The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2014 31 Hitting the Ball By Christopher W. Bishop Consulate General Osaka-Kobe A senior officer of the old school—and four-time ambassa- dor—once told me that diplomacy was like playing tennis. “The cable is just the follow-through on the stroke,” he explained. “What really matters is that you hit the damn ball. You have to go talk to people and influence them.” I’ve often thought about this analogy as I reflect on my work as a political officer. The very term “reporting officer”—a favorite State Department catch-all—implies that a political or economic officer’s primary job is to report on conditions in the host country to inform and influence the making of U.S. foreign policy. But isn’t influencing host-country policy just as important to U.S. interests, if not more so? Reporting has long been an easy way to judge the “productiv- ity” (if not the success) of a post’s political or economic section. A friend at the American Institute in Taiwan once admitted he kept a tally of howmany cables Embassy Beijing had sent the previ- ous day, so that Taipei could match it the next day. (The fact that Beijing had twice as many “reporting officers” as Taipei didn’t matter—nor, apparently, did the question of whether either posts’ cables actually influenced policy in Washington.) As a junior officer in Shanghai, I was routinely tasked with writing quarterly cables on the local macroeconomic situation. Even if anyone read them (something I doubted), I knew someone FOCUS EMBASSY REPORTING STATE DEPARTMENT POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC REPORTING TODAY A SELECTION OF VIEWS FROM PRACTITIONERS The Journal invited AFSA members to share their perspectives on this important topic. We asked five questions to spur discussion: What is the state of State Department political and economic reporting today? Can you provide recent (unclassified) examples of how reporting affected policy or led to a change in operations? What is the impact of the vast and instanta- neous flow of information in today’s digital age on political and economic reporting (and are embassy reporting methods changing as a result)? What impediments to reporting—tech- nological, physical access or process—have you encountered, and what would be your proposed remedy? Do today’s promotion boards give too much or too little weight to reporting and analysis versus other skills (e.g., management of people and resources)? Here is a selection of the responses we received. We thank all those who responded. —Shawn Dorman, Editor