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by Raymond F. Smith*

The Context

A country’s political leadership establishes its foreign policy goals, and its diplomatic service works to achieve them.  Ideally, a country’s fundamental foreign policy goals should be so clear and compelling that they transcend specific administrations and provide enduring guidelines for carrying out the work of diplomacy.  Previous post-Cold War administrations have made half-hearted, but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to do this.  The new administration may want to consider these three strategic objectives:  1) create a more stable international system; 2) avoid an alliance between China and Russia; 3) decrease the likelihood of a nuclear war.  These objectives are clear, compelling, and enduring.  The benefits of any system adhere disproportionately to those at the top of the system.  Since we are at the top of the current international system, no one has a greater interest in its stability than we do.  An alliance between the other nuclear superpower and the other economic superpower would represent a clear and present danger to our preeminence.  And in all likelihood, we’d all be dead after a major nuclear war.

A diplomacy aimed at achieving these objectives should include: 1) prioritizing US interests; 2) talking less and listening more; and 3) leading by example.

Prioritize US Interests

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has repeatedly conflated its national interests with those of its friends, allies, and putative allies.  This needs to stop.  The two primary examples of this that the new administration will have to deal with are the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East.  We are in danger of having our fundamental interests hijacked and replaced by those of countries whose own interests, while perfectly understandable, are local and parochial, and not consonant with fundamental US interests.

Israel has succeeded in neutering or neutralizing all of the Middle Eastern states that could represent a serious military threat, with the exception of Iran.  (Its current military campaign in Syria is aimed at ensuring that Syria remains neutered.)  Israel considers the physical destruction of the Iranian threat and/or the replacement of the current regime with one that is compliant a vital interest.  Achieving that interest would be best served by leading or enticing the United States into a war with Iran.  This is not a case where US and Israeli interests coincide.

The nature of the regime in Iran does not threaten American vital interests.  Israel fears Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons as an existential threat, but its preferred method of eliminating that threat—US participation in a war against Iran—also does not serve US interests.  It would require a massive commitment of US personnel and military and economic resources without any assurance that the long-term outcome would be any better than the disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  We should pursue negotiations with Iran that solidify its non-nuclear status, allow it sufficient participation in the international economic system to incentivize it to turn its attentions inward, and allow its people to sort out how they want to be governed without outside interference.  Israel has been quite clear that it will pursue its own national interests even when they differ from those of the United States, as they do in this case.  We should be equally clear in pursuing our interests when they differ from those of Israel.

Ukraine’s only realistic chance of attaining its fundamental objectives—recovering all of its occupied territories and removing Russia as a threat to its security—is for the United States to go to war with Russia, or at least to be prepared to go to war with Russia.  The types of armaments it seeks and the ways in which it wishes to use them must be seen in that light, as does its desire for NATO membership.  Ukraine’s ultimate geopolitical orientation will have no effect on fundamental US objectives.  Its membership in NATO would be detrimental to them.  No vital US interest is involved in the extent of its national borders.  To further fundamental US interests, US diplomacy should be aimed at achieving a geopolitically neutral Ukraine, militarily capable of defending itself, with productive economic ties with both Western Europe and Russia, and internationally negotiated and recognized borders.

Talk Less, Listen More

It may seem paradoxical, but is nonetheless true, that in diplomatic practice the US can in most cases best achieve its objectives by talking less and listening more.  The United States has been a superpower since 1945 and one of the major powers for decades before that.  There are few now alive who can remember an era in which the US was not the dominant world power, or at least one of the two dominant world powers.  We have lived since 1945 in an international system shaped primarily by US values, the so-called “rules-based international order.”  For several generations of Americans, this has been the natural order of things.  We believed that we had realized Abraham Lincoln’s description of us as the “last, best hope of earth.”  The system we created might still be perfected, but it already in at least broad outlines marked the end of history.  Our global role and responsibilities made us, in the words of Secretary of State Madeline Albright, the “indispensable nation”.

All of this is quite ego-inflating and has produced an approach to international affairs in which, to put it plainly, we talk too much and do not listen enough.  Diplomatic posts abroad have as a primary purpose advancing US interests as those interests are articulated by elected national officials.  At the same time, their location, contacts, and local knowledge give them a unique opportunity to gather and transmit information and interpretation about how other countries view their interests and how they are responding to US activities abroad.  Such information should be a vital element in the policy-making process because the success of US policies often depends upon how they are received abroad.

Too often, there is actual or perceived pressure on US diplomats abroad to temper their reporting to conform to policy preferences in Washington.  This is short-sighted.  It is not that our diplomatic posts abroad have a better understanding of US interests than the country’s political leadership.  It is simply that they have a unique perspective that can best be of use to policymakers in unvarnished form.  Perhaps the most prescient example of this in contemporary diplomacy is former CIA Director William Burns’ now declassified email in 2008 (when he was ambassador to Russia) to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on how Russia would view NATO membership for Ukraine.  Then and later a consummate Washington player, he chose to express his views in a private email rather than a front-channel embassy cable because he knew they would not be popular with President Bush.  They were not popular, but they were right.  It’s worth reiterating what he said:

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests…. (It is) hard to overstate the strategic consequences. 

It does not serve the interests of the United States, or of the administration in power, if the ambassador to Russia (or any ambassador) feels compelled to temper the form or content of his analysis of a major issue.  The next administration would serve its own interests as well as those of the country by staffing its diplomatic posts well, encouraging them to report frankly, giving careful attention to what they learn, and shaping its foreign policy initiatives accordingly.

Lead by Example

Many in the foreign policy establishment contend that the US must choose between isolationism and defending the “rules-based international order.”  This is both a false dichotomy and a mischaracterization of US policy since the end of the Cold War, which is more accurately described as interventionist than as a defense of anything.  Military interventions abroad have cost thousands of American lives and trillions of taxpayer dollars while leaving the countries affected in tatters and usually harming fundamental US interests rather than advancing them.  There is an alternative approach, which some have called strategic restraint, but I prefer to think of as reverting to the historic American norm of leading by example.  Another foreign policy commentator has called it transitioning “from crusader back to exemplar”.

Common to these approaches is a more rigorous definition of US vital interests abroad—those which must if necessary be defended by military force—and other interests including, frankly, the domestic and geopolitical orientation of most of the countries and regions where we now have a military presence.  For the latter countries, we should aim to be a pole of attraction by strengthening our core political institutions and ensuring our economic dynamism.  Decreasing our military footprint abroad, having a wide network of mutually beneficial trade relationships, and allowing the virtues of our economic and political system speak for themselves is a far cry from isolationism.  Rather, it recaptures the virtues of the primary tenets of US foreign policy for most of our country’s history while adapting them to the technological realties and political demands of the current century.End.

*The author, as editor of this journal, wishes to reiterate the journal’s policy that the views expressed in this article, as in all American Diplomacy articles, are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the journal’s staff, the American Diplomacy Board of Directors, or their partners.

 

Raymond Smith
Raymond Smith

Raymond Smith spent more than 30 years at the State Department, retiring from the Senior Foreign Service as a minister counselor and then serving as a senior advisor to the Department’s Nonproliferation and Disarmament Fund. He spent six years at the US embassy in Moscow, serving as political counselor from 1988-91, a period that included stints as acting deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires. He has a doctorate in international relations from Northwestern University and has authored two books, Negotiating with the Soviets and The Craft of Political Analysis for Diplomats, as well as numerous articles.

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