The Foreign Service Journal, November 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2020 17 said, is also working to finalize its Diver- sity and Inclusion Strategic Plan to guide its work over the next two years. ABC News reported Sept. 1 that Amb. (ret.) Thomas Pickering earlier this sum- mer had proposed doubling the number of participants in the fellowship program that bears his name. “It has to begin with the Secretary of State making a statement to all of our employees, not only about the impor- tance and the attention to diversity in the Foreign Service, but setting forth some guiding principles,” Pickering told ABC News. Pickering also called for more Foreign Service recruitment at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, appointing a chief diversity officer and requiring diverse officials on promotions panels. Diversity advocates praised the deci- sion, but some said it is a modest step, and the Foreign Service must do more to increase hiring and retention of minori- ties. “Great news but again this alone will be insufficient in addressing the real racial, diversity, and inclusion issues at @ StateDept,” former Foreign Service Officer Desirée Cormier Smith tweeted on Sept. 1. “As a former Pickering [Fellow], I know firsthand its value. If it weren’t for the fellowship I would have never even known about the Foreign Service nor would I have been able to afford to go to grad school,” she noted. “ But the program shouldn’t be used as a prop to avoid addressing systemic problems.” “Over the years, the department has taken steps to expand the fellowships exponentially, but new fellows will suc- ceed only if the department decides that ensuring their long-term career success— and the project of normalizing diversity at the State Department—is everyone's responsibility,” Ana Escrogima, Lia Miller and Christina Tilghman, three former Pickering fellows, wrote in the September Foreign Service Journal as quoted in the ABC story. State DG Testifies on Diversity C arol Perez, the State Department’s Director General, testified before a subcommittee of the House Commit- tee on Foreign Affairs Sept. 22 about the agency’s efforts to expand diversity. She said State is working hard to figure out how to improve recruitment and reten- tion of minority groups. The proportion of minorities in the Foreign Service does not reflect American demographics. A January Government Accountability Office report noted that African Americans represented 7 percent 50 Years Ago The Nixon Doctrine and Beyond T he question of implementing a low posture policy is one of relinquishing power. The United States has never looked at its position as an imperial one, but to a great extent the nation did fulfill the imperial role of maintaining security and minimum order on a world- wide basis. How can we divest ourselves of part of this role without seeming to incur a defeat in the traditional concepts of international politics? How can we get down from the tiger? The move toward a low posture in U.S. policy has been generally accepted by our fellow actors on the international stage, but their acceptance has resulted in no small part from the lack of specifics in the Nixon Doctrine. A little wishful thinking can go a long way in estimating the impact that a change in U.S. policy will have. We must expect that our allies will seek to avoid doing many of the jobs that must ultimately fall to them. Few will willingly take over costly and unpleasant duties that we have performed previ- ously, and we shall sometimes have to play the role of a drill sergeant in calling for “vol- unteers.” Having gotten our volunteers, however, it will be hard to restrain ourselves when our allies do not do their job the way we would do it and may even seem to be failing. The temptation to retrieve deteriorating situations— to intervene “just a little bit” to save a country from its own shortcomings—will be great. But we must, as a senior administration official recently said, get over the idea that the security and development of other countries are more important to us than to the countries themselves. —Thomas P. Thornton, former chief of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s South Asian Division, excerpted from an article of the same title in the November 1970 FSJ .