The Foreign Service Journal, September 2003

ormer Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich unleashed two shotgun blasts at the State Department in recent months, with a talk at the American Enterprise Institute in April and a piece in Foreign Policy magazine in July. The speech blamed the difficulties President Bush had with Turkey over military access, and with our allies on the U.N. Security Council leading up to the war in Iraq, not on differences over diplomacy and strategy, but on Foggy Bottom’s propensity to play a “murky game in which the players were deceptive and the rules were stacked against the United States.” He purported to describe the heretofore unknown behind-the-scenes role the department had played to thwart U.S. interests last fall even before the U.N. resolution authorized inspections, and to outline how State is now “back at work pursuing policies that will clearly throw away all the fruits of hard- won victory.” The article expanded on these statements and claimed that “anti-American sentiment is rising unabated around the globe because the U.S. State Department has abdicat- ed values and principles in favor of accommodation and passivity.” Mr. Gingrich outlined a reform program that would shift the department’s role from traditional diplo- macy to communication (mostly) of the president’s views and “American values” to other countries. At root, how- ever, he seems to think that the nation’s problems in inter- national relations are not a matter of addressing foreign societies but the social milieu at Foggy Bottom. The Foreign Service, he concludes, must adopt President Bush’s “vision,” which means, “We can no longer accept a culture that props up dictators, coddles the corrupt, and ignores secret police forces.” Unfortunately, this attack is neither unprecedented in its message nor in its viciousness. It is just the latest ver- sion of nearly identical charges that, depressingly, have been a staple of conservative Republicans ever since America became a superpower. When our foreign policy fails, someone must be at fault, so why not the diplomatic corps, since they are supposed to be the foreign policy professionals? Curiously, Mr. Gingrich, who was an assis- tant professor of history at Western Georgia College from 1970 to 1978, seems to be ignorant of his subject, for he is repeating it. Almost word for word. And with an equal lack of accuracy. The classic example, of course, is when the department was purged of its “China hands” after that country’s “loss” to communism in 1949, part of the fallout from Wisconsin Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s famous claim that over 200 “active members of the Communist Party” worked in the department, undermining American securi- ty from within. That huge political and social forces involving hundreds of millions of people, in a far-off country as large as the United States, may have been beyond the ability of the department to affect, did not fig- ure in the calculation. Foreign Policy System — Or Cabal? But it was during the Reagan administration that the strongest parallel to Mr. Gingrich’s curious comments can be found — that somehow or other a foreign policy artic- ulated by the president is not really his responsibility, that it has been warped by others behind the scenes, and that 62 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 3 Stephen R. Dujack was editor of the Foreign Service Journal from 1981 to 1988. He now edits a magazine on environmental policy, The Environmental Forum. B Y S TEPHEN R. D UJACK F OR P ROF . G INGRICH , A L ITTLE H ISTORY L ESSON N EWT G INGRICH CLAIMS THE F OREIGN S ERVICE HAS SYSTEMATICALLY WORKED TO THWART B USH ADMINISTRATION POLICY AND TO UNDERMINE U.S. INTERESTS . H ERE ’ S WHY HE ’ S WRONG . F