20 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL SPEAKING OUT John H. Mongan joined the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, later CSO, in 2005 and has served in a variety of leadership roles in the bureau, including in field operations in Afghanistan and in support of the Syrian opposition in Türkiye. A former Foreign Service officer, he served tours in Albania, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. He retired from the State Department in September 2025. The Trump administration’s decision to disband the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO)—like its more publicized dismantling of USAID—represents a belief that the U.S. can choose how it wants to engage abroad. Of course, the idea that the U.S. can choose how it engages abroad is the exact thought that motivated presidential candidate George W. Bush when he said in 2000 that the U.S. “shouldn’t be in the business of nation-building.” Four years later, after 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, it was President Bush who created CSO’s predecessor, the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), and it was Bush who signed legislation institutionalizing it in 2008. As of the time of this writing, that statutory “coordinator” appears to be vested in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) that will coordinate disaster response efforts. S/CRS was created to memorialize and operationalize the lessons of the major stabilization missions of the 1990s and 2000s—Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among others. It evolved into CSO under President Barack Obama to “anticipate, prevent, and respond” to conflict risks and became the centerpiece of implementing the Global Fragility (GFA) and Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocity Prevention Acts of President Donald Trump’s first term. It will be interesting to see whether the department is able to implement those acts without the bureau. It is reasonable to expect that some conflict-related contingency will arise in the next decade, and the department will be no better prepared to respond than when it became necessary to establish a new mission in Pristina in 1999; provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan in 2002; effective governance in Iraq in 2003; or the GFA’s small-scale, conflict-focused interventions in different countries today. Whatever one thinks of CSO, it was the only element of the State Department specifically tasked to think through these challenges, and its absence re-creates a capability gap likely to haunt the department in the years ahead. Ironically, it would have been an organization well suited to plan for the takeover of Greenland, Gaza, or the Panama Canal, or the reestablishment of a presence in Damascus—all initiatives this administration has proposed. Without relitigating the decision to abolish the bureau, it is incumbent on department leadership to consider how to maintain some degree of conflict capacity for the time when political leadership suddenly cares about a conflict challenge somewhere. The Secret Sauce All bureaucracies have good intentions that can lead to pernicious side effects. Professionalism leads to apolitical expertise but risks the moral cowardice of careerism. Physical fitness is essential for armies in combat but leads to many officers who are better at push-ups than strategy. Patience and judiciousness are essential qualities for diplomacy but can camouflage laziness and indecisiveness. CSO challenged these diplomatic hazards by asserting that diplomatic responses to conflict require fast and decisive action, much like military responses. CSO developed a range of capabilities during its existence, but three core requirements guided its formation and operations, and remain gaps for the department: The End of CSO: Don’t Let Stabilization Expertise Go BY JOHN H. MONGAN A persistent and repeated error through the ages has been the failure to understand that the preservation of peace requires active effort, planning, the expenditure of resources, and sacrifice, just as war does. —Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War, 1996
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