The Foreign Service Journal, December 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2022 57 they worked on the Bosnia War, and the emotional pressure they felt as they battled with their consciences to try to change the policy from within. Western recounted for The Washington Post the psychological toll exacted by spending day after day looking at thousands of photographs and videotapes depicting “human beings who look like they’ve been through meat grinders.” It was clear to him that the Bosnia War “isn’t a civil war. It’s the systematic slaughter of civilians.” Concurring, Harris told The Post : “What we were doing was not only wrong. It was something I couldn’t participate in.” Walker told me in an interview that he had trouble sleep- ing and was increasingly depressed and withdrawn at home. “Genocide felt different to me than just another issue I might have disagreed with,” he explained. “The issue wasn’t so much that we weren’t intervening; it was that we were de facto intervening on the perpetrator’s side.” The Ethics of Resignation At some point in their careers, most State Department employees have disagreed with policy. Not a few have had to defend and support these policies in public or with foreign interlocutors. Faced with such a dilemma, they know resigna- tion is an option, but most would only make such a personally and professionally significant decision after serious consider- ation. How does one know if resigning is the right choice? In his insightful meditation Public Integrity , the ethicist J. Patrick Dobel suggests a set of criteria—a “triangle of judg- ment”—to guide such a decision. Dobel argues that professional integrity is the product of the harmonious interplay of three sets of “ethics” —legal-institutional, personal responsibility, and effectiveness— that interact synergistically and dynamically. Legal-institutional and personal responsibility ethics are straightforward: U.S. government officials must not violate the law and should act in accordance with their moral beliefs. Effectiveness ethics consist of two elements: Officials must be personally and materially able to do their jobs, and—this is the interesting part—they must “prudently” seek to achieve their mission even in ethically complex situations. To act “prudently” for Dobel is to use discerning judgment, to be politically savvy, to make small compromises to accomplish larger goals, and to be bureaucratically skillful—all the while maintaining a moral compass. It is an art, not a science, and requires constant vigilance lest “prudence” become an excuse for ethical laxity. In essence, Dobel is insisting that, ethically, it is incumbent on government officials to operate and be effective in the real world, which is often morally ambiguous. Refusing to do so—and (my elabo- ration) to hastily resign simply because one disagrees with policy—to preserve one’s moral purity is no virtue. When does personal conscience take priority over profes- sional obligations? When does “working within the system” become complicity? How do you know when it’s time to resign? A closer look at the decision-making process FS-3 Croatia desk officer Stephen Walker went through provides some answers to these questions. Legal-Institutional . While Walker does not believe the administration broke U.S. domestic law or engaged in unambig- uously illegal conduct with regard to Bosnia, he contends that by the summer of 1993, senior officials were at best dissembling and at worst misleading Congress and the American people on both the situation in Bosnia and the government’s policy. For example, Secretary Christopher’s frequent public state- ments that both sides had committed atrocities were technically accurate, but masked the fact that the vast majority of atrocities were perpetrated by the Bosnian Serbs and their proxies, whose genocide was systematic. Christopher’s formulation implied a moral equivalency on both sides. It became apparent to Walker that the real goal of the administration’s Bosnia policy was to keep the war out of the headlines so that there would be less pressure on the president to do something about it. In Walker’s view, the State Department, including by extension himself, was compromis- ing its public mission to advance the administration’s political needs, and in a way that violated U.S. values and international law. Personal responsibility . As described above, Walker believed that the Clinton administration’s inaction was a tacit accep- tance of genocide. This violated his moral principles. Yet his commitment to the Foreign Service outweighed his moral disagreement, even after Harris and Western had resigned. “Foreign Service officers are told from Day One when they join that during their careers they will be called on, and should be prepared, to defend policy with which they disagree,” he explained. The nation’s diplomats may express their dissent as policy is being formulated, but “once a decision is made, they are professionally bound to publicly support and advance it.” Despite his considerable reservations, Walker was still prepared to publicly support the Bosnia policy as he prudently sought to change it from within. The “final nail in the coffin,” he recounted, came on the evening of Friday, Aug. 20, when a senior official in Walker’s chain of command informed him of an evolution in policy that