The Foreign Service Journal, September 2018

28 SEPTEMBER 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL of those agencies tasked with programmatic responsibilities and endowed with the wherewithal to carry them out. Neither the numbers nor the argument have greatly changed in the decades since. Presidents, Secretaries of State, members of Congress and numerous wise observers have echoed the com- mission’s desire to have State organize the government’s efforts abroad. In 1951 President Harry S Truman wrote to Secretary of State Dean Acheson: “The Secretary of State, under my direction, is the Cabinet officer responsible for the formulation of foreign policy and the conduct of foreign relations, and will provide leadership and coordination among the executive agencies in carrying out foreign policies and programs.” In 1961, after years of hearings, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jack- son (D-Wash.) lamented: “State is not doing enough in asserting its leadership across the whole front of foreign policy.” In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson, who tried to manage foreign affairs with a hierarchical system of interagency groups under (usually) State Department chairman- ship, assigned the Secretary of State “authority and responsi- bility … for the overall direction, coordination and supervision of interdepartmental activities” overseas. One of the bluest of blue- ribbon commissions, Ambas- sador Robert D. Murphy’s 1975 Commission on the Organiza- tion of the U.S. Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, urged that consistency in policy required the department to “monitor, oversee and influence foreign activities of other agencies”—but judged that State was not up to the task. In 1998 the Stimson Center, in a report called “Equipped for the Future, ” discovered again a “profusion of agen- cies” operating overseas and found the United States “deficient” in interagency coordination. Another commission, the Secretary of State’s Overseas Presence Advisory Panel, complained in 1999 that “though the nation’s overseas agenda involves more than 30 federal departments or agencies, there is no interagency mecha- nism to coordinate their activities.” Two years later, a study for the Council on Foreign Relations by Ambassador Frank Carlucci, the Foreign Service officer who rose to become Secretary of Defense, offered a similar judgment: “Foreign policy has been undermined by ineffective interagency coordination.” Calls for the department to assert greater programmatic and operational leadership intensified after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In December 2005, as the situation in Iraq deteriorated, a presidential directive ordered the Secretary of State to “coor- dinate and lead integrated United States government efforts … to prepare, plan for and conduct” stabilization and reconstruc- tion efforts, in Iraq and around the world. But neither the White House nor Congress provided new resources for that purpose, and State’s coordinating role remained unclear. Two years later, the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Transformational Diplomacy, acting as if the 2005 directive did not exist, called on the president to “make an explicit state- ment underscoring the Department of State’s role as the lead for- eign affairs agency.” In 2010 the department’s first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review said that State “react[s] to each successive conflict or crisis by reinventing the process for identifying agency leadership, establishing task forces, and plan- ning and coordinating government agencies.” At embassies abroad, the chief of mission is responsible by law (per the Foreign Service Act of 1980) for the “direction, coordination and supervi- sion of all government employees in that country (except for employees under the command of a United States area military commander).” The Foreign Affairs Manual currently contains 19 numbered paragraphs listing chief-of-mission responsi- bilities: among them are opening markets for U.S. exports, halting arms proliferation, preventing conflict, countering terrorism and international crime, upholding human rights and promoting international cooperation on global prob- lems such as the environment, narcotics and refugees. And these are just in paragraph one. Responsibility, however, does not convey authority. As Car- State’s claim to responsibility for interagency coordination in foreign affairs is easy to assert, but hard to enforce. In 1968 the American Foreign Service Association published a lengthy report, “Toward a Modern Diplomacy,” containing specific recommendations for improvement in the organization of the nation’s foreign affairs. Among other things, the authors stated that training should occupy about 10 percent of a Foreign Service career and be a “virtual prerequisite” for promotion.