The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2016

64 JULY-AUGUST 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL to address schools, social clubs and other local organizations about the Foreign Service. This activity led me to mentor three college students on how to successfully pursue careers in the Foreign Service. My wife and I lived in 11 different countries during my For- eign Service career, and we still travel the globe, making scores of close friends. Many of our voyages have been by sea on freight- ers, each carrying fewer than 13 passengers. We traveled all the way around the world on a Danish freighter! People often ask us, “What was your favorite place or trip?” We usually respond that it’s impossible to pick only one. As long as our health holds out, we just keep on going. Oh, and closer to home, we also have Green Bay Packer sea- son tickets! James Prosser joined the Foreign Service in 1954 and served in Vietnam, Germany, Congo, Belgium, Finland, Russia, Switzerland, Kenya, the Holy See and Washington, D.C. Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice BY WI L L EM H . BRAKE L T here are many onward paths following a career in the State Department. Over the past five years, mine has centered on teaching part time at the university level. I have found this to be extremely rewarding in various ways: the interactions with bright and curious students, the possibilities for sharpening one’s own analytic and presentation skills, and the opportunity to find some perspective and coherence (if only retrospectively) in the random moving around from issue to issue and post to post that is typical of a Foreign Service career. As active-duty diplomats, we flit from one assignment to the next, focusing so much on the crisis of the day and the deadline of the moment that we have precious little time for reflection or strategic thinking. Academia offers an antidote to these tenden- cies. They say you never really understand a subject until you have had to teach it. And, as Socrates said, an unexamined life is not worth living. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity for that reflection and self-examination today. For those contemplating going in an academic direction, I call attention to the excellent, thought-provoking series of articles on the divide between scholars and practitioners of diplomacy in the January-February 2015 Foreign Service Journal . My only quibble, as a former economic-coned officer and scientist with 24 years in the Foreign Service, relates to that series’ relatively narrow focus on (geo)political issues. Not long ago, I had the opportunity to teach a course on inter- national environmental politics at AmericanUniversity’s School of International Service. In preparation I delved for the first time into the extensive scholarly literature on international relations as it relates to environmental concerns. (My own previous degrees were in biology.) Like several authors in the above-mentioned FSJ , I found that some academic writing was pretentious and pompous, and the- oretical to the point of abstruseness. Yet I also foundmuch that was useful and insightful and valuable—stuff I wish I had known better while I was still in the trenches drafting position papers, sharpening decisionmemoranda and delivering demarches. Take, for instance, the academic literature on international environmental governance, which looks at the totality of institu- tions and arrangements and all their moving and non-moving parts. Over the years as an FSO I had picked up a lot of this in a piecemeal fashion. Yet if I could have given some advice to my younger self, I would tell that slimmer, hairier Willem to seek out opportunities for reflection and learning about his profession outside of the day-to-day grind of work. He will need that broader perspective in more senior positions later on and in retirement— and it will make him a better officer in the near term. And I would also tell him to not be shy to bid on assign- ments that interest him and allow him to develop new skills and experience, even if they do not appear to be promotion-worthy or career-enhancing in the immediate term. In my case, several assignments that might appear off the beaten path (a teach- ing stint at FSI; an out-of-cone assignment that involved lots of negotiation; a detail to an international agency involving lots of practical, hands-on experience) helped me immeasurably in the Senior Foreign Service and paved the way for a rewarding career in semi-retirement. Willem Brakel, an economic-coned officer whose career at State focused on environment, science and development issues, retired from the Se- nior Foreign Service in 2011 as director of the Office of Environmental Policy. He is currently adjunct professor of environmental science at American University, and represents the District of Columbia on the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin.