The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2016 13 Obama administration. The NYT notes that the memo does not address what would happen if Mr. Assad is forced from power. That point was also made by Vice President Joseph Biden, in an interview with “CBS This Morning” on June 21. “The president and I and previous presidents support the right of any dip- lomat to have a secure channel to voice a different view,” Biden said. “But there is not a single, solitary recommenda- tion that I saw that has a single, solitary answer attached to it—how to do what they’re talking about.” Writing on ForeignPolicy.com, retired FSO Joseph Cassidy says that this isn’t the first sign of an insurrection; rather, it means the system is working. Use of the Dissent Channel is different from normal policy tussles, he explains, because the message reaches the highest levels of the department, including the Secretary of State. Cassidy notes that State Department officials should and do debate and argue among themselves, because they care deeply about the outcomes of the foreign policy they help to make and implement. Most of the dissenters are mid-level officers who have been involved in the administration’s policy on Syria in the last five years. The last U.S. ambassador to Syria, career FSO Robert Ford, resigned from the Foreign Service over his disagree- ment with Syria policy. Now a senior fel- low at the Middle East Institute, Ford told The Daily Beast on June 20: “The dissent memo should wake us up… we need to reconsider our approach.” Meanwhile, the question of who leaked the memo and why is being hotly debated. And then there’s the question of how the NYT had the details of the Secretary’s “private” meeting with eight of the dissenters the same day. There will be more to this story. —Gemma Dvorak, Associate Editor, and Shawn Dorman, Editor Canadian Foreign Service: A Plea for Reform F ormer Canadian diplomat and current Director of the Mackenzie- Papineau Group Bruce Mabley calls on the new Liberal Party government to restore the Canadian Foreign Service as “a true diplomatic corps” in an article in Open Canada , a digital public polic y magazine. Mabley’s plea is bound to resonate with members of the U.S. Foreign Ser- vice. He highlights inadequate training, excessive lateral movement between the Civil and Foreign Services and a lack of transparency as factors in what he describes as the long CFS decline. Though engaged in the national foreign policy conversation, the Cana- dian public has little sense of the work of the Foreign Service, Mabley argues, making it very difficult to create a public constituency to support reforms. High- level officials with no FS experience are tasked with making budget decisions, often trimming long-term programs in favor of expanding travel and hospitality budgets, he adds. Among other things, Dr. Mabley recommends restoring the CFS’s meri- tocratic promotions and evaluations system. Also needed, he says, are better training opportunities for mid-level offi- cers and a drastic reduction in the num- ber of Civil Service employees allowed to move into Foreign Service positions. He advises that more attention be paid to the well-being of Foreign Service families to increase retention rates. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new government may be unable to deliver on its many foreign policy promises, Mabley says, if it does not first reform the Foreign Service. Daryl Copeland, another former Canadian diplomat and now a senior fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, speaks often about the need for reform in the Canadian Foreign Service. Following a June 2 presentation at AFSA, Copeland told the FSJ : “We nee d to re-profile our presentational network, get away from cookie-cutter embas- While so many Americans are cynical these days about our civil servants, we came away thankful that we have smart, experienced and hard-working people like Ambassador [Eric] Rubin and his staff. They are dedicated to maintaining stability in this complicated corner of our shaky world. The thought that someone as experienced as Rubin could be replaced by a new president with a political appointment (a crony or fundraiser) who had no previous experience or interest in that country (as often happens) is heartbreaking. —Rick Steves, author and TV host, at a dinner with career FSO U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria Eric Rubin, reported in The Huffington Post on May 31. Contemporary Quote