Can We Fix American Diplomacy?
Originally posted on October 16, 2024 in Inkstick Media
Can We Fix American Diplomacy?
The world is rapidly changing. Experts weigh in on the State Department’s attempts to adapt.
By: Evan Cooper, Dan Spokojny, Vivian Walker, Benjamin Poole, and Dani Nedal | October 16, 2024
“Adults in a Room” is a series in collaboration with The Stimson Center’s Reimagining US Grand Strategy program. The series stems from the group’s monthly networking events that call on analysts to gather virtually and hash out a salient topic. It aims to give you a peek into their Zoom room and a deep understanding of the issue at hand in less than the time it takes to sip your morning coffee without the jargon, acronyms, and stuffiness that often come with expertise.
From his first day in President Joe Biden’s administration, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken espoused his plans for robust State Department modernization — ironing out bureaucratic inefficiencies and re-centering resources on the most pressing problems of today. Many experts welcomed this change, citing the emaciated state of American diplomacy as a core driver for reform. More than just inadequate resources, structural issues with the department have plagued the successful execution of US diplomatic efforts in the modern era, thus demanding fundamental institutional reform.
The years since Blinken’s 2021 address on modernization have begun to solidify his words into actual departmental change, but like any monumental task of this nature, the road has been bumpy. Limitations to the revitalization of the State Department are evident both in and outside the house — whether they stem from Congress’s purse, executive strategy documents, or even cultural forces within the department itself.
The Reimagining US Grand Strategy program’s September 2024 roundtable brought experts together to discuss the US Department of State modernization efforts — what has gone right, what has gone wrong, and what needs to happen moving forward. The group largely agreed that the modernization agenda has conceptually been a step in the right direction, though there were diverging opinions on the root cause of its limitations and ways to effectively address these issues. Five experts weigh in on this debate below.
Evan Cooper, Research Analyst, Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program, Stimson Center
US diplomacy has atrophied over the course of the 21st century. There is not just one cause for this trend. The overuse of the military tool has come at the expense of appropriately utilizing diplomacy. The State Department has suffered from paltry budgets and senior diplomats leaving due to political attacks on the institution. But above all, US diplomacy has struggled to adapt to a more multipolar world, one in which the United States cannot dictate terms.
The Biden administration recognized that the State Department and American diplomacy was in a dire position and has pushed ambitious reforms through its State Department modernization agenda. This has led to the creation of new bureaus for cyberspace and global health, improvements to its hiring and training processes, and an increased focus on in-person diplomacy.
While the ambition behind this agenda is worthy of recognition, it has become clear that there are larger impediments to US diplomacy that are outside the control of the State Department. First is Congress, which has too often slashed the foreign affairs budget and failed to consistently pass State Department authorization bills, constraining the department from making key changes to its operations and effectively spending the funding that it is appropriated.
In theory, this is an eminently solvable problem for Congress to fix. But Congress’s obstinance is driven by a bigger second problem: American culture has become hostile to the core tenets of diplomacy. The end of the Cold War left the United States the only superpower, able to enact its will and rarely having to make major concessions. Many Americans view this as the status quo and see diplomatic negotiations that require compromises being made by the US to adversaries as capitulation.
From discussions surrounding ending the war in Ukraine, China’s role in the South China Sea, and the end of the war in Afghanistan, many Americans feel that the US should be able to get its way without paying an incredibly high cost of lives and treasure. While they often support the notion of diplomacy, large constituencies routinely reject diplomatic agreements as too generous to adversaries. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. The US ultimately exited a deal that successfully obtained the outcome that many Americans wanted for being too accommodating of Iran.
For US diplomacy to be rejuvenated, there will need to be a cultural shift alongside bolstered resources and persistent utilization of the diplomatic tool by the president. This poses a chicken or the egg problem — giving the American people tangible results from diplomatic endeavors is requisite for receiving public support, but securing those returns requires public backing. How do Americans come to believe in the value of diplomacy enough to back Congress and the president to invest in diplomacy when the diplomatic tool is so weak? It will require a bold political agenda that sells diplomacy to the American people as the means to advance US interests. It demands making compromises that ultimately leave the United States better off than it would otherwise be, and then unabashedly communicating those wins to the American people.
Dan Spokojny, CEO, fp21
The quality of our institutions’ policymaking processes — the ability to turn ideas into action — ought to be an essential concern for grand strategists. Yet, the decision-making process at the US State Department remains largely unchanged since the end of World War II. It urgently requires attention, investment, and upgrade.
Modernizing the State Department and revitalizing US diplomacy must begin by answering one critical question: What does it mean to be an expert in foreign policy?
My favorite definition of expertise is that which achieves “consistently superior performance.” Scholarship on expertise identifies two ingredients under which superior performance thrives: 1) one must receive feedback about the success and failure of their actions, and; 2) they must take opportunity practice and update their skills.
Unfortunately, today’s State Department makes little attempt at measuring the success and failure of US foreign policy, and thus has little foundation upon which to identify and build expertise.
Instead, policymakers tend to speak about the “art of diplomacy.” This view suggests that policy expertise arises from some combination of ambiguous gut instinct, good judgment, hard-earned experience, and knowledge of history and culture.
Certainly that’s a useful starting point, but today’s complex world demands we do even better.
Building a culture of diplomacy centered around expertise requires creating the conditions for receiving and integrating high-quality feedback into the every-day work of our diplomats and policymakers. To achieve this, the State Department should:
Utilize new analytical tools to extract insight from an increasingly complex world, and to help its diplomats understand how their tools work;
Build modern knowledge management structures to make sure the best available knowledge is easily accessible outside of the minds of our most experienced policymakers;
Improve the decision-making process. Right now the clearance process — the policy process — at the State Department is a consensus-based procedure. State can tweak this process to better weigh the evidence supporting various policy ideas rather than simply empowering the loudest voice in the room or the most watered down policy idea;
Invest resources into monitoring and evaluation of its big strategic priorities, not only foreign assistance and programmatic expenditures. The success of policy ideas should be monitored throughout the implementation process;
Compile widely applicable best practices to start developing doctrine for diplomacy. A new required curriculum for policymakers should be developed to inculcate the next generation with the most effective tools of analysis, strategy, planning, and evaluation; and,
Feed this knowledge about success and failure into the personnel system to improve the quality of decisions about hiring, job assignments, and promotions.
In sum, upgrading the State Department’s decision-making process may be the single most impactful intervention one can make to improve the effectiveness of our national security and foreign policy.
Vivian Walker, Adjunct Professor, Georgetown University
Effective monitoring and evaluation (M&E) frameworks are essential to foreign policy implementation. This is especially true when it comes to the practice of public diplomacy, defined here as a state’s effort to inform and influence foreign audiences in the service of its national interests.
In addition to providing essential insights into audience understanding of and responses to USG foreign policy initiatives, monitoring and evaluation helps diplomats assess where and how a policy is succeeding as well as its misfires. M&E can identify and fill knowledge gaps, root out misperceptions, and capitalize on shared values and interests.
From the earliest days of the Cold War to the present, USG public diplomacy practitioners and institutions have relied on cutting-edge monitoring and evaluation practices to produce critical data on program and outreach activities and shape future resource allocation in support of US foreign policy programs.
However, there are two persistent obstacles to the effective implementation of monitoring and evaluation results. First, the existence of multiple and overlapping M&E efforts inhibits integrated information sharing and coordination efforts.
There are, for example, at least four distinct M&E frameworks within the State Department’s public diplomacy bureaus and offices. The data and analytics produced by each unit are siloed and therefore not readily available to stakeholders across the Department and the interagency.
Nor is the data produced easily accessible to the legislative, foreign policy, and academic communities with a stake in the impacts and — critically — funding of USG information and influence activities.
Then, there’s the time factor. The careful, informed, and regulated data collection process central to effective monitoring and evaluation is inconsistent with the fast-paced demands of policy formulation and resource allocation.
It takes a while to get good data. Research parameters and benchmarks must be set. Data collection methods, and protocols must be determined. The data must be analyzed and categorized. By the time the results are in, the funding cycle has moved on, resources have been reallocated, and policy priorities have shifted.
The solution lies in the consolidation and integration of M&E processes within the Department of State, the facilitation of unrestricted data sharing and collaboration across the interagency, and a commitment to providing unrestricted and timely public access to the results.
Benjamin Poole, Air Force Visiting Fellow, Stimson Center
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed or implied are those of the author and should not be construed as carrying the official sanction of the Department of Defense, Air Force, Air Education and Training Command, Air University, or other agencies or departments of the US government or their international equivalents.
With the start of another fiscal year and with a renewed focus on great power competition, each government agency must look for ways to improve. The good news is there are techniques foreign policy experts can take away from the military that do not burden taxpayers with funding.
Foreign policy goals are often opaque and difficult to measure. For instance, the ill-defined objective of maintaining and expanding our competitive advantage over China is the latest. Another example from recent history was the decision to back Islamist militants in Afghanistan, which arguably led to Taliban control over Afghanistan and the seeds of the 9/11 attacks. Ill-defined objectives lead to inefficient use of resources and no articulable outcomes. In military planning, we use the SMART acronym when developing objectives or goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, reliable, and timely. This helps planners, military or otherwise, develop goals to help solve complex and wicked problems. Additionally, clearly defined objectives ensure practitioners have an avenue to provide honest, measurable, and data-driven evaluation and feedback.
The aviation community puts as much emphasis on post-mission debriefing, evaluation, and lessons learned as we do on the actual flight. You learn as much or more in debrief as during the flight. United States Air Force flying squadrons use the debrief focal point (DFP) method for evaluating objectives and debriefing flights. The method consists of the following steps: objective review, data gathering, debrief focal point creation, and dissemination of lessons learned.
The debrief begins with the mission lead reviewing the objectives with the crew and next everyone inputs data from the phases of the mission which were crucial to mission success (meeting the objectives) or lead to mission failure. After the data is gathered and analyzed, the crew grades each objective as a plus for achieved or a negative for failure. The next step in evaluation and debrief is DFP creation.
DFP creation begins like an episode of Jeopardy, with a question. Why was a certain objective not achieved? The crew performs root cause analysis identifying contributing factors and the root cause of why the goal was not achieved. Next, the crew provides recommendations that mitigate the factor that was the root cause. These recommendations are known as instructional fixes. The last step before presentation is taking all the information and creating lessons learned. After lessons learned are created, all of the information is formatted for presentation.
The most crucial step in the DFP method is to present the lessons learned to the rest of the organization. The presentation allows others to learn from the crews’ mistakes as well as teaches aviators how to be accountable for their mistakes in front of their peers. After the presentation, enter lessons learned into a database and distribute the lessons learned to the organization.
The last step in the feedback and evaluation process is followthrough. It does no good if you store the lessons learned in a database and never review them. At the beginning of the next planning session, the crew should review the applicable lessons learned to keep them from turning into lessons observed.
There are a few things that practitioners can do to optimize lessons learned. Most importantly, they can take the time to provide feedback and evaluate each mission. As consumers of American tax dollars, it is our duty to make sure we do the due diligence to improve the process. Keep up with the lesson learned and find any repeated mistakes. One technique is to go over the earlier operations’ areas for improvement after creating lessons learned for repeats. If the same area for improvement shows up more than twice it becomes a “lesson observed.”
For example, one can assume that the United States and Russia will decide to negotiate a new nuclear weapons treaty after NEW START expires. Before negotiations start, the treaty team should ensure any lessons learned from NEW START are reviewed and apply them to the new negotiations. If the lessons observed continue to show up, it becomes a “trend” and efforts need to reemphasize the lesson learned. Lastly, be sure to leave rank or seniority at the door because everyone is equal in debriefing and this will lead to frank evaluation.
In conclusion, the foreign policy community can use clearly defined, measurable goals as well as lessons learned from military planning to assist in improving outcomes. As we continue focusing on great power competition with Russia and China, I can think of no better time to implement these concepts in foreign policy processes.
Dani Nedal, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto
American diplomacy is in trouble. Embassies and consular offices are understaffed and under-resourced, especially in some of the world’s most volatile places. Decades of neglect, apathy, or outright antipathy from politicians have brought the State Department close to a breaking point. This state of disrepair is a threat not only to the country’s ability to play a constructive role in international affairs but also to the welfare and security of Americans at home and abroad. Proposals for reforming the institution need to start with acknowledging that the problem is not one of HR or PR, but politics.
The State Department’s budget and prestige are casualties of a combination of related trends, from the ballooning of the national security state and the militarization of US foreign policy to the backlash against the US-led economic and political orders of the post-Cold War era, stemming from both the progressive left and the reactionary right.
While most Americans still believe in peaceful and constructive engagement with the world and trust American diplomats to play that role, large portions of the public are disenchanted with multilateral institutions, foreign aid, alliances, and diplomacy writ large. One of the country’s major parties has all but given up on global leadership. The problem is not a lack of tools to evaluate, measure, or communicate diplomatic success and failure, but a fundamental lack of political agreement on the objectives of American foreign policy and the role for diplomacy in achieving them. The reality is that the State Department might need to learn not only to do more with less, but to do less with even less, prioritizing key issues and competencies and abandoning or transferring other responsibilities.
To adjust to this new reality, the State Department should take a good, close look at the Department of Defense — and aim for the exact opposite. The DoD is bloated and wasteful, the State Department needs to be lean and efficient; the Pentagon has embraced mission creep, the State Department needs to pick its battles; the military is notoriously slow and reluctant to learn and change, the State Department needs to value flexibility and creativity; the military is risk-averse, but effective diplomacy often requires making leaps and taking risks; the military overvalues technology, diplomacy is all about people. Institutional reforms can’t solve or sidestep the political problems at the heart of America’s diplomatic crisis; at best, they can ease the adjustment.