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Readers’ Comments
America’s Other Army author Nicholas Kralev interviewed some 600 U.S. diplomats for his book, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and all her predecessors in the last 30 years: Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher, James Baker and George Shultz.
Now Nicholas would like to hear from you, the readers. Did the book change your perceptions of diplomacy and your understanding about what the Foreign Service does? Did any stories or characters stick in your mind? You can use the form below to leave your comments. Please use your full name.
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I was a Foreign Service officer from 1986 until 2006, serving in Zambia, India, Albania and China (i.e., Taipei, Beijing and Chengdu). Candidly, most of my State Department superiors were unimpressed with me, but the local nationals with whom I worked and I cooperated very well together. Be they local government officials, members of the judiciary, academics, journalists, business leaders, we worked together. Many of these people remain friends to this day. Some have even visited my wife and me at our home in retirement. Yet, by anybody’s judgement, my FS career was mediocre at best. Why? Because I was viewed as having “gone native.”
One example: I was serving in Beijing when the U.S. accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia. The ordinary citizens were so angry, the attacked the US Embassy. The Embassy’s American staff was ordered to remain at home. The day after the attack, the embassy’s political officer (a very “successful” FSO who later served on the National Security Council) called me and said, “My Chinese staff tells me you have the best contacts of anyone in the embassy. Can you tell me what you’ve heard from them about this incident?”
I replied, “I haven’t heard from any Chinese friends in the government, but our friends in academics…” He interrupted me and said, “Get one thing clear right now: They are not your friends. They are your contacts.”
I responded, “Did it ever occur to you that your staff believes I have the best contacts of anyone in the embassy because they are my friends, not my contacts?” He hung up and never spoke to me again.
In short, the real problem is the State Department’s personnel policy. First, if we really want knowledgeable, well-qualified people, one’s entire career ought be focused on a single country, or no more that a small region (e.g. Southern Africa).
Second, stop moving people about every 2-3 years. Currently, about the time an officer has a modicum of understanding of the parameters of her/his assignment, she/he is reassigned.
Third, when I was in the FS, Washington was the best, if not only, assignment for career advancement. Granted, one could argue that Washington is where the decisions that truly impact our policies toward a given country are made, but currently those policy decisions are based on quite ill-informed reporting from our constantly moving embassy reporting officers. As a comparison, when I was a Ph.D. student in Chinese at the University of Washington, one of my major professors was Helmut Wilhelm. His father, Richard Wilhelm, one of the best China scholars of the 20th century, was the German ambassador to Beijing from 1896 until 1934.