The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2022 51 of the Service? There is rarely a perfect solution. I resigned—and took a Civil Service job at Commerce to ease the transition back to D.C. I honored my marriage but threw the Foreign Service career overboard. A troubling pattern was starting to emerge here. I was 40 years old, and I’d already resigned from the Foreign Service twice. At this point, I saw the Civil Service job, which had me implementing tech solutions for Commerce’s global team, as a bridge assignment to return to the private sector. Luck and Politics But within two years I was reinstated and headed off to Pan- ama for a four-year assignment. How had this happened? Luck played a strong part in it—a senior political appointee in Com- merce and his deputy wanted to retain me and saw reinstate- ment as the most logical way to do so. In a roundabout way, I’d gotten the curtailment (at the cost of resigning my Foreign Ser- vice commission, applying for and obtaining a Civil Service job to come back to D.C., and then going through a reinstatement process to return to the Foreign Service). As a result, however, my wife was able to spend time with her father before he died, and then my father died just months later. After another decade, I was deputy assistant secretary for Europe, one of Commerce’s senior-most Foreign Service positions. It was 2019. I was immensely uncomfortable with directives coming from the White House through Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and directly to me, directives that had profound geopolitical consequences but had not been vetted through any interagency process. Congress was at this time initiating impeachment proceedings as a result of White House activities in Europe. Typically, the National Security Council assesses policy options by consultation with relevant agen- cies. In these cases, this process was completely bypassed, and information was actively withheld (John Bolton’s recent memoir addresses this dysfunction in greater detail). Foreign Service officers, caught up in this sort of situation, have two honorable options. The first is to suck it up, salute and serve. The second is to resign. I left in November 2019—qui- etly, and this time after having completed 20 years of service. I had nothing planned, other than a break from paid work. Four months later, the pandemic upended any conventional notion of work, and the presidential election was in full swing. I excised some of the toxicity built up frommy last assignment by working on the Biden campaign’s Latin America foreign policy team and joining the ground game in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Once the change of administration was complete, in January 2021, it was time to return to work. Lessons to Learn Where are the lessons here? They seem trivial in print, but I had to learn them the hard way. First, family matters more than the Foreign Service career (or any other, for that matter). Families sometimes rally in new post- ings. They can also be torn apart, however. So if you are miser- able at work, or your partner is miserable, or your kids are not able to get a good education, I do not think you will regret leaving the Foreign Service to support your family or your principles. After all, private sector demand for Foreign Service skill sets is growing, and there is a strong alumni network in place to help former colleagues. I attribute my new position at Davidson, my former position at Veracity and my work on the 2020 campaign to this network. Second, I believe that being in the Foreign Service is better seen as a great way to serve the national interest, rather than as a career-long commitment for 20-plus years. Those who serve for a few postings and then leave will always be part of the Foreign Service family. In fact, I would very much like to see our fam- ily offer more options to return—some of the finest colleagues I’ve worked with were better for their time outside of the public sector. Third, I believe that every job is an opportunity to solve prob- lems. Develop and hone problem-solving skills on the job, and force yourself to make the outcomes you’ve achieved the core of your evaluations. For my part, helping U.S. companies succeed in the global market and implementing tech solutions to make my colleagues more productive were clear, quantifiable accom- plishments that convey directly into the private sector, making it that much easier for companies to see how I could, in turn, solve problems for them. We all know the colleagues at post who solve problems in every cone and specialty—they are the ones you always want on your team. And when, not if, it is time to leave the Foreign Service, if you’ve become a problem-solver, you’ll never want for a job. n What does one do when family needs conflict with the needs of the Service? There is rarely a perfect solution.