Summary: Zenpundit writes about one of the major geopolitical problem facing America. His analysis, like mine and others, misses the key point — the key challenge. Describing the problem is easy; describing the solution is difficult.
Zenpundit has 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 institution and with the frankly insular and anachronistic cultural worldview that it tends to inculcate but starving State of operational funds and personnel – the historic reflex of the U.S. Congress – is not the road improvement. While money for “more of the same” is not an acceptable answer, demanding that diplomatic miracles be performed by the seat of the pants on a shoestring budget is a position worthy of a village idiot.
Now is the time for a strategic rebuilding of the State Department, as well as the Foreign Service, as the linchpin in a new national security system conceived in terms of interagency jointness, a Goldwater-Nichols Act on steroids. The old State Department structure was reformed by Charles Evans Hughes, who as Secretary of State in the early 1920’s found that his staff was too small and procedures too antiquated, to adequately cope with the modern world. So Huges rebuilt it, creating State’s specialization and mission structure that yielded a constellation of statesmen and grand strategists a generation later, including Dean Acheson and George Kennan, when America and the world needed their vision most. Great leaders either found new systems or they are the ultimate product of them.
Secretary Hughes did a superb job but America can do better than our great-grandfather’s State Department.
Senator Clinton, President-elect Obama and the next Congress should move boldly and retire the State Department as it has been the way Hughes waved goodbye to the quaint and time honored practices of the 19th century. We need not a half-step but a leap:
I strongly and fully agree, and recommend reading his post in full (and the links provided). I wrote some parallel thoughts about this in Thoughts on fixing America’s national security apparatus (11 August 2008). An excerpt follows, with a conclusion explaining why analysis like this misses the key point.
We must reform the massive “arms” of our foreign policy machinery, the Departments of Defense (DoD) and State (DoS), so they can successfully operate in a 4GW world. Otherwise we’ll be in effect running sail-powered navies in the Age of Steam. The DNIsite has many articles detailing the crippling managerial, financial, and operational flaws of the US DoD. This is relatively well understood.
DoS is in worse shape, perhaps the weakest of our national security agencies – and almost ignored by 4GW experts (who focus on DoD and the intelligence agencies). Crippled since the 1950’s “who lost China” blame game and the following McCarthy-era witch-hunts, reform of the State Department might be the most difficult task on the 4GW “To Do” List.
It’s no secret. Journalists have long described how the weakness of State vs. Defense has influenced the course of the War. Note this incisive analysis:
Dealing with the military, the President learned, was an awesome thing. The failure of their estimates along the way, point by point, meant nothing. It did not follow, as one might expect, that their credibility was diminished and that there was now less pressure from them, but the reverse. … Once activated they would soon dominate the play. Their power with the Hill and with journalists, their stronger hold on patriotic-machismo arguments (in decision making they proposed the manhood positions, their opponents the softer, sissy, positions), their particular certitude, make them far more power players then those raising doubts.
…These years show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President needed all the help he possibly could get, not the least a powerful Secretary of State.
…{What we have instead is} a forceful, determined, hard-working, intelligent man who was in charge of the political aspects of American policy, and he would have made a very great Secretary of Defense, it was his natural constituency.
This nicely describes Secretary of State Colin Powell’s role in the Iraq War. Sadly for America, it was written about Secretary Rusk’s role in the Vietnam War, an excerpt from The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam. Our inability to fix long-known problems is a major symptom of our government’s structural weakness.
Seeing today’s State Department, it’s difficult to recall that it was long considered the senior department of the Executive Branch (ref the Secretary of State’s status as #4 in the succession to the Presidency). Appropriately so, as State should be the center wheel of our geo-political machinery.
- State is everywhere on the front lines, the nerve ends of our Government’s international sensory systems.
- Negotiations with State and non-State actors are the routine between (hopefully infrequent) armed conflicts, and that is largely State’s role.
State is the natural counter-weight to DoD. In a parochial society such as ours the State Department staff should be those best able to understand the outside world in any fullness, in a multidimensional fashion. It has experts with a depth of foreign experience unmatched by other Government agencies – unlike the academics in the CIA or the military professionals in DoD.
Deep knowledge of foreign cultures and their leaders is necessary for success in a multi-polar world. We’ll need people like Robert Clive and Sir Richard Burton, and State is where they’re most likely to find a home in our bureaucracy. But not, of course, in today’s State Department. Nor anywhere in the US Government apparatus, which often rejects people with great initiative and expertise as surely as your body rejects foreign bacilli.
That’s the news; here is the bad news
My analaysis from August and Zenpundit’s today, plus those he link to are all — in a sense — irrelevant. They ignore the two key aspects of the problem.
First: American history offers no precedent for institutional changes of this magnitude. The recent re-organization of the Homeland Security agencies – a much smaller project – does not provide grounds for optimism. There might be no precedents for reform of such large, entrenched organizations. Growing an organization, as Charles Hughes did for State, is far easier.
Second: there are good reasons that American Presidents do not attempt institutional reform on a large scale.
- There are usually operational priorities.
- There is seldom a powerful “constituency” for reform.
- They consume vast amounts of political capital.
- They have a high risk of failure.
- They produce no visible results that help win the next elections in 2, 4, or 6 years.
- Benefits go to the next Administration, who inherits the renewed institution.
Stating the need for reform is the easy part. It has been done well and repeatedly for the Defense Department over several generations — to no effect. Describing how to effect reform is the challenge.
Afterword
If you are new to this site, please glance at the archives below. You may find answers to your questions in these.
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For more information from the FM site
To read other articles about these things, see the FM reference page on the right side menu bar. Of esp relevance to this topic:
- Posts about America’s national defence appartatus
- Posts about Military and strategic theory (note the section about “grand strategy)
Posts on the FM site about the State Department:
- Truly cracked advice to the State Department, receiving wide applause, 13 February 2008
- Ready, Aim, “foreign policy” away, 7 March 2008
- Thoughts on fixing America’s national security apparatus, 11 August 2008
