The Envoy and the Ambassador: The State Department in the 21st Century

Charles W. King

A letter from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to Senator Robert Corker (R-Tennessee), the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, published by Foreign Policy today outlines changes to 66 of the 70 current Special Envoy positions at the State Department. Organizational and personnel changes at Foggy Bottom are the subject of current headlines, for good reason, but reform to proliferation of special envoy positions may not be as detrimental to the Department as other new policies. It provides an opportunity to examine how the conduct of diplomatic relations has changed over the years.

Prior to World War One the United States’ Department of State owned five overseas properties. In the nineteenth century being an American ambassador or consul required independent sources of wealth, as they were responsible for both their own expenses and the salaries of their staffs. Consuls in particular were frequently American business-people trading abroad. They became representatives of the United States after establishing themselves in foreign centers of trade. In the nineteenth century the State Department followed Americans abroad, following missionaries as well as entrepreneurs. This system would begin to see reform after the assassination of President Garfield over a State Department posting. It was not until after World War Two that the State Department and the Foreign Service would become the extensive bureaucracy that we recognize today.

Communications is the other major factor in the history of the U.S. Foreign Service. American Ambassadors were empowered to act with a large degree of autonomy. Even after the first transatlantic telegraph cable was completed in 1858 the seventeen hour transmission time, and relative lack of security in early cables meant that the Foreign Service continued to need to act without detailed instruction from Washington. Nonetheless by the turn of the century, the diplomatic cable was one of the most rapid and secure methods of communication. A hundred years later its relative lethargy would be the object of scorn. The absurdity of reliance on diplomatic cables in the era of modern telecommunications is a recurring joke in Abel Lanzac’s Quai d’Orsay which recounts the months of lead up to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq from inside the French Foreign Ministry.

Modern transportation is another field where advances in technology may not have provided American diplomatic efforts with all the benefits possible. It is now possible to travel long distances in very short amounts of time. Six hours to cross the Atlantic, let alone how easy it is to travel quickly within Europe. Yet the State Department maintains individual Ambassadors for each European capital, with limited purviews. The ubiquity of air travel shows why Special Envoy positions have proliferated in the past four decades. Combined with modern communications it has become possible to select diplomats with expertise and dispatch them to travel between foreign capitals with a specific task. This raises questions about the effectiveness of the proposed reforms. Will the under-secretaries, assistant secretaries, and deputy assistant secretaries who are receiving the staff and budgets of the eliminated envoy positions be empowered to communicate and travel like the envoys were? Given the speed and security telecommunications is the independence of Foreign Service officials abroad receding? Is the importance of the United States’ Ambassadors abroad declining as Washington based officials have increased communications and access to their foreign counterparts?

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The Envoy and the Ambassador: The State Department in the 21st Century

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Charles W. King