The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2013 25 response—without slanting his or her observations and com- ments to satisfy the report’s recipients. Don’t Rock the Boat? In their seminal 1953 study, The Diplomats , 1919-1939 , Gor- don A. Craig and Felix Gilbert decry “the growing tendency of home governments to give attention, and preferment, to those diplomats who reported what their superiors wanted to hear, rather than to those whose analyses of the developing situa- tion has been justified by history.” This is a persistent tempta- tion for all governments, but especially in democracies with lively domestic political environments. After all, the careers of the political leadership depend on policy success, or at least avoidance of blame for failure. Moreover, because political leaders tend to value personal loyalty, career officials who introduce opinions and informa- tion at variance with the official policy line risk adverse consequences. Another temptation for any diplomat in the field is to gild his or her own lily. (No drafter of a memoran- dum of conversation has ever reported losing an argument.) And then there is the ever-present threat of “locali- tis”: giving too much weight to the pressures and temptations of the local environment. The intellectual center of gravity of the diplomat’s profes- sional perspective has two dimensions: the need to balance the present against the future, viewing the world objectively from both perspectives; and the need to protect one’s cred- ibility as an agent by not uttering falsehoods deliberately. The first half of the equation may seem obvious, though it is often ignored by commentators. As for the second, the distinction between misleading one’s interlocutors and not lying to them is subtle, and lost on many. Self-delusion is dangerous for countries as well as indi- viduals, so the diplomat’s job is to introduce into political and policy deliberations the realities of that “vast external realm” which lies outside our borders. As Edmund Burke observed two centuries ago, “Nothing is so fatal to a nation as an extreme of self-partiality, and the total want of consideration of what others will naturally hope or fear.” The ability to resist that tendency requires a robust adherence to ethical principles by Foreign Service officers. The ethical quality that stands out in such situations is honesty: the requirement that each diplomat, serving as rep- resentative and interpreter, must somehow earn and maintain credibility with two “masters”—each of whom may well see that effort as betrayal. This is a tricky and dangerous situation for the profes- sional diplomat, as evidenced by the case of Ambassador April Glaspie. Following her instructions in a 1990 meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, she carefully laid out the U.S. position regarding the ongoing Iraqi-Kuwaiti border dispute. When Hussein nonetheless invaded Kuwait soon thereafter, some accused Amb. Glaspie of having given Hussein a “green light” for the invasion by how she phrased her message. No one who was not there can really say what transpired. But given her professional reputation and her reporting on her demarche, most knowledgeable commentators consider the charge unfair and irrespon- sible. Still, that does not stop the Monday morning quar- terbacks and others seeking scapegoats. Recognizing Dissent Welcome evidence that proper apprecia- tion of this ethical dilemma is not yet a lost cause, despite the lingering wounds of the McCarthy era and the persistent demands of party politics, comes from two quarters. In 1968, as the Vietnam War was raging, the American Foreign Service Association began conferring two annual awards to recognize and encourage constructive dissent and risk-taking within the Foreign Service: the W. Averell Harriman Award for junior officers (FS-6 through FS-4) and the William R. Rivkin Award for mid-level officers (FS-3 through FS-1). The Harriman and Rivkin Awards were joined the following year by the Christian A. Herter Award , honoring construc- tive dissent by Senior Foreign Service officers. And in 2000, with the support of the Delavan Foundation, AFSA created the F. Allen “Tex” Harris Award for dissent by Foreign Service specialists. All four of these awards have proven to be helpful to most recipients’ careers, not harmful. Separately, in 1971 the Department of State instituted the Dissent Channel, through which any employee may submit a message to the Secretary on any subject. (That mechanism remains unique, by the way; no other federal department or agency has anything similar.) As George Kennan puts it, the diplomat’s job is to be “the bearer of a view of the outside world.”