The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2015

48 JULY-AUGUST 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL between Confucius and one of his followers, named Tsekung. It reads as follows: Tsekung asked Confucius: “What kind of a person do you think can properly be called a scholar?” Confucius replied: “A person who shows a sense of honor in his personal conduct and who can be relied upon to carry out a dip- lomatic mission in a foreign country with competence and dignity can properly be called a scholar.” As I say, I was very pleased about this. I saw in it a vindication of my own personal conviction about the connection between the two professions. But I was somewhat nonplussed when I read further down the page and came across the following: “What do you think of officials today?” “Oh!” said Confucius, “those rice-bags! They don’t count at all.” There is a special reason, in my mind, why it is important to recognize this connection between diplomacy and the life of the intellect. Diplomacy is a profession which until recently had never fully found its own soul or discovered its own proper dignity. As you all know, it had its origins, as an institution, in the relations among the royal and imperial courts of an earlier day. Its initial task was the mediation between royal persons, not states. The diplomatist was a member of the court. He stood at the center of its life: of its gossip, its intrigues, its sycophancy, of the moral corruption which inevitably attends great personal power. He gained, perhaps, in outward glamour from these associations, but he failed to gain in true professional dignity; for what was involved here was too often the interests of a dynasty, and too seldom the interests of a people. As things began to change, in the past century and a half, as dynastic relationships began to give way to relationships reflecting the interests of entire peoples—diplomacy, for understandable reasons, was slow to change with the times. It long retained the trappings and habits of an earlier epoch. It could hardly do otherwise. It continued to be, by habit and tradition, an expensive profession. It required independent means. It required special breeding and education. These were things for which, until very recently, one had to have had the advantages of birth. Diplomacy, for this reason, long continued to be the province of what we could call high society; and I think it suffered from this fact. It led a life remote from that of the masses and the people. It attracted the sneers and jealousies that are bound to attach themselves to any social elite. It still had, of course, its somewhat spurious social glamour; but it tended to be associated in the public mind with luxury, with personal ingratiation, with deception and intrigue, with cunning and insincerity. It failed to command wide respect as a calling which had its own integrity and could absorb the best there was in people. And even for those who practiced it, the rather unreal social climate in which it all proceeded tended to obscure rather than to reveal its true distinction and its true possibilities. I say these things with no disrespect for the men who staffed our diplomatic missions in earlier days. On the contrary, many of these were very able people, some of the ablest we ever had. The advantages of personal security and superior education which they brought to this work often stood them in good stead. A Challenging, Difficult Task But the excellence of some of these men must not blind us to the weaknesses that affected the Service in the days when I joined it. There was still a hangover from the older assumptions of dynastic diplomacy. It was still assumed that what was most importantly involved was to know and understand, in any given county, only a small group of highly placed and influential individuals. It has taken the events of recent decades to teach us that in the modern age, diplomacy has a task far wider, more difficult, more challenging than this. The conduct of foreign policy rests today on an exercise in understanding, truly staggering in its dimension—understanding not just of the minds of a few monarchs or prime ministers, but understanding of the minds and emotions and necessities of entire peoples. The conduct of foreign policy rests today on an exercise in understanding, truly staggering in its dimension— understanding not just of the minds of a few monarchs or prime ministers, but understanding of the minds and emotions and necessities of entire peoples.