The Foreign Service Journal, September 2019

26 SEPTEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL are blind in critical countries. So we made mistakes in Libya, in Egypt and in Saudi Arabia, because we did not have a good understanding of the local scene. Fundamentally, the State Department has become pro- foundly reluctant to put people in harm’s way, under any cir- cumstances. And because we are not on the ground in places like northeastern Syria or Libya or Yemen, we have turned more and more of the responsibility over to the Department of Defense. Further, unpredictable withdrawals of personnel and closing of embassies make us look afraid; and that, too, has long-term consequences. This isn’t about not having enough money—that’s not new—or about the alleged tyranny of the Bureau of Diplo- matic Security. In fact, my experience is that senior DS agents understand more than most that embassies need to know what is going on— it makes us safer . The tendency to pull back was greatly aggravated by the vicious political fallout from the 2012 attack on a U.S. post in Benghazi, killing four Americans including Ambassador Chris Stevens. But the trend had been growing for years. The 1985 Report of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Panel on Overseas Security (the “Inman report”) responded to embassy bomb- ings in Lebanon, Kuwait and Africa and forced us to move our embassies to the edge of cities and build fortress-like opera- tions that have made it increasingly difficult to do our jobs. But the buildings were only symptomatic. The Shifts at State When senior officers talk about why we have become less effective, they mention the inability to travel or meet people outside the embassy, the reduced pool of employees to draw on for our unaccompanied posts, the risk of corruption in management and programs because of the constant churn of supervisors, and the workload disparities because officers who have been in a country longer are simply more productive. In turn, foreigners friendly to the United States see closed embas- sies, evacuations and withdrawals as abandonment. One Saudi told me he used to know people in the embassy when Americans spent years in country; but with the short tours imposed after the attack on the Jeddah consulate in 2004, he hasn’t bothered much to get to know any American diplomats. Anyone he met would be gone soon; and they weren’t much interested in meeting with him, either. The growth of risk aversion at State has diminished U.S. diplomacy, and this trend has coincided with broader cultural shifts that have altered our patterns of diplomatic engagement overseas to the detriment of local understanding. In the last 40 years, we have built the elites of the world in our image. It is a huge success story for the United States. Foreigners who want their children to get ahead school them in English. Our business practices have become the gold standard of the world; our military is the best; many ambitious students in the world want to go to our schools. All this has had positive benefits for the United States. As a result, how- ever, many prominent foreigners don’t read and write their own language anymore (and, I would add, they often know less about their own countries than we do). Not long ago I was the guest of an Arab minister; his toddlers, barely able to talk, rushed out to greet him in English. Not surprisingly, we now spend a lot of time interacting with these English-speaking people overseas. In Saudi Arabia, the embassy entertains male and female entrepreneurs who attended Ivy League schools. Our senior diplomats have always had good access to the country’s leaders. But we prob- ably know less today about what is going on in Saudi Arabia’s heartland than we did 30 years ago. I once asked a Saudi minister who studied in London and Paris what was going on in his conservative home town. He admitted he hadn’t been there in 12 years because his more conservative relatives didn’t approve of his writings. Why does this matter? Because internal stability in Saudi Arabia is an important U.S. strategic interest. And because we need to understand what environment encouraged the Saudi hijackers to flourish—or, in another context, Tunisia’s angry young men to join the so-called Islamic State in droves. An Unsustainable Model It isn’t that we don’t have talented and adventurous young Foreign Service officers. In Yemen, before our embassy was evacuated in 2015, there were two outstanding officers who had been Fulbright scholars. They had great contacts and spoke The growth of risk aversion has coincided with broader cultural shifts that have altered our patterns of diplomatic engagement overseas to the detriment of local understanding.