The Foreign Service Journal, September 2003

confronting an issue.” But a profes- sional diplomat probably wouldn’t have been telling the French that the U.S. planned to retain its nuclear counterstrike force under a Star Wars system at the same time that President Reagan was saying just the opposite, which Galbraith did to Secretary Shultz’s and the White House’s dismay. Galbraith spent the next week trying to retract his remarks about FSOs. Some guts. A Failure to Communicate? Today, the “Bush administration’s war on terrorism has led to a signifi- cant militarization of U.S. foreign pol- icy that has become the dominant force in world affairs,” columnist Jim Hoagland wrote in the Washington Post in June. “A cliche that once described this capital preparing for crisis abroad— ‘the lights are burning late tonight at the State Department’ — has become an anachronism in George W. Bush’s Washington.” The Defense Department now runs for- eign policy, according to Hoagland. In Dana Priest’s book The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military , she describes how the military’s regional commanders- in-chief have become more powerful and influential than ambassadors, often assuming their roles. For its part, as Mr. Gingrich knows, the Defense Department basically ran the show on diplomacy in the runup to war, when Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made insulting “Old Europe” allies Germany and France a daily sport at his televised press conferences. Yet Mr. Gingrich charged in his speech that it was State that had “a pattern of commu- nications failures as a result of which ... a vast majority of French and German citizens favored poli- cies that opposed the United States.” He also blames State for the vote of the Turkish parliament to deny U.S. troops transit rights — a remarkable claim, considering that Newt couldn’t get most of his “Contract with America” through the 104th Congress. Be that as it may, in his Foreign Policy article, Mr. Gingrich declares 64 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 It was during the Reagan administration that the strongest parallels to Mr. Gingrich’s curious comments can be found.