THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 33 this standard. Weak professionalization makes U.S. diplomacy less effective, invites inexperienced outsiders into positions of power and influence, and contributes to diplomacy’s marginalization in national security policymaking. Congress, to its credit, has sought to change this state of affairs. In January 2023, bipartisan legislation demanded upgrades to the Foreign Service Institute, located at the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington, Virginia, by creating a provost and a board of advisers to oversee its training program. The 2023 announcement of a core curriculum for diplomacy was a step in the right direction, though its initial manifestation was little more than a set of voluntary recommendations that largely validate the status quo. One might have expected the Foreign Service and its professional association to champion the opportunity to set a high bar for itself, but there has been little attention to the issue. Discussion about curriculum can put experienced diplomats in a bind. When they assert their readiness to take on roles of high responsibility, they implicitly validate their existing experience and expertise. If, however, they admit their expertise is insufficient, they risk invalidating their qualifications and affirming the flood of outsiders into the leadership positions. It will thus take courage to advance a new vision of foreign policy expertise. With the Foreign Service increasingly marginalized and the utility of career service being called into question, it is time to find the courage to evolve. What Is Foreign Policy Expertise? The luminary diplomats Ambassadors William Burns and Linda Thomas-Greenfield co-authored an article in 2020 that described diplomacy’s fundamentals as “smart policy judgment” and a “feel for foreign countries.” Policymakers, they explain, must possess a “nuanced grasp of history and culture, a hard-nosed facility in negotiations, and the capacity to translate U.S. interests.” Certainly, this is all true, but the descriptions offered by Burns and Thomas-Greenfield—like the Department of State’s promotion process itself—are highly subjective. If foreign policy is an art, as Burns claims, then does its beauty lie only in the eye of the beholder? This is infertile soil for the growth of expertise. Expertise requires clear standards. A good definition of expertise is “consistently superior performance on a specified set of representative tasks for a domain.” The scholar Gary Klein seeks the secrets to superior performance by studying chess masters, neonatal nurses, elite athletes, and others. His study of firefighters, for instance, found that “when faced with a complex situation, the commanders could see it as familiar and know how to react. The commanders’ secret was that their experience let them see a situation, even a nonroutine one, as an example of a prototype, so they knew the typical course of action right away.” Klein finds, however, that not all experience is equal—a lifelong tennis hobby, for instance, does not make one Serena Williams. Two features are necessary for experience to flourish into expertise: (1) One must receive clear feedback about the success of their actions, and (2) one must practice and improve based on this feedback. Research from Anders Ericsson finds that it takes 10,000 hours of practice—“deliberate practice”—to become an expert. This sort of effortful training requires focused attention to converting one’s weaknesses into strengths. In the absence of feedback loops and deliberate practice, expertise does not readily form. The brain tricks us into thinking we are much better at a task than we really are. We develop great confidence but not expertise. This research offers a warning for foreign policy practitioners: Policymaking is highly susceptible to overconfidence. State Department officials are neither trained nor encouraged to provide clear feedback about the success or failure of efforts. Policymakers, as a result, cannot be trained on their strengths and weaknesses, nor can they easily pass expertise on to future generations. What Would an Expert Curriculum Look Like? I surveyed dozens of reform reports, syllabi, and course descriptions in the field of U.S. foreign policy to better understand what a curriculum for foreign policy might look like. I have organized the field into four broad categories of knowledge: A good definition of expertise is “consistently superior performance on a specified set of representative tasks for a domain.”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODIyMDU=