The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2020 15 vice should not let themselves off easily after doing very badly in the murderous and disastrous VietnamWar. A serious reevaluation and self-definition were in order. That article asserted we should put aside conceptions of ourselves as managers (by implication, maximizers) of American power, and also as faith- ful executors of presidential policies (even when those policies are wrong, as Lyndon Johnson’s were in Asia). Rather we should reaffirm as our professional purpose the nonviolent, nonmilitary management of international disputes (short-, middle- and long-term). Further, we should understand that the advocate of a peace-preserving approach in National Security Council deliberations will never lack for adver- saries there, and on the bad days would involve a lot of hand-wringing. These issues have arisen again since our domestic political system, prob- ably in some distress, put into the White House in 2016 a right-wing populist whose personal characteristics and inter- national policy impulses are too much like those of a very dangerous bull in a china shop. I suspect that many FSOs who think seriously about our country’s foreign relations and the present historical moment are very troubled. Rightly so. If there is anxiety during the Trump administration and if there are conflicted consciences among diplomats, there should be. There is certainly real peril for our country in specific steps that Mr. Trump has taken, such as withdrawing from the Paris climate change accord, the Iran nuclear deal and several arms control agreements. Broader, more general policy orien- tations are also squarely in the wrong direction, such as the long-term drift toward major conflict with China—lay- ing for our grandchildren’s lifetimes the foundations of a new Cold War, instead of the war we and China should be waging cooperatively against climate change. A Deeper, Truer Conviction In a sense, we can do nothing about these large-scale historic decisions that take place on our watches but are far above our pay grades. Many good State Depart- ment people have resigned (or been forced out), but it’s not always clear that getting out is the best solution or, indeed, that there is any good solution at all. Taking the liberty of giving advice from the old dilemmas to people embroiled in the present one, the most constructive approach is intellectual self-preservation, keeping oneself from being swamped mentally by convenient, pervasive and seductive conventional outlooks (primarily, for Americans today, the moderate military, nationalist mind- set in our foreign affairs). Diplomats should hang onto the deeper, truer conviction of how bad war is and how difficult to control once unleashed, and hold steadfastly that peace really is what their profession is all about. That is true whether they can do anything overt about it at any given moment, or not. The trick is to studiously avoid feed- ing conflict and to always be alert for moments when a contribution in the right direction can be made. n Born in Boston and educated at the University of Toronto, Yale University and MIT, Peter Lydon joined the Foreign Service in 1962, serving in Leopoldville, rural Laos, Vientiane, Calcutta and Dhaka. He chaired the Secretary’s Open Forum from 1975 to 1976, and retired to California in 1988.