The Foreign Service Journal, September 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2019 27 Arabic. But our security restrictions meant that they never left the embassy. Our officers could do a lot by phone, but eventu- ally their skills would atrophy, and Arabs would see the lack of personal contact as a lack of interest. By contrast, there were analysts from international nongovernmental organiza- tions (NGOs) who lived in downtown Sana’a and continued to provide useful information well into the civil war. Our ambas- sador, a distinguished Arabist, worked from Saudi Arabia on the phone, taking advantage of the contacts he had made during 10 months in Yemen before he was evacuated. With enormous bureaucratic effort, he managed to make a few short trips back. Would the U.S. government have been more effective at resolving the conflict if he and his staff had been there more often? Hard to say. But the vast majority of countries in the world are relationship-based societies: It is far easier to find out what someone is planning when you are sitting on their couch late at night rather than talking to them on WhatsApp. What the Foreign Service can no longer do in many coun- tries was brought home to me by a 2013 New Republic article on Egypt by Eric Trager, an Arabic speaker with excellent contacts. “My Brother’s Presidency Was a Disaster” was an interview with the brother of now-deceased Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. I asked Trager how he had gotten his story. He told me he had gone to Morsi’s hometown, a rural village, and stopped Today’s American political officers can’t go on the spur of the moment to some rural village, ask some kid to take them to an unknown destination and hang out with some members of the Muslim Brotherhood.