The Foreign Service Journal, December 2013

14 DECEMBER 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL SPEAKING OUT A Plea for Greater Teamwork in the Foreign Service BY GEORGE B . LAMBRAK I S T he militarization of America’s foreign policy in recent years, and the encroachment by political appointees onmore andmore positions within the State Department that used to be occupied by career diplomats, are both disturbing trends that should impel those of us in, or retired from, the Foreign Service to ponder howmost Amer- icans see our profession. After all, popular perceptions affect how America deals with the rest of the world, and therefore howwe shouldmanage our institution. However, there are some subtleties to be considered. The Foreign Service is much smaller than the Department of Defense, and affects a much smaller population of American voters directly. We are alsomore remote from, and less immediately relevant to, most Americans than the military or such professions as law enforcement, firefighting, teaching and medicine. George B. Lambrakis was a State Department Foreign Service officer from 1957 to 1985, after two years with USIS in Vietnam and Laos. He served in hardship and non-hardship posts in the Middle East, Africa and Europe as a consul, political reporting officer, deputy chief of mis- sion and chargé d’affaires, and as an intelligence analyst, desk officer, personnel officer and of- fice director in Washington. While serving in wartime Beirut in 1975 and 1976, he shared in an embassy unit award for valor as DCM and chargé between four different ambassadors (one of whom was kidnapped and assassinated). He also shared an award for heroism while serving as political counselor and (for several months) acting DCM in revolutionary Tehran between 1977 and 1979. After retirement, he set up international fundraising operations for Brown University, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and other organizations. Since 1994 he has been a program director and professor of international relations and diplomacy at universities in Lon- don and Paris, and often defends American foreign policies on Press TV, the Iranian television network. At the same time, State and the other foreign affairs agencies loom large in Washington, and are vital to theWhite House and Congress—as well as to journal- ists, businesspeople and those who travel abroad. These are the people whom the Foreign Service must convince of its value. Fortunately, this is a feasible task that the Service can address head-on. I would go so far as to suggest that the president, Congress, fellow departments of govern- ment, and others with whomwe deal would value and trust our judgment more if they generally saw our culture as striving to achieve our aims in a relatively disinter- ested and collegial way—not (as may now sometimes be the case) seeing us as being mainly out for ourselves. If I am right, this shift could induce more legislators to take a realistic, even admiring, view of what we (no longer “gen- teel cookie-pushers”) accomplish with our limited budgets. Copy–but Selectively To facilitate that process, we should consider copying to a considerable extent the teamwork that the military and other service professions enjoy, while maintain- ing the different traditions of the diplo- matic career. Diplomatic work differs in its essential characteristics from those other professions, and I am certainly not sug- gesting otherwise. For example, there is one pernicious idea borrowed from the military which I would argue runs contrary to the essen- tials of diplomatic work: the “up or out” promotion process embedded in the Service since the 1980 Foreign Service Act. Diplomacy in the wider world is not best conducted by the young and inexperi- enced. Nor is the Foreign Service well served by a personnel pyramid that eliminates capable officers because they have not quite reached the top. If anything, diplo- macy has proportionally more uses at or near the senior ranks for experienced mid-career and senior officers than does the military. The emphasis since 1980 on facilitat- ing the rapid rise of exceptionally gifted officers at the expense of the average has evolved to the point that individual officers have to compete actively, if not ferociously, against their colleagues for promotion. This can lead to some desperate maneu- vering at reassignment time for the flashier assignments, and requires diverging from other duties tomake sure supervisors write the best-sounding annual performance