Why Not Try Diplomacy?
Remarks
to the University Continuing Education Association
March
28, 2008,
Ambassador
Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
I want to speak to you this
afternoon about diplomacy as an element of statecraft. By now most Americans recognize that we are
in a bit of trouble both at home and abroad.
What is to be done? Is diplomacy
a better answer than the use of force?
The late Arthur Goldberg, who
was both a Justice of our Supreme Court and Ambassador to the United Nations,
observed that “diplomats approach every issue with an open ... mouth.” A colleague and friend of mine, who served as
Ambassador to
Americans believe in military
power, and the
In current dollars, we are
spending about 28 percent more on our military each year than we did during the
Korean and Vietnam Wars, and over one-third more than at the height of the
Reagan defense build-up against the late, unlamented
In the first ten years of this
century, US defense outlays will total about five and one-quarter trillion
dollars. Military-related outlays in
other parts of the federal budget – like homeland security, veterans affairs,
and interest payments on war debt – will add another $2 trillion or so to this,
for a cumulative total of something well over $7 trillion in military and
military-related spending. Our defense
budget, including supplementals to pay for offensive operations in Afghanistan
and Iraq, is now about 5 percent of our
gross domestic product (GDP). Counting
military-related outlays in other budgets, the percentage of our economy devoted
to defense is around 7 percent. We have
a huge economy and, in absolute terms, that is a lot of military spending.
We need a strong military even
though we’re not really worried about an invasion from Jamaica or Canada or
Mexico or even Cuba or Iran. Unlike
other nations’ armed forces, what ours do is mostly not defense against foreign
invasion or attacks on the homeland. Our
military is configured for offensive deployment in support of foreign
policy. It does deterrence, punishment,
and conquest of real and potential foreign enemies. That is why our soldiers, sailors, airmen,
and marines are in Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in Bosnia and dozens
of other places around the world that have neither the intent nor the
capability to attack us. It took 9/11
and its demonstration that we had no military means of preventing foreign
attack on US civilians to get us to worry about the possibility that such
attacks might occur. We now have a
separate department of government focused on that.
Somehow, however, despite all
the money we’ve spent, the debt we’ve accumulated, and the sacrifices patriotic
Americans have made in distant foreign lands, our leaders tell us that we have
never been so threatened. Given all the
enemies we have been making recently, they may be right. There is, of course, a time-tested political
axiom in Washington that if something isn’t working the answer is to add money
and do more of it. So our president and
the three major candidates vying to succeed him join in promising further
increases in defense spending – without providing any indication of how these
increases would buy us greater security.
It’s enough to make one wonder whether President Eisenhower wasn’t onto
something when he warned Americans against the danger of nurturing a
“military-industrial complex” that would give us a vested interest in military
spending, regardless of the nature and level of the threat to our nation.
Massive military spending has,
in fact, become an indispensable part of our political-economy. In addition to buying remarkably capable and
costly weapons systems, it feeds hordes of consultants and contractors and
houses legions of academic specialists. These are very bright people who labor
to develop theories of how military coercion might control foreign
behavior. They produce threat analyses
to justify continuing US military build-up.
They consider how best to apply our military might abroad, and they work
out the force packages and weapons system specifications to do it. The intellectual energy that massive
spending has focused on these topics – as opposed to means of influence that do
not rely on the threat or use of force – has revolutionized the American
approach to foreign policy. One should
never underestimate the impact of either federal spending or the resulting
focus of the academy!
And one should never
underestimate the ability of politicians to ignore millennia of human
experience and to aspire to expediency if the academy gives them an opening to
do so. Most of our leaders, in both
major political parties, now espouse a reversal of the longstanding American
view that coercion, especially through military means, is a last resort to be
brought into play only when diplomacy – in the form of persuasion, diplomatic
bargaining, alliance-building, and other measures short of war – has
failed. In both Afghanistan and Iraq,
the sequence approved on both sides of the aisle was to shoot first, then send
in the diplomats to mop up. Since this
hasn’t worked out too well, there is now a lot of talk about how to recruit
more diplomats and buy more mops. That’s
probably a good idea, but it might be more effective and cheaper to involve the
diplomats at the outset and avoid creating such a mess in the first place.
It used to be thought that the
purpose of war is to secure a more perfect peace. That is an objective that invokes diplomacy
to translate military triumph into new arrangements acceptable to both victor
and vanquished. It implies war planning
focused on the question: “and then what?”
and the conduct of war in accordance with a strategy that unites political,
economic, informational, and intelligence measures with military actions and a
well-crafted plan for war termination.
In Iraq, a brilliant general has belatedly come up with a credible
campaign plan but
his plan is still unconnected to
a strategy. Our plan to end the fighting
is apparently to hang around until the Iraqis decide to make peace with each
other. That might take a while. In the strategy-free zone that is
contemporary Washington, no one wants to second-guess a celebrity general, but
any reading of David Petraeus’ manual on counter-insurgency must lead to the
conclusion that, in Iraq, “victory” remains undefined and missing in action.
Sadly, theories of coercion and
plans to use military means to impose our will on other nations have for some
time squeezed out serious consideration of diplomacy as an alternative to the
use of force. Diplomacy is more than
saying “nice doggie,” till you can find a rock.
Weapons are tools to change men’s minds but they are far from the only
means of doing so. As we are learning
from our misadventures in the Middle East, they are also seldom the most
reliable or least expensive. The weapons
of diplomats are words and their power is their persuasiveness. Talk is cheaper than firepower and does less
collateral damage, so it makes sense to try it before blazing away at the
adversary.
There is another reason to
regard force as a last resort. It
creates ruins that cannot easily be rebuilt and resentments that cannot be
easily be overcome. War is a form of
demolition; its results are messy and its effects on those it touches are
uncertain. In the age of globalization,
moreover, military invasion is as likely to incubate terrorists with global
reach as it is to overthrow governments and seize terrain. It makes sense to exhaust diplomatic remedies
first, not to follow a script of “Ready! Fire! Diplomacy!”
Diplomacy is the art of pursuing
the internationally possible. Its main
drawback is that it involves the unpleasant task of interacting persuasively
with usually disagreeable adversaries and sometimes tedious friends. Despite the example of useful, wide-ranging
dialog with our Soviet enemies (conducted on the sound theory that one should
never lose contact with the enemy diplomatically or militarily), a generation
of American leaders seems to have concluded that we shouldn’t talk to people
who disagree with us till they come out with their hands up. But not talking to those with whom one
disagrees is the diplomatic equivalent of unilateral disarmament.
Figuring out why others are
doing things and explaining to them why Americans disagree with this and why
they should, in their own interest, do things our way is the opposite of
appeasement. And it is more likely to
achieve results than ducking such encounters while loudly proclaiming that
those we disdain to speak with already know what they need to do to appease us,
so we don’t need to reason with them.
Substituting reliance on the intuition of our adversaries for diplomatic
communication with them leaves few options.
We can live with a surging mess or we can slap on some sanctions. When these fail, as they inevitably do, we
can send in the B-2s and Abrams tanks.
These are not good choices. The
approach they impose creates more problems than it solves.
Our next president will inherit
a daunting list of challenges: apparently interminable wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq; withering alliances; diminished international prestige and deference to
our leadership; deepening estrangement between the United States and the
Islamic world, a mounting threat to our homeland from the growing ranks of
anti-American jihadis; a war-fatigued, equipment-depleted, disenchanted, and
still untransformed US military; an increasingly lawless world order; and the
emergence of a widening range of regional challenges to US influence and
interests from the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chávez Frías, and
Vladimir Putin.
.
He or she will have to deal with
all these issues while wrestling with a budget and economy in chronic deficit;
mounting national debt amidst a credit crisis; recession; inflation; insolvent
pension systems; decaying infrastructure – complete with collapsing bridges,
pot-holes, and gridlock; a medical system that extracts rapidly inflating
payments from middle class Americans without caring for the poor, sick, and
destitute among us; and other developments that, collectively, undermine
America as a model that other nations wish to emulate. It is tempting to conclude that anyone who
wants to be president under these circumstances is prima facie mentally defective and unfit for the office. Still, some poor soul will be inaugurated
next January 20 and will have to deal with all these issues and then some.
The new president might start by
shaking off the constipated notion that diplomacy is, like military posturing,
just a way of conveying menace or containing or deterring threats. These things are, of course, part of
diplomacy. And it’s true, as Al Capone
once sagely remarked, that “you will get farther with a kind word and a gun
than with a kind word alone.” Diplomacy
is largely about adding the strength of others to one’s own, but its greater
mission is to take the political offensive by transcending the conventional
wisdom and identifying or creating opportunities, and seizing them to the
national advantage. That is what Truman
did with the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO. It is what Nixon did with his opening to China. It is what Carter did at Camp David. It is what Reagan did with Gorbachev at
Reykjavik. The next president should
look into how to restore our atrophied diplomatic capabilities so as to lift us
from the mire into which we have sunk.
Resorting to diplomacy will not
be as easy as it may sound. Secretary of
Defense Gates has recently begun to speak to the lopsided priorities apparent
in our budget, which underfunds diplomacy and forces the US military to do all sorts
of things that would be more appropriately and better done by civilian foreign
affairs personnel. Gates points out that
there are fewer professional diplomats in our Foreign Service than there are
personnel in military bands or a single carrier battle group. What our country spends on a year’s
diplomatic and consular operations worldwide is less than what we spend in six
days of military operations in Iraq..
You get what you pay for. In this case, that’s a superbly professional
and supremely lethal military and an anemically staffed and undertrained
diplomatic service led by inexperienced political appointees on sabbatical from
high incomes. As one of the last
century’s greatest diplomats, Israel’s Abba Eban, said of this peculiarly
American practice,
"The
bizarre notion that any citizen, especially if he is rich, is fit for the
representation of his country abroad has taken some hard blows through
empirical evidence. But it has not been discarded."
It has been 196 years since an
amateur general – Andrew Jackson – last commanded US troops in battle not far
from here. But to lead our diplomatic
work abroad, especially in countries where the standard of living is high and
the danger of anti-American violence is low, we still depend on amateurs who
must learn on the job, hoping that their experienced subordinates will help
them overcome their ignorance of the local language, paper over embarrassing
gaffes, and avoid catastrophic mistakes.
And in Washington, where Iraq has just reminded us how dangerous it can
be to allow civilian armchair generals to substitute their military judgments
for those of military professionals, we now staff our foreign policy apparatus
almost entirely with people with no diplomatic experience. No other country in the world so values
ideological reliability and party loyalty over professional knowledge and
expertise. Only in America....
I am reminded of the story of a
former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Mac Toon, a crusty career diplomat
who went aboard an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean for a meeting with the
admiral who commanded its battle group.
At the end of their discussion, the admiral leaned over to ask, “what’s
it like being an ambassador? I’ve always
thought that after I retire I might want to try it.” Ambassador Toon replied, “that’s funny. I’ve always thought that, when I retire, I
might try my hand at running a carrier battle group.” The admiral said, “That’s ridiculous. A naval command requires years of training
and experience.” But so do the
management of foreign policy and diplomacy, if the ship of state is not to be
sailed onto the rocks or beached in the desert.
It is a truism that skilled work
requires skilled workmen. Americans are now without peer in the military
arts. To prevail against our current
enemies, we must attain equal excellence in diplomacy. We do not have the margin for error we once
did. But even if we devote the
equivalent of a whole week’s worth of the Pentagon budget to the arts of peace
– rather than the three days or so we now do – fixing our Foreign Service will
take time. As our military know better
than anyone, it takes decades to train, exercise, and professionalize
personnel. After years of overemphasis
on military means of conducting our foreign relations, getting up to diplomatic
snuff will also require a serious investment in intellectual infrastructure
comparable to that we have devoted to the military arts.
If we build a diplomatic
capability to match our military prowess, we will gain a key building block of
national strategy. But a bigger, better
Foreign Service will not in itself
create such a strategy. Nor will it
solve the underlying problem of national strategic illiteracy. We suffer from what one of our most
sophisticated foreign policy practitioners, Chester Crocker, has called a “statecraft
deficit.” It is inspiring to observe the
professionalism of our military, which is the most competent in history. It is painful to observe the extent to which
military requests for direction from the civilians whose control they are
taught to revere go unanswered. The fact
is that we – and those we elect and appoint to lead us – are remarkably poorly
prepared for the preeminent role in world affairs we now play.
Our educational system bears
major responsibility for this. Most
Americans can’t find Louisiana, let alone Iraq or Afghanistan, on the map. Many are unversed in history, still less
diplomatic history. Few have been
exposed to any instruction in how to reason about foreign affairs or statecraft
and its diplomatic, intelligence, and military tools. Almost none have been tutored in
strategy. This is understandable. It is largely a reflection of two factors,
both of which have changed.
First, until recently, the
American homeland was apparently invulnerable, and the United States was the
leader in most fields of human endeavor.
Foreign policy was therefore something we inflicted on others without
fear of reprisal, not something they did unto us. And we didn’t think we had much to learn from
foreigners. Foreign affairs and national
security didn’t seem like anything the average American citizen had to worry
about. But 9/11 changed that forever.
And, second, the formative
influences of the Cold War, during which the United States led half the world
against Soviet communism, are still with us.
Then, the capacity of the Soviet Union to annihilate us imperiled our
very existence. Its predatory ideology
menaced our values; its imperial ambitions threatened our interests and those
of many other nations.. The threats to
both values and interests became so thoroughly merged that we forgot how to
distinguish the two, though they are very different in their functions and
import.
Attempts at historical
revisionism by the proponents of militarism notwithstanding, the fact is that
we won the Cold War by patient adherence to a strategy of containment, not by
butting heads on a battlefield.
Containment relied on diplomacy – on measures short of war – to build
and sustain alliances backed by the deterrent power of great military strength. Some may profess to regret that we did not
join in battle with the Soviet Union to roll back its empire. I am glad we substituted patience for
belligerence. Our strategy did not vary
over forty years. It formed the foreign
policy outlook of three generations We
did not have to think about strategy. In
many ways, we appear to have forgotten how to do so.
We now face a world in which our
personal security and that of our communities is threatened, but our national
existence is not. As a people and as a
nation, we are challenged from many directions and in many ways, not by a
single “evil empire” that we can count upon to rot away from within. To secure our domestic tranquility against
foreign assault and to lead the 21st Century as we did the last one
will demand of us a higher level of strategic conceptual ability and civic
literacy than we have had to demonstrate for decades. And it will require instruments of statecraft
adequate to the task – diplomatic, informational, and intelligence capabilities
of the first order, backed by military power without peer and a prosperous,
attractive, and open society.
Two millennia ago, the Roman
philosopher Seneca advised the Emperor Nero of the vital importance of setting
objectives. “If a man does not know to
what port he steers, no wind is favorable,” he pointed out. It was good advice, even if Nero didn’t take
it. It is worth pondering in our current
circumstances. Our debate about the
challenges before us is almost entirely tactical
not strategic; cast in terms of our politics rather than external realities;
and focused on preventing change rather than turning it to our advantage.
Yet, for example, we risk
reaping the whirlwind if we simply leave Iraq.
We cannot do so safely and responsibly without defining realistic
objectives and using our withdrawal to advance toward them. If we continue to aid and abet
counterproductive behavior by all sides in the Middle East, we should not be
surprised when they turn on us. If we do
not define a feasible end-game in Afghanistan, we will just incubate more
anti-American terrorists while expanding the world’s heroin supply.
If we cannot decide what sort of
international monetary reserve system should replace the currently collapsing
one and persuade other stakeholders to act with us to fix it, we will drift
into increasing economic misery. We must
develop a plan to reunite the Atlantic region behind the rule of law and other
Western values or see these eclipsed by ideas from other regions of the world
that are rising to new prominence.
Without a vision of mutually beneficial coexistence in our hemisphere,
events and the anti-American dreams of others will bring needless trouble right
up to our borders. If we are not positioned to help as Cuba, North Korea, Burma,
and other troubled nations enter periods of transition, we must expect that
they will change in ways that create new problems for us and their
neighbors. If we have no positive agenda
for enlisting Chinese and Indian power in common causes, they may well apply
their power in ways that undercut ours, annoy us, or even injure us.
It has been a long time since
Americans had a positive vision or clear objectives for these and many other
pressing issues. I could go on, but the
afternoon advances, and New Orleans beckons.
Let me close with the obvious point that we cannot hope to appeal to the
conscience of humankind if we do not continue to embody its aspirations. If we do not restore our country’s good name,
others will not follow when we lead or share the burdens we take up. To regain the cooperation of allies and
friends, we must rediscover how to listen, how to persuade, how to be a team
player, and how to follow the rules we demand others follow.
We must do this because we
Americans cannot successfully address the problems we confront on our own. Our need for foreign partners has never been
greater. Fortunately, the world’s desire
for partnership with America has not really gone away. Beneath the layers of resentment and
animosity laid down by our recent behavior, there is still much goodwill toward
the United States. This “fossil
friendship” will not last forever. For
now, however, it is a resource that American diplomacy can mine to rebuild the
respect of allies and friends for our leadership and to unite them behind an
American vision of a better world. A
return to diplomacy, not threats and the use of force, is the surest path to
the reassertion of American leadership.
It is time to rediscover and explore that path.
Thank you.