The Foreign Service Journal - December 2017

22 DECEMBER 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL FOCUS ON HOW DIPLOMACYWORKS How do diplomatic services around the world ensure their governments have a steady supply of the most effective professional envoys? BY ROBERT HUTCH I NGS AND J EREM I SUR I Robert Hutchings is the Walt and Elspeth Rostow Chair in National Security at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and was dean of the school from 2010 to 2015. He is a former U.S. ambassador and a former chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, and is author of four books, including Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy (Oxford University Press, 2015), co-edited with Jeremi Suri. Jeremi Suri is the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Department of History. Suri is the author and editor of nine books. In September he published his newest, The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office (Basic Books, 2017). The graduate students who researched and wrote the report on which this article is based (“Developing Diplomats: Comparing Form and Culture Across Diplomatic Services,” a report by the Policy Research Project on Reinventing Diplomacy at the University of Texas-Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs) are: Bryce Block, Evan Burt, Catherine Cousar, Adam Crawford, Michael Deegan, Daniel Jimenez, Joel Keralis, Joshua Orme, Zuli Nigeeryasen, Maria Pereyra-Vera, Zachary Reeves, Annika Rettstadt, Marne Sutten, Jessica Terry and Leena Warsi. The report is available at bit.ly/DevelopingDiplomats. D iplomatic services around the world face many similar challenges: nurtur- ing officers who are globally aware and still deeply connected to their nation; managing the growing centralization of foreign policymaking in the offices of presidents, prime ministers and chan- cellors; engaging a growing array of non-state actors with whom they must do business; and widening their scope of expertise to include commerce, climate change, terrorism, energy and cybersecurity, among other issues. The Making of an Effective Diplomat AGlobal View With such challenges in mind, and thanks to funding and guidance from the American Foreign Service Association, the two of us led a project at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs during the 2016-2017 academic year aimed at examining the practices of diplomatic services in other major countries to see what lessons we might draw that would be helpful in improv- ing the effectiveness of American diplomacy. We worked with a team of 15 talented graduate student researchers on a comparative study of the development and operation of diplomatic services in eight countries: Brazil, Ch ina, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, Russia and Tur- key. Our research focused on the recruitment, training, organi-