Formalizing an Alliance While trying to throw off the shackles of one monarchy, Franklin operated inside the court of another. This unsettled his fellow American commissioners, but Franklin realized the need to work on Versailles’ terms and at Versailles’ pace. He also understood the fundamental truth of diplomacy: Countries act in their own best interest. France’s greatest fear was reconciliation between Britain and the colonies, who together had defeated French and Spanish forces in the Seven Years’ War, and Franklin exploited it. He arranged covert shipments of arms and critical supplies for the Continental Army through fictional trading companies financed by the courts in Paris and Madrid, appealing to their thirst for revenge without forcing them to return to open warfare with Britain. When the British offered a peace proposal, Franklin was quick to reject it but still made sure the French Foreign Minister was aware, insinuating that a more generous offer from London might produce a settlement without more clarity on where France stood. Franklin was so successful in convincing Louis XVI that America’s victory was vital to France that it was the French who insisted on signing the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with the United States without delay. The treaty joined the two in a military alliance and guaranteed that neither side would consider peace until American independence was established. Spain’s 1779 declaration of war against Britain added to Franklin’s diplomatic triumph. As U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations (UN) in 1990, Thomas Pickering was operating, like Franklin, in an environment with its own rules and pace when he got word of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. He organized a late-night UN Security Council session to call for an Iraqi withdrawal, then headed to the White House for an emergency National Security Council meeting. He realized that the administration was exclusively focused on defending Saudi Arabia from a continued Iraqi advance. “I spoke up near the end of the meeting,” Pickering recalls, “and said I thought the credibility of the president’s foreign policy in the region hinged on our being able to make a commitment to liberate Kuwait. ... We could not allow the creation of a precedent for a continued kind of Iraqi gobbling up of other states and territories in the region.” After inspiring a U.S. commitment to pushing Iraqi forces back, Pickering focused on creating the conditions to allow other nations to join the effort. This culminated with UN 40 JULY-AUGUST 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Benjamin Franklin set the standard for modern diplomatic practitioners, and his wisdom continues to resonate. “‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You’re up to your eyeballs in trouble. You do not want to mess with the United States of America. If that American citizen doesn’t walk out the front gates of parliament in 20 minutes, all hell is going to rain down on your head.’ “And I hung up. It was a complete bluff. We had nothing— no resources, no plan B. Twenty minutes later, the American journalist walked free out the gates.” Fueling the American Economy Franklin convinced both the French and Spanish to keep their ports around the world open to American ships, allowing our businesses to continue growing despite a British blockade. He negotiated the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France, which recognized American independence and established mutual commercial and navigation rights. As a printer, postmaster, and inventor, Franklin remained a proponent of free and open international trade throughout his life. Lauri Fitz-Pegado continued Franklin’s work to promote American trade when she became director general of the U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service in 1994 and led a team that established new, stand-alone commercial centers outside embassy complexes to facilitate overseas access for the private sector. “It was a team that worked well together,” Fitz-Pegado remembers. “We opened these centers in major commercial/ business cities—Shanghai, São Paulo, Johannesburg. … When we traveled throughout the world, we took high-level business representatives involved in industries of importance to the country to meet with their counterparts: the trade ministers, the commercial people, companies, and presidents … decisionmakers at the highest levels. “We were traveling, seeing American businesses win where they hadn’t won before. They were competing against the French and the Germans, and they were winning contracts, and businesses were excited, because a lot of companies said that they didn’t really know what the Commerce Department could do for them. Well, now they knew, and now they had an advocate, and they had an effective one.”
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