OxBlog

Wednesday, April 09, 2003

# Posted 5:41 PM by Patrick Belton  

BELOW THE BELT(ON): Have you ever noticed the world is full of pundits who put their own words in other peoples' mouths and then criticize them? Calpundit's Kevin Drum just helpfully provided us with another sterling example of this. Ordinarily one of the better and more enjoyable liberal members of the blogosphere (together with a personal favorite, the well written and always entertaining Hauser Report), Kevin very forgivably slipped up the other day and, after rather airily advising his readers "don't worry about the substance" or context of what I'd actually written (which, for the record, was to praise US Ambassador Sandy Vershbow as "one of the few gems of the Foreign Service"), he then rather groundlessly put words in my mouth and incorrectly accused me of being "contemptuous of government agencies and government employees." First of all, since I personally make a habit of slipping-up most days - fairly continuously, actually - I really don't mind at all. Second, though, since Kevin was nice enough to express interest in my views of the U.S. Foreign Service, I thought I might as well develop them in further detail. Gratuitous misreadings of my post notwithstanding, I have no negative views of "government agencies and government employees" in the abstract, although having worked in the State Department and agonized over whether to enter the Foreign Service, I do have some sociological comments about that particular service and things it does well, as well as things it does badly.

Between Yale and Oxford I spent a summer working at the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels, and I passed several months of my first year at Oxford in deciding whether or not to accept a position I'd been offered in the Foreign Service as a political officer. Based on my first-hand experiences, my personal reflections on the Foreign Service are these. The people it attracts are generally competent, often even attractive in their breadth of interests and adventurousness. However, as an institution it tends to socialize its youthful, talented members toward (to generously paraphrase Kennan, its most noted alumnus) irony wrapped in sarcasm and shrouded in bitterness; depreciation of the experience or insights of individuals outside that particular bureaucracy; and a disposition toward anecdotal rather than analytical thought, characterized by a reliance on the argument from "well, I was there," which is somewhat analogous to the 19th century Catholic Church's overindulgence of the argument from authority.

My impression, at least, is that many of these norms represent a social response to the experience of stultifying in the middle levels of a large bureaucracy - if joining they expected their profession to confer them status and the ability to provide intellectual contributions to the process of diplomacy, they then however encounter work which is anonymous, routinized, and more bureaucratic than diplomatic. These socialization pressures are certainly very strong, and the only people who seem to escape them are those who, by virtue of talent conjoined with luck, and perhaps connections of mentorship, rise quickly to the upper echelons of the service, and thus bypass the normative pressures of its middle levels - Toria Nuland, Thomas Pickering, and the aforementioned Vershbow being prime examples. Ambassador Pickering , a famously kind man, was nice enough to speak to me about my decision whether or not to join; it was clear that he approached all of his tasks at the junior and middle levels with an entrepreneurial disposition to make his work matter, however routinized or menial. Thus as a vice-consular officer he made sure to discover who in the society in which he was serving would make useful contacts for the embassy, and he ensured he would be the officer adjudicating their visa applications whenever they applied for visas; in this way, as a FS-03 he generated useful contacts for the embassy in the commercial and political elite of the nation in which he was serving. But the Pickerings, Vershbows, and Nulands rise up quickly through the stratosphere of the Foreign Service, leaving behind a cynical, ironic remnant of their A-100 classes who often gripe at everyone: the political appointees who occupy the top tier of the department's offices, the administrations whose naiveté they deride, and which ultimately exercise executive power, the non-diplomats (generally derided as kooks or fools) who dare to comment on the issues on which they work.

It was not always this way: these particular bureaucratic delicts are common to diplomatic and intelligence services (and to some extent officer corps) everywhere since the old boys' networks that had taken the places of aristocratic remnants in these professions (a transition which in the U.S. dates broadly to the Rogers Act of the 1920s) in turn yielded to anomic bureaucracy and impersonal, rule-based administrative structures in the 1970s. It differs among bureaucracies and nations: the British Diplomatic Service is still quite cohesive and relatively unbureaucratic, perhaps because it maintains a fast track and all sub-ministerial posts may be aspired to by career diplomats (as opposed to the U.S., where generally only one Under Secretary of State and several assistants and deputy assistants are drawn from the career ranks); within the United States, the CIA's directorate of operations, with its emphasis on mentorship and apprenticeship in the learning of tradecraft, remains closer to the old-boy than the bureaucratic model; and the strong normative commitments present in the officer corps give it a normative cohesion not present in civilian services. There are some things the Foreign Service does well: while officers are not trained or encouraged to think strategically rather than anecdotally, at the tactical level their work is generally quite competent. Some things it does not: personnel from the directorate of operations, for instance, are by the nature of their socialization and training much more open to useful information and perspectives coming from non-official channels than Foreign Service officers who are socialized only to really respect the opinions of the diplomatic caste. This creates noticeable blind spots. Their cynicism generally makes them less pleasant to deal with, and less ideal representatives of the country, than, say, the action-oriented gregarious officers of the DO or the touchingly loyal officers in uniform. There are of course always exceptions.

So that's my two paragraph anthropological dissection of the Foreign Service, and some of its strengths and pathologies. I'm happy to admit that portions of it may be gloriously wrong, but having been close to the subculture for extended periods of time it strikes me as generally accurate. But now more important activities call than the dissection of diplomats - most notably at the moment, dinner.
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