 2017 Ambassador Larry Butler (in black jacket) with soldiers of the French Operational Mentoring Liaison Team on a hilltop outpost south of Surobi, Afghanistan, in December 2008. COURTESYOFLARRYBUTLER