ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: EYELESS IN FOGGY BOTTOM

"The foreign policy gossip in Washington largely agrees on two points. First, US secretary of state Rex Tillerson will hit the one-year mark of his tenure and step down. Second, he has taken a wrecking ball to the state department, destroying morale and driving out talent.... Mr Tillerson seems impervious to this criticism. The standard explanation is that, as a former chief executive, he sees the state department as just another business that needs slimming and restructuring. Like any successful corporate leader, he is determined to “make his numbers”. Mr Tillerson has set forth those targets, presumably encouraged by the White House, in “seven ambitious proposals with investments that will generate a minimum deliverable of 10 per cent ($5bn) in efficiencies relative to current spending . . . over the next five years, with an aspirational general interest target of up to 20 per cent ($10bn)”. Again following the corporate model, he is offering buyouts to senior staff to encourage attrition. Mr Tillerson’s language and approach are hardly diplomatic. And if he is driving out an entire generation of talented young foreign service officers, the US may feel the effects on its ability to conduct global diplomacy for a decade at least. Ms Shackelford and many others point to examples where the US is simply throwing away global leadership opportunities because of a lack of direction and personnel.... Sacrificing influence at embassies and missions around the world may not be a price worth paying. Yet although it may be heresy to say so, what if the wrecking ball approach is the only way to bring the scale of change needed to the state department? Secretary after secretary has tried to reform a calcified bureaucracy. The foreign service has not changed substantially since the 1920s, when the diplomatic service merged with the consular service. When she was secretary of state, Hillary Clinton followed the example of the Pentagon’s quadrennial defence review with a similar one for diplomacy and development, which I helped lead. John Kerry led the second such review. But, like the Republicans’ tax bill, we could get things done by adding, but never subtracting. Major change was out of the question, often fought by outsiders who suddenly became insiders. A key reason not to appoint assistant secretaries, as Mr Tillerson is doing, is that any political appointees can only survive by standing up for his or her department. Sweeping reform, such as making it possible for individuals in the private and civic sectors to come in and out of the foreign service at multiple levels, requires congressional action. That may seem like swapping one large dysfunctional bureaucracy for another but, if Mr Tillerson breaks enough china, it is possible that Congress and a new administration will be able to work together to renovate and rebuild in a very different direction. The state department building, an enormous, bland edifice, is a relic of the 1950s. For all the talent and dedication of many employees, and notwithstanding the deep need to develop civilian rather than military solutions to global problems, the US approach to diplomacy is often similarly outdated. It may take a thick-skinned outsider like Mr Tillerson to begin the process of genuine change".

Anne-Marie Slaughter, "Rex Tillerson — wrecker or reformer of American diplomacy?" The Financial Times. 20 December 2017, in www.ft.com.

"Promise was that I Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver; Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves".

John Milton. Samson Agonistes. (1671).

There may be a certain amount of logic in what Mme. Slaughter, a former director of the policy planning staff at State Department states in her piece on the egregious Rexford Tillerson. What that logic is exactly I am not entirely sure, unless it is something akin to the idea that by in effect destroying the State Department from within, Tillerson and his employer, President Trump, are engaged in some type of Schumpeter-like exercise in 'creative destruction'. Of course the concept itself, and the two individuals who are allegedly engaged in it, answers (in the negative of course), the feasibility of the idea. It is a nonsense. Absolute unadulterated nonsense. Mr. Tillerson is in the context diplomacy, a lightweight (at best) and a supreme incompetent (at worse). A/K/A a gentler version of President Trump. Given these demonstrable facts, the idea that by destroying the State Department, Tillerson, et. al., are creating the possibility for 'genuine change' is simply false. Unless of course by the mot 'change', Mme. Slaughter is referring to the type of 'genuine change', that say Pompeii could have been said to have undergone when Vesuvius erupted in Anno Domini 79. The fact of the matter is that the type of genuine change Mme. Slaughter advocates for the State Department has been: a) on the table for sixty-years; b) shows little evidence that it would improve the Department's performance. The idea that 'individuals in the private and civic sectors to come in and out of the foreign service at multiple levels', sounds on first hearing a good one. It fits within an American tradition of disparaging bureaucracy and experts, for something akin to 'Citizen-Ambassadors' and diplomats. Of course in reality and as history of the State Department in the past seventy-years has shown, it is precisely the inherited traditions and frame of mind (bureaucracy) and long-term accumulated knowledge and experience of the individuals who are running it (experts) which have always been the State Department's greatest virtues. Indeed the virtues of any large scale governmental organization. Indeed, insofar as the State Department has been much more prone to be infiltrated and suborn by political appointees, many of them inexperienced (id. est., political appointees to the rank of Ambassadors), than its counterparts in the rest of the world, then the State Department has already undergone something approximating to what Mme. Slaughter advocates. And the results are in, and then do not reflect very well on Mme. Slaughters idea. Ask almost any American embassy staff with a political appointee as Ambassador. Quod erat demonstrandum