Hillary Should Dare to Break State in Order to Save It
- Establish both an objective and principles of international engagement. Understand why we are engaging – not just communicating – with the world. The national security policy and this mission must be synchronized. Public diplomacy, strategic communication, or whatever you want to call it is central to our national security. Bullets and bombs do not protect our financial system from rumors. They do not protect our health when we need to respond to pandemics and they do not deny sanctuary for terrorists and insurgents and their ideology. Suggested principles: telling the truth, explaining the motives of the United States, bolstering morale and extending hope home and abroad, giving a true and convincing picture of American life, methods and ideals, combating misrepresentation and distortions, and aggressively interpreting and supporting a smart American foreign policy developed and implemented in conjunction with the above principles and long term views. This should also lead to a much simplified National Security Strategy with easy to read, translate, and PowerPoint bullet points.
- Convince Congress of the need to accept and support the principle(s) of engagement. “Real security, in contrast to the relative security of armaments, could develop only from understanding and mutual comprehension.” Congressional support is required for any revamp. They must be assured the problems from the past are the past and the future is well thought out. Promise serious and critical semi-annual public reports to be presented to Congress written by people who understand the issues. The threat is not just from “radical Islamists”, but from the criminals, the Chinese, the Russians, and others.
- Realize that we need a Department of Non-State. The DNS could be conceptual or a separate entity, but realize that extracting public diplomacy from State means we should similarly gut DOD, FDA, USDA, and DHS from their ability to communicate with the world. Extracting “R” from State would mean it is only the Department of State at a time when not only are non-state actors from Al-Qaeda to Hamas to No Mas FARC to the Gates Foundation more important and powerful than ever, but engagement with states is increasingly a public affairs. The USIA was a DNS, however a future DNS/USIA/USAGE (U.S. Agency for Global Engagement, my preferred acronym) didn’t have the power it would need today. Coordinating requires right of oversight on key personnel choices and input on programming across the board, not just access to the President. Perhaps it should have two masters like the DOD does. It may be best to keep this in State as State must transform from the 19th Century organization it is.
- Re-align State’s regional bureaus with DOD’s Combatant Commands. Increase the power of these regional bureaus by having “super-ambassadors” akin to Combatant Commanders. World affairs are decreasingly subject to the geopolitical borders on which the State Department is aligned. AFRICOM could provide some lessons with its co-deputy structure of State and Defense. State must have a greater presence and power to operate regionally. Create and empower more DASS positions like Colleen Graffy’s who operate regionally rather than within country. This will not to diminish country teams but provide greater regional / cross border integration. It will also help align with and increase collaboration with DOD.
- Realize Foreign Aid and Humanitarian Relief and all manner of capacity building is “public diplomacy” in action. The Marshall Plan, the greatest reconstruction, stabilization, and education and exchange program ever put forward was a program that was in large part a denial of sanctuary program. In response to the MP, the Communists flipped and reorganized and vastly increased their volume and tempo of their lies and distortions. The bad guys don’t like stability. The Smith-Mundt Act was passed largely as a response to the uptick in Communist propaganda against the MP. Don’t exclude Foreign Aid from the picture today.
- Break down the barrier between Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy in the State Department. This is global communication and there is a need to be agile, cooperative with the media and very often “pre-active” to help shape discussions by informing and educating along the way. Drop zero-tolerance for errors, push down “PA authority” to lower levels, give everybody media training, and adopt the 4-E’s Caldwell is pushing at Leavenworth in new Army Doctrine: empower, educate, equip, and encourage. Engage the public, domestic and foreign, at every opportunity. Use social media, blogger roundtables, and other means to engage in Q&A. Increase language training and have websites like state.gov available in multiple languages with the headlines on the major pages reflecting the likely interest of the linguistic profile. This is common in our allies, why not the U.S.? Increase the agility of DipNote and America.gov. Increase the flexibility of America.gov and similar assets to report on foreign policy of the U.S. and not simply echo press releases.
- Re-align the walls between Public Affairs, Information Operations, and Psychological Operations. PA is largely re-active and IO and PSYOP understand the power of information. Much of what they do is “white” and overt so move the lines to remove the “stigma” and empower the “PA” who should be “communication officers” or something similar. Agility is required today.
- Return to the original purposes, principles, and intent of the Smith-Mundt Act that included the principles listed above. Dropping the firewall will increase American’s knowledge and oversight of overseas activities conducted in their name and with their tax dollars, raise the bar for domestic media who once through foreign bureaus were a public service, and accept that the truly global information environment does not stop at the water’s edge.
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Smitten Eagle:
December 18th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
I personally never thought Hillary to be terribly good at the "vision" thing. She is a tactical politician, not a strategic one. Her single large attempt at a building a vision was the Health Care fiasco of the early 1990s, which was a program that suffered from a gross lack of disciplined thought, and instead became an unworkable behemoth. Maybe she learned from that mistake.
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But I don’t think so.
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Honestly, I wish Robert Gates could cloned and put in charge of State.
Lexington Green:
December 18th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Absolutely right. Unfortunately, I don’t think Hillary is the person to do this. She has never run anything except her mouth. You need someone to rethink the State Department, and ask, what would you want it to look like if it had never existed? What would it look like if you built it from scratch?
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Maybe get someone like Steve Jobs to be Hillary’s deputy … . Kidding. But, not so funny, the need for a powerful outsider with the muscle and the brains and the experience to rebuild the thing without a lot of preconceptions or ties to the status quo.
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Per Smitten Eagle, who is the nearest Democrat "Gates equivalent" to do the big rethink?
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Or maybe the initiative starts in Congress with the Goldwater-Nichols-on-Steroids (GNOS) being initiated there, with hearings and a forced public teardown. Perhaps GNOSis will prevail in that situation (sorry).
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Maybe assemble a panel consisting of all living former Sec. States and a bunch of other heavy hitters and have them to the big re-think? Like the Baker commission.
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The status quo forces will fight very hard to avoid major changes. Someone needs to be willing to wage that at the same time that the State Department is being asked to do a lot of things.
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The impetus from this would have to come from elsewhere, not from Hillary. I just don’t see her looking for that kind of trouble Probably from Obama himself. He does have incentive. If he wants to deemphasize the kinetics, he is going to find only rusty and ill-suited tools once he sets those aside.
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As I have said repeatedly about this administration — I hope they surprise me.
Fat Man:
December 18th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
If you think that the Queen of the White House Travel Office can or will take on that bureaucratic monster, I want whatever it is you have been drinking.
Lex is absolutely correct. She can’t and she won’t.
Obama has already demonstrated that Change and Hope mean that the party apparatchiks get their chairs back, not that the ways of Washington will change.
Hillary wants the office so that she can go from being one of one hundred to being the guest of honor at the fancy dress state dinner.
zen:
December 18th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
I dislike Hillary Clinton and I’m glad she failed in her presidential quest.
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That said, I’m banking a small hope on her known rigid self-discipline in pursuit of goals, intelligence and willingness to punish those who obstruct her being put to good purpose. If Hillary intends to try in 2016, being SecState alone won’t cut it ( Hear much from Warren Christopher lately?) she needs to be a success on par with the rep that Robert Gates now enjoys. Obama will support her as such an acheivement will only rebond to his administration’s general credit. The GOP will support it because much of what they dislike about State is going to get smashed. Opposition will come from the Lefty/Dove liberals and academia.
Lexington Green:
December 18th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
"Opposition will come from the Lefty/Dove liberals and academia."
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Maybe. But more, I think, from simple bureaucratic inertia and defense of incumbent interests. Those forces are far more powerful than ideology. People who want to be in a European city and not in Niger or the Solomon Islands, who want the current patterns to continue to be rewarded with promotions and plum assignments, will use every means to thwart real reform. And they will believe to the core of their being that they are doing the right thing, because people always believe that the end of the world they have always known and have served and worked in and maintained is a bad thing. Overcoming that kind of calcified barrier will take a head like a battering ram, willpower and strong support from above.
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You are right, though, that Hillary’s long term interest is to make an impact and be seen as a serious player. But, facing away from the public and doing unglamorous, politically difficult, publicly invisible, bureaucratic reorganization is not the way to get that kind of respect and renown. Kissinger did not do it. He just ran around the world doing stuff on his own, and left the organization to fend for itself. Hillary is probably more likely to do that sort of thing.
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I really think she should convene a "college of Cardinals" to come up with a major reorganization plan, give herself a year or so to just work on existing stuff, then use the imprimatur of the old heads to make any institutional change. She can deflect blame to them — "hey, I am running around talking to the leaders of the world, the bureaucracy will just have to learn to like the reforms, which a bipartisan committee has approved and I agree with their program". Something like that.
lrblyth:
December 18th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
For a another suggestion see “Breaking the Proconsulate: A New Design for National
Power.” Mitchell J. Thompson. Parameters (Winter 2005-06): pp. 62 to 75, on line here in html (here for pdf).
Thompson argues from historial experience that
"the commanders of geographic commands could be senior civilians with the experience of long and distinguished careers representing key governmental agencies in the National Security Council. The President would nominate them to their new role with full ambassadorial rank, and they would report to the National Security Advisor. Interagency synergy would be achieved through deputy director positions based on the elements of power—DIME. Reversing the command re-lationship in CORDS, the military director would be the current four-star Combatant Commander. This officer would retain command authority over military forces, and responsibility for planning efforts, albeit with augmentation from the diplomatic, informational, and economic directorates. Military billets might be staffed by officers from an “Interagency Officer” career field, proposed by Colonel Harry Tomlin, with the same underlying philosophy as the Army’s Foreign Area Officer field. Diplomatic, informational, and economic directors, each with ministerial rank, would come from appropriate Cabinet departments and be responsible for integrating planning with the military within their spheres of expertise, and for coordination and interface with embassy country teams. Interagency intelligence centers, staffed by regional and topical specialists from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), would replace the current Joint Intelligence Centers at the commands."
I read this as part of my Marine Corps Command and Staff College work. It was a reserve class and many of us worked for COCOMs as civilians. Most thought it a good idea/way to start.
andrewdb:
December 19th, 2008 at 3:20 am
Since we can’t really abolish our Foreign Ministry, I suggest it is time to "reform" it – much like JFK did with forming HEW (which was later reformed again into HHS and something else), or forming DoD out of Navy and War. We could add State, re-vamp the old VOA outfit, and add some other stuff to it – the essential thing is that it needs enough change to actually be able to change the "corporate culture" of the place.
of course what also needs to happen at the same time is to change the FS hiring policies. Today it is "the race perpetuating itself" as a freind of mine calls it, so there isn’t any institutional change (the same problem can be observed at DoD among a lot, but not all, of the GOFOs).
Dave Schuler:
December 19th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
In his recent commentary on President-Elect Obama’s foreign policy appointments in reference to Hillary Clinton former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote one of the funniest and, I suspect, truest things I’ve read all year:
State is a bureaucracy. Its members dont’ want “implementating capacity”. It’s stucturally incapable of functioning any other way. I doubt that anyone can change that let alone Hillary Clinton.
Lexington Green:
December 19th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
"…to reorganize the department…"
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That is particularly rich coming from Kissinger. Anyone attempting to "to reorganize the department" would disappear into the fog never to be seen again. He ought to know. He chose not to try it.
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She needs to assemble a coalition to impose the changes, of external experts and in Congress, and the President. If it were to become just the Secretary v. the Department, the outcome woould be forgone. She is smart enough not to die in a thankless war of attrition.
Seerov:
December 19th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
The most difficult challenge will be getting qualified people to want to make the Middle East or Africa their regional specialty. I think the African American community should be encouraged to take on much of the diplomatic work in Africa. African Americans should be guaranteed jobs in the State Dept or in other civilian agencies after they finish a Bachelors degree. The State Dept can work with the black colleges or other universities and offer to pay for tuition if the student agrees to make Africa their regional specialty.
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African Americans are sometimes reluctant to serve our country (this is especially true regarding the military). But if African Americans feel that they’re helping their fellow Africans, they may be more inclined to join the diplomatic corps. Africans in Africa may feel more comfortable working with African Americans as well? This program will also give African Americans a chance to get closer to their roots. IMO, one of the biggest issues affecting African Americans is their loss of ethnic identity due to forced migration. This program can potentially help African Americans feel more confident about their true origins, while benefiting American diplomatic interests.
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New networks will be created by African Americans in Africa. Human relationship networks are the key to attaining the connectivity that is needed for more investment/development in Africa. The African American community can make helping Africa into a major part of the African American experience. Traveling to African and helping their brothers and sisters can be similar to how Muslims view travailing to Mecca.
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At the same time, Americans serving in places like the Middle East or Africa need to be paid more and given better benefits. The US government also needs to improve living conditions for civilians working in these regions (and their dependants). Another idea is to give more retirement credit for people working in these places. Working in Europe for 20 years should be the same as someone working in Africa or the Mid East for 15 years.
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The US cannot remain the global hegemon using traditional methods of power politics. We need to use all our country’s characteristics to increase power in the world. In fact, our grand strategy should be to appear less aggressive and more multi-lateral, while at the same time, increasing our influence. Instead of the old Fordist hierarchy masculine power structure featuring Americans "on top"; we need to be developing a more "feminine" network-centric power configuration with American players occupying the most influential nodes.
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While carrying out this strategy, we need an information/propaganda strategy that features lots of American scholars and writers who write books talking about how “America isn’t on top anymore” or “the Asian century” or “the rise of everyone else” and while doing so, make it appear that this is a “good thing.” Make it sound like we’re truly concerned about “equality” and “justice.” President Obama is the perfect front man for this. While he stands up and uses his rhetorical magic on the zombie masses, men of action can take advantage of the current instability to further increase America power.
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But we must examine what assets America has. The use of African Americans to spread American influence in Africa is what I’m talking about. There’s no reason why China should have more influence in Africa when we have 40 million "Africans" in America. Some see African America ethnocentrism as a liability; I see it as an asset. African Americans many times feel like outsiders in America. The mission of spreading American influence in Africa can be a turning point in their history as Americans.
Lexington Green:
December 19th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Seerov, I think you may have a mistaken premise. From what I have read, "African Americans" from the USA are not perceived as "African" in Africa. They have no particular cultural commonality. Perhaps more important, most "African Americans" have a significant admixture of European ancestry, and are immediately perceived as being of "mixed" ancestry in Africa, which is a source of suspicion. I recall reading about Andrew Young trying to speak as an "African" to South African Blacks, and being treated with suspicion. To them he looked like a mixed race "colored" and hence basically a member of a favored group and a stooge for the Whites.
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Care should be exercised on this, and no assumptions should be made that what an American White person perceives as a "Black person" will somehow have a superior ability to communicate with and find common ground with a Black person from Africa.
Seerov:
December 20th, 2008 at 2:29 am
LG, you may be correct on how Africans perceive African Americans? But what about the rest of my post? I’m trying to figure out how we can get Americans to want to serve in Africa or the Middle East. African Americans (AA) do seem generally concerned about the fate of Africans. Many AAs even think that America "doesn’t care about Africa becuase they’re black" or becuase "they’re not white." This could give AAs the opportunity to help Africa, and, the opportunity to serve America too. I’ve spoken to AAs who’ve visited Africa and they usually describe it as a spiritual experience.
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Besides creating strengthening and spreading networks in Africa for America interests, this may be something that the whole African Amer9ican community can get behind. This is important as it will give African Americans a sense of accomplishment and duty that many AAs don’t seem to feel in this country. They can work to better Africa while bettering America. It is critical that AAs start to feel more "American" becuase this country is experiencing demographic transition and the potential for ethnic conflict is increasing.
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So this plan has several benefits. 1) It will spread American influence in Africa; 2) Give the African American community a critical "project" to undertake; 3) Help Africa; 4) Increase man power in the diplomatic corps; 5) Give the African America community a major role in the American power structure, similar to the Scots Irish in the US military. This is important as it will give demogauges on the left less fodder as this country transitions demographically.
Lexington Green:
December 20th, 2008 at 2:42 am
Seerov, other than that detail, I see nothing I disagree with.
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So, we are in agreement, the whole rest of the world now has to catch up with us!
Seerov:
December 20th, 2008 at 7:40 am
So, we are in agreement, the whole rest of the world now has to catch up with us! (Lex Green)
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How long do you think we’ll have to wait?
Lexington Green:
December 20th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Until, as the song goes, The Twelfth of Never.
Fixing the State Department « Fabius Maximus:
December 22nd, 2008 at 12:02 am
[…] a typically excellent post up about one of the major challenges in American geopolitics: “Hillary Should Dare to Break State in Order to Save It“, 18 December 2008 — Excerpt: There many things wrong with the State Department as an […]
T. Greer:
December 23rd, 2008 at 2:21 am
I am surprised you do not mention the problem of political appointees. On average one third of ambassador-level appointments are of this sort; one half of Mr. Bush’s picks were such. Any "old hand" system is next to useless if the men and women directing the regional specialists have no experience with diplomacy or the region itself.~T. Greer, directing you to <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/12145.html>a Politico piece</a> with a similar theme.
T. Greer:
December 23rd, 2008 at 2:22 am
Oops. Feel free to delete my extra posts.
Stefan Saal:
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:23 am
Gates made that speech in November 2007, more than a year ago; and Rice had been asking for the same thing two years before that. But Bush, the decider….oh, never mind…
It stands to reason; you will see the new administration take up this idea, slowly during the first two years, and then ramping up much more rapidly after that, having as many as 10,000 USAID types by 2012.
Missions will be along the lines Gates said: "…economic development, institution-building and the rule of law, promoting internal reconciliation, good governance, providing basic services to the people, training and equipping indigenous military and police forces, strategic communications…"
Methods will be along the lines Armstrong wrote:"…telling the truth, explaining the motives of the United States, bolstering morale and extending hope home and abroad, giving a true and convincing picture of American life, methods and ideals, combating misrepresentation and distortions…"
You may also see a new breed of foreign service officer who is less interested in hanging around the American club and more interested in deep engagement with foreigners in foreign lands. With any luck, America will also begin having a much more robust cultural exchange with these foreign lands.
Peter:
December 26th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
The one thing that I think works in HRC’s favor is her standing with the legislative branch, as a sitting Senator moving to State. Couple that with the selection of Lew as the second Deputy Secretary and you have two people capable of the inside-baseball necessary in Washington to get any serious reform done.
Despite all the focus on the Executive Branch and plans for reform, its worth remembering that the reason much of this never happens is that it needs to pass through Congress. Clinton can’t re-org the department on her own, she will eventually need legislation and appropriations to make it happen. This seems to be a wider theme of many of Obama’s appointments, picking people with an idea toward moving legislation to enact an agenda. Emmanual, Clinton, Daschle, etc, all fit this bill.
Any time you see such dysfunction in government, remember Congress is partially to blame. Its not the "Broken Branch" for nothing…..
zen:
December 27th, 2008 at 5:59 am
Hi Dr. Peter,
Agreed. Good point. Sort of a smaller scale LBJ move.
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And she can also throw in a sizable network of Democratic pols, fundraisers and powerbrokers with ties to the Clintons who may not be members of Congress themselves but can influence those who are. A person who can leverage many networks toward a common goals like a conductor of an orchestra, without playing an instrument they help make the music.
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