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?

Further Reading

Colum Lynch, Robbie Gramer, "State Department Reorganization Eliminates Climate, Muslim and Syria Envoys." Foreign Policy, August 29, 2017, Accessed August 29, 2017, http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/29/state-department-reorganization-eliminates-climate-muslim-and-syria-envoys/

Abel Lanzac, Christophe Blain, Quai d'Orsay, (Paris, France: Dargaud, 2013)

Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890-1945, (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1982).

Charles W. King

One of the major concepts in modern Political Science is that of credibility. For a threat to be credible the leaders and policy-makers of foreign powers must believe that the actor making the threat will follow through on it. Credible threats are what make policies of nuclear deterrence and collective defense effective. After World War Two the United States initially threatened a policy of nuclear retaliation for any Soviet aggression, but this was quickly undermined by American unwillingness to use nuclear weapons over the 1948 Soviet coup d’état in Czechoslovakia. The formation of NATO and establishment of Article 5 made American and European threats of retaliation for Soviet aggression more credible. The articulation that, “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” clarified how the US and its allies would respond to what kind of actions. Where previously it has been difficult for rivals and allies alike to predict the American response to Soviet actions, this clarification made US policy more predictable.

Predictability has a range of advantages in international affairs. In the 1980s the Soviet Union developed a system known as the “Dead Hand” or “Hand from the Grave” that would automatically launch a retaliatory strike against the United States if a nuclear weapon detonated in the Soviet Union, a doomsday device in every sense of the word. Contrary to Dr. Strangelove’s exclamation that, “the whole point of a doomsday device is lost if you keep it a secret!” The purpose of the “Dead Hand” system was not to deter American policy-makers, but Soviet ones. Knowing that the “Dead Hand” would automate a nuclear second strike if the Soviet Union was attacked, Soviet leaders would no longer be tempted launch a nuclear strike in response to a false alarm. The predictability of their own system made Soviet policy-makers confident in the credibility of their own threats of retaliation and enabled them to act more predictably towards American policies.

International diplomacy is underpinned by its predictability. Nations know that their diplomats and embassies are protected from molestation, and they know how and where to contact each other publically and privately. In the midst of war nations are able to contact each other directly or through intermediaries, which is essential to the successful resolution of conflicts. The United States does not have diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, however there is a longstanding policy of contact between the US and Iran through the Swiss Embassy in Iran. The United States’ “One China Policy” and the Shanghai Communiqué allow both the US and the People’s Republic of China to know what is and is not over the line, so that the can avoid crossing it or cross it if they so choose. Without knowing where that line is relations between the US and the PRC would be much more fraught.

Even Richard Nixon’s “Madman Theory” was an exercise not in unpredictability but in predictability. Nixon established that he was willing to respond to Soviet actions more aggressively; this would not have been effective if it was not predictable. Nixon was not unpredictable; rather he leveraged Soviet expectations from previous administrations to create new expectations that his administration believed to be advantageous.

Predictability makes cooperation with friendly nations and deterring rival nations easier. It is the foundation of credible deterrence and effective international trade agreements. The establishment of policies and patterns of behavior on the international state are something that policy-makers must engage with actively, knowing that predictability is advantageous and descalatory, and can be leveraged.