Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Ode to Policy Wonks (reprise)



The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of my personal heroes, famously said that "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."  That's another way of stating the position argued a few months ago by Dylan Matthews in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post.  Matthews advocates investing in the kind of non-partisan research associated with the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service, and the Congressional Budget Office.  Lawmakers will always argue about the ends of public policy, Matthews concedes, but there shouldn't be so much confusion about the facts; we ought to have a better idea, for example, of which means are appropriate for the promotion of which ends. And about how much it's going to cost.

I'm hoping that the Summer 2013 Glenn Fellows will take a very close look at Matthews's piece as they think about possible policy paper topics for next semester.  And I'm hoping that they come away from the WAIP program with a nuanced idea of the "facts" and the extent to which they can be expected to inform public policy. 




Friday, April 19, 2013

Lessons from a Diplomatic Life: A Book Review



Marshall P. Adair, the author of the book under review here (Lessons from a Diplomatic Life, Lanham, MD: Rowman, Littlefield, 2013) is the scion of one of those splendid Mandarin families—the progeny of John and John Quincy Adams—who have played such a prominent part in the history of the U.S. foreign service. The son of a former U.S. Ambassador (Charles Wallace Adair) and grandson of a gentleman who participated in the drafting of the peace treaty that ended World War I (Hugh Dow Marshall), Marshall P. Adair retired as a Minister-Counselor in the Senior Foreign Service in 2007. Those of us in the Glenn School got to know him at an event that we co-sponsored with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Like most seasoned foreign service officers, Mr. Adair has interesting stories based on a string of exotic postings abroad (in chronological order: Paris, Lubumbashi, Taipei, Hong Kong, Beijing, Rangoon, Chengdu, and Tuzla). And he has worked with a few of the world’s most charismatic and colorful characters, including Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he befriended during his tour in Burma, and uber-diplomat Richard Holbrooke, with whom he worked in Bosnia. Of the lessons he learned in the foreign service, some are fairly mundane: for example, that there always will be tension between the experts (i.e., professional diplomats) and the amateurs (i.e., political appointees). Others are a little more nuanced (for example, that an embassy staffer cannot afford to be completely dependent on his or her official hosts, or the U.S. will have no credibility among opposition elements). Mr. Adair was reminded repeatedly that in recent decades the role of the Department of State in making U.S. foreign policy has been significantly diminished by the Almighty Department of Defense, which has perfected the art of ingesting the massive military-industrial budget, converting it to pork, then channeling it back to carefully selected Congressional districts.

In Lessons from a Diplomatic Life, Mr. Adair demonstrates the many advantages that foreign policy professionals have over the rest of us by virtue of their having a historical context in which to fit contemporary events. Consider the case of Tibet. Adair clearly is drawn to Buddhism, and so he admittedly is fascinated by “exotic and mysterious” Tibet; that is why he welcomed (as “a dream come true”) his posting to Chengdu, which is relatively close by in China. Thanks to that proximity, and a close study of the history of the region, his perspective on Tibet-China relations changed substantially during his time there. He discovered, somewhat to his surprise and chagrin, that there is some truth in China’s claim that prior to its intervention in the 1950s, Tibet, far from being the Shangri-La of romantic myth, was in many ways a feudal theocracy heavily dependent upon slave labor. He learned that Tibet, contrary to myth, was for many hundreds of years not a separate state but rather an integral “part of the Chinese empire.” He came to understand that China has good reason to regard Tibet as a potential threat. Finally, he learned to appreciate a painful irony: compared with the treatment of native Americans in the Western Hemisphere, China’s relationship with Tibetans and Tibetan culture could be considered “a model of respect and restraint.”

The nine chapters (plus preface and coda) of Lessons from a Diplomatic Life are free-standing in many ways, but there are a few themes that run throughout the book. One, already alluded to, is the pathetic status—in terms of budgetary and political clout—of the Department of State compared with the Department of Defense. Another, related to the first insofar as it is a function of draconian budget cuts, is the status of foreign language training in the U.S. foreign service. Americans in general are not good at foreign language acquisition, in part because we haven't had to be multilingual. But wholly inadequate resources exacerbate the problem for our foreign service. Take the case of Zaire: “Because most of us did not speak the indigenous languages or Kiswahili,” Adair writes of the embassy staff, “we were not able to communicate with about 80 percent of the population except in the most rudimentary fashion. Communicating with a country’s elite is insufficient.”

I’ll say. The problem is particularly acute in countries that have indigenous languages beyond the official national languages that are usually a vestige of colonialism. We have a very unimpressive record of training FSOs in indigenous languages, and our performance, according to Adair, is getting worse, not better. “Inadequate financial resources limit the number of teachers and classroom space. A shortage of Foreign Service positions makes it impossible to assign existing Foreign Service officers to more extensive language training.” It’s not a pretty picture.

Mr. Adair has written a most insightful account of his career as a third-generation diplomat, one that offers real insight into the changing status of spouses and children accompanying foreign service officers in the field. His anecdotes are informed by his own youthful experience as an embassy brat in Uruguay, Panama, and elsewhere. I was moved by his sensitive treatment of the often uncomfortable role that his wife, Ginger—a Taiwanese-American—was called upon to play during various tours of duty, particularly in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Chengdu. Adair introduces us to his son, Charles, and ruminates about the agonies and ecstasies of living abroad (and changing schools!) as a teenager.

Mr. Adair does an excellent job of demonstrating how the personnel policies of the U.S. Department of State often impacted his career. Rotational assignments, for example, require junior officers to float through the different parts of a U.S. embassy, where they will learn about cultural, political, economic, and consular affairs, in sequence, thereby becoming acquainted with the many dimensions of diplomatic work; he seems to think rotational assignments are a good thing, and I am inclined to agree. Hiring decisions, training opportunities, short-term details, performance evaluation, and the system of bidding on jobs are among the standard operating procedures (SOPs) that Human Relations administers, and that shape a working environment that any federal employee will recognize as profoundly bureaucratic—again, it’s a mixed bag.

Most impressively, Mr. Adair owns up to his own errors, whether of commission or omission. For example, he relates the story of a senior Defense Department official who asks him in Bosnia about lessons learned that could perhaps be applied to Iraq in the aftermath of a war waged in the name of regime change. Based on his experience working with war criminals in Bosnia, Mr. Adair took the opportunity to argue in favor of “cleaning house”; after 2003, he wonders how much that conversation contributed to the forging of a campaign to purge the Iraqi government and military of Baathist party members, a policy that was “probably a huge mistake.” Readers who take public service seriously will sympathize with the author and value his unusually candid reflections on his work.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

The Strange Career of Pithole City (reprise)

It's week 13, which means that the Spring 2013 edition of the Washington Academic Internship Program is starting to wind down. I like to wrap things up by reading several public policy classics, including Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons," which tries to explain why fouling one's own nest is both unnatural and widespread.  This semester I'm asking the fellows to read a case study that I recently published aout the environmental degradation accompanying the world's first oil boom, which occurred in the 1860s not far from where I grew up--though it antedated me by a few years--in western Pennsylvania. There is a link to my essay, "Pithole City: Epitaph for a Boom Town," over on the right-hand side of this blog. And here is a link to a 7-minute summary of the astonishingly brief but intense history of Pithole City. The photo above is the view down Second Street today. Obviously, Pithole exists today mainly as an archaeological site; it could scarcely even be called a ghost town.


Monday, April 1, 2013

A Diplomat's Progress (reprise)


Last week the Spring 2013 class of Glenn Fellows read Samuel Huntington's famous Foreign Affairs article on "The Clash of Civilizations." As an introduction to the not-always-glamorous world of professional diplomacy, I have this week assigned a book called A Diplomat's Progress, written by Henry Precht, a retired foreign service officer. Mr. Precht was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Emory University. He joined the foreign service in 1961 and served in U.S. embassies in Italy, Mauritius, Iran, and Egypt. He was the Department of State’s Desk Officer for Iran during the revolution and hostage crisis when the Shah was overthrown, and he was deputy ambassador in Cairo when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. His nomination by President Jimmy Carter to the post of U.S. ambassador to Mauritania was blocked by Senator Jesse Helms, who blamed him for "losing Iran."

After leaving the foreign service, Mr. Precht served as president of the World Affairs Council in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also taught at Case Western Reserve University. A few years ago, he published A Diplomat’s Progress, a work of fiction consisting of a series of vignettes about a State Department official named Harry Prentice. It is an engaging work that reveals, as one reviewer has put it, the “grittier side of embassy life with a wry sense of humor and a bit of an edge.” To the extent that the work is autobiographical, A Diplomat’s Progress is rather remarkable.

For one thing, the “grittier” aspects of diplomacy are portrayed warts and all. In one of the vignettes, the young Harry Prentice and his wife attend a dinner party at the home of the foreign minister of Mauritius, during which the lecherous host assaults the drunken daughter of the Japanese ambassador. In a vignette set in Egypt, the protagonist must tend to a dead body and a suitcase full of drug money. In “Caviar and Kurds,” set in Iran, Prentice unwittingly leads the Shah’s secret police to an underground freedom fighter named Hassan, whom Prentice finds hanging from a lamppost the next morning. In this account of embassy life, it seems that no good deed goes unpunished.

Most remarkable as an autobiography—and surely it must be regarded as partly that, in spite of the veneer of fiction—is the book’s unflattering portrait of its protagonist. Throughout A Diplomat’s Progress, Harry Prentice’s diplomatic efforts are undone by his unusual combination of naivete and cynicism. Typically, the reader is given a glimpse of a career diplomat preoccupied, not with the national interest, as one might suppose, but rather, with his own career advancement. At one point, for instance, Prentice seems to have been the unwitting accomplice of a Palestinian terrorist. What does he do about it? He gets up in the middle of the night to compose a somewhat Bardachian “balance sheet of possible courses of action.” There appear to be two:

First, the natural inclination of every Foreign Service Officer: Do nothing. Wait on events and react as necessary and as seems prudent at the time. . . . Alternatively, I could report my suspicions to the police. Playing it straight and admitting wrong might be partially redeeming. The key word was “partially.” The embassy surely would be informed and handle my future as if it had no value. The same with the Israeli authorities. I had to face it: Only I really cared about my future, not any American or Israeli career-building bureaucrat.
During his posting to Cairo, Prentice is asked to interview a Sheikh who might have been in a position to influence the extremists holding a number of American hostages in Beirut. Prentice’s efforts fail. “But never mind,” seems to sum up his reaction. “I could only hope that someone—the ambassador or an unknown friend in the department—would make an excellent report of my performance for my file.” The adventure, he concludes, “just might be a turning point—upward—in my career.” On the basis of the evidence provided by the author, the judgment handed down by Prentice’s first wife seems just: He has “a pretty good soul, even though sometime it seems quite lost in the bureaucratic maze.”

May 13, 2012 update: Jonathan Yardley reviews another diplomatic memoir, this one published posthumously, the work of one of the veteran foreign service officers accused during the McCarthy era of having "lost" China. It's worth a read.

August 3, 2012 update: The current issue of The New York Review of Books has a very fine review by Roger Cohen of a book by Christopher de Bellaigue about Muhammad Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran who was ousted by an Anglo-American coup in 1953. The review features a cameo appearance by Ataturk and a number of references to U.S. diplomatic snafus that will call to mind some of the stories from Henry Precht's A Diplomat's Progress about the role of Big Oil in Middle Eastern politics and of SAVAK in Shah Reza Pahlavi's Iran.

November 13, 2012 update:  According to Yahoo News, Mossad tried to assassinate Saddam Hussein with an exploding book.

April 1, 2013 update: And here's another memoir of a retired foreign service officer that I'm considering adopting for next semester.