Editor's Note: This article was originally published on Oct. 13, 2009, as part of the WPR feature "Reinventing Diplomacy." It is made available here for free, as part of a promotion that ends Jan. 5. To experience more of WPR's subscription service, sign up for a 30-day free trial.
Power and Influence in a World of Insecurity
With the dismal record of the Bush administration fresh in mind, assessing the first nine months of the Obama administration's international relations performance evokes a mixture of admiration and trepidation. The substantive signals have been important, but arguably less so than the tone and the carefully choreographed style, which seem painstakingly designed to offer something for everyone. Special envoys have been appointed, thorny issues broached, executive orders signed and new directions mooted. Guantanamo Bay is closing, Europe is opening, missile defense is being reprofiled and overtures have been made to Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and Indonesia. Even if Fox has not quite toned down, the neocons have packed up, torture is out, and negotiation is in.
And in its Oct. 9 statement awarding the Peace Prize to President Barack Obama, the Nobel Commmittee cites the word "diplomacy" three times in four paragraphs.
Statecraft, then, is on a roll. Right?
Well . . . maybe.
In recent years, America's unilateral exercise of hard, which is to say, mainly military, power, supported by controversial doctrines such as pre-emptive defense, has not only exacted a great human and financial toll, but it has come at considerable expense in terms of Brand USA's global appeal. In part as a result, American soft power, which is nourished by national image and reputation and is fueled by the attraction generated by popular perceptions of the U.S., has been damaged.
The good news is that this has created a huge opportunity for gains on the upside, and public opinion research now suggests that a recovery is underway. The bad news is that America's soft power instruments, which will have to perform effectively if lost ground is to be fully regained, need a great deal of work.
Diplomacy is at the front of that queue.
What, though, is to be done? Smart power -- the putative blend of hard and soft power advocated by Harvard professor Joseph Nye -- has been mentioned by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joseph Biden, and other senior administration officials as one possible solution. At first blush, it looks not just eminently sensible, but in fact an overdue restyling of something that major players on the international stage have long engaged in: a combination of dangling carrots and brandishing sticks.
For this familiar formula to deliver as advertised, though, it will have to rely -- to varying extents but almost always -- upon diplomacy, which weighs in heavily on the soft power side of the equation. Yet diplomacy has in recent years been marginalized and allowed to atrophy. As conceived, resourced and practiced at present, it does not seem up to the challenge.
The current state of diplomacy is all the more unfortunate, because in principle at least, the business case in its favor is strong. Defense departments and military organizations exist, in the first instance, for the purpose of exerting power. Foreign ministries and the diplomatic service, on the other hand, are designed mainly to exercise influence through persuasion. Skilfully conducted, diplomacy represents the promise of a peaceful way forward when it comes to resolving complex differences and addressing even the most vexing of interstate and transnational problems. Especially in economic and humanitarian terms, diplomacy is subtle, versatile and highly cost-effective in comparison to the use of organized violence.
Attaining its full potential, however, will require a Revolution in Diplomatic Affairs, and not just in the United States. Diplomacy is in trouble almost everywhere, and its main institutions need reconstruction from the ground up. Moreover, for such a revolution to succeed, a major rethinking of international relations will be essential. In the age of globalization, if long-term, human-centered development has in large part become the basis of sustainable security, then diplomacy must displace defense at the center of international policy.
This will entail returning to foreign ministries the catalytic role in international policy development and implementation now played by departments of defense, and inserting diplomats, rather than soldiers, into the roiling interstices which connect development and security, or, more commonly, underdevelopment and insecurity.
In the elemental quest to meet basic human needs by providing economic opportunities, good governance, social justice and political progress, bombs, guns and expeditionary interventions just won't work.
You can't garrison against global warming.
Getting from where governments are to where they need to be will not be easy. But unless diplomacy is restored to its rightful place, the smart power doctrine will be incapable of delivering as advertised.
Placing Diplomacy in Rehab
Diplomacy is the tool of choice for anyone with a penchant for negotiation and compromise, and a general preference for talking over fighting and dialogue over diktat. But it is currently facing a crisis of relevance and effectiveness. A rising tide of violence, inequality, and unaddressed threats provides powerful testament not only to the socialization of globalization's costs and the privatization of its benefits, but to the abject failure of diplomacy to engage remedially.
Today, diplomacy remains the orphan of international relations, rarely discussed and widely misunderstood, even by experts and diplomats themselves. In the public mind, diplomacy has never really recovered from the legacy of Chamberlain in Munich, when it came to be associated with weakness and appeasement.
But in addition to an unfortunate image problem -- of spoiled ditherers, lost somewhere between alcohol and protocol in a haze of irrelevance -- diplomacy is suffering from a very real substance problem, related mainly to the inability of diplomatic practices, practitioners and institutions to change with the times. As a result, the world is facing a double diplomatic deficit: an increasing demand for, but reduced supply of diplomatic solutions to widespread problems of conflict and suffering; and a host of serious shortcomings which afflict foreign ministries and foreign services globally.
The prospect of rehabilitating diplomacy has been complicated by the wholesale militarization of international policy, a psychological carry-over from the Cold War to the Long War that is now firmly lodged in place. It finds expression in the persistence of a binary, Manichean worldview and an associated tendency to respond to supposedly universal and undifferentiated threats -- then communism, now terrorism -- with armed force. Not only is this black-and-white model of little use when confronted with grey ambiguities and constantly shifting circumstances, it leaves little scope for the peaceful resolution of differences.
While the focus of this discussion is on the diplomatic rather than defense dimension of smart power, the two are by no means disconnected. The military's already significant domestic political clout has been reinforced across government by personal ambitions, career interests, organizational mandates and budgetary allocations that grew out of the Cold War and depend now on the continuation of the Long War. Such a concentrated combination of financial and human resources results in all kinds of further international policy distortions -- for instance, tasking the military with strategic communications, agrarian reform or infrastructure reconstruction. This is somewhat akin to asking an aid worker to direct an air strike, or a diplomat to run a field hospital.
However big and asset-rich relative to the competition, the military is simply the wrong department for most functions not directly related to war-fighting, which can be performed more efficiently by civilians.
Unless the enormous inertia supporting the status quo can somehow be broken, diplomacy will inevitably be cast in a minor, supporting role. Statesmen will continue to play second fiddle to generals and admirals, and calls for real change will be met with a resounding chorus of, "No, you can't."
On the other hand, just dusting diplomacy off or changing the wrapping won't suffice. Traditional diplomacy is rigid, hierarchic, and formulaic. Its practices are deeply entrenched, and turn on conventions, some formally codified, others embedded in bureaucratic culture.
Getting to the Revolution in Diplomatic Affairs will depend not on conventions, but on the embrace of the unconventional, and will require going beyond the ritual motions of conducting relations between states. If it is to be restored, diplomacy will have to be reframed, repositioned, and, in essential respects, re-invented. That will mean taking diplomacy public, to be sure, but also taking it to the streets . . . and not just overseas.
Diplomacy needs desperately to demonstrate its relevance domestically. In the erstwhile global village, which today looks like an island patchwork of gated, heavily guarded communities surrounded by an angry sea of seething shantytowns, nothing less will do.
Is Smart Power Really so Smart?
Refurbishing diplomacy may be job one for U.S. international policy, but it is also only one job among many. An assessment of whether diplomacy should be situated within the discourse of power -- whether soft, hard, or smart -- rather than influence is also needed. Because as soon as diplomacy, and especially public diplomacy (PD), is framed primarily in the context of power, it immediately becomes instrumental, a tool to be used in order to have your way with others, rather than as a platform for political communication, social interaction, and intercultural contact.
In an era of shared (in)security and persistent (under)development, two hallmarks of the globalization age, the fundamental threats and challenges to world order -- and human survival -- are less military in nature than they are rooted in science and driven by technology: climate change, pandemic disease, and environmental collapse, among others. With the military far and away its preponderant component, smart power does not seem the most apt instrument with which to address these global issues.
For the same reason, neither is it well-positioned to promote transparent public administration, respect for human rights or grass-roots democracy, or to help develop the kinds of functioning markets which generate employment, fund government services and facilitate participation in the wealth-creating side of globalization.
Smart power, all told, is not the tool of choice with which to pursue a grand strategy of comprehensive international development as the basis of the new security.
Enter Guerrilla Diplomacy
The pursuit of influence through the practice of a highly leveraged, transformational form of public diplomacy -- what I dubbed Guerrilla Diplomacy in a recently published book of the same title -- could be a less costly, more practical alternative. George Washington University's Bruce Gregory has described this approach as "PD on steroids," and it starts with recognizing the need to build a better diplomat.
Next page: Profile of a guerrilla diplomat . . .
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