A Change of Culture at Foggy Bottom?
Via Austin Bay, the Washington Post reports that the State Department’s personnel system has gotten the memo that the Cold War is over, and that a new war has started:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that she will shift hundreds of Foreign Service positions from Europe and Washington to difficult assignments in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere as part of a broad restructuring of the diplomatic corps that she has dubbed “transformational diplomacy.”
The State Department’s culture of deployment and ideas about career advancement must alter now that the Cold War is over and the United States is battling transnational threats of terrorism, drug smuggling and disease, Rice said in a speech at Georgetown University.
Every big government agency that assigns people overseas stuggles with this; the Army is certainly no exception. People fight for the cushy assignments, and the people with the best professional reputations and personnel evaluations have the most bargaining power with the bureaucrats who hand out the assignments. That means that the most technically capable (if not the most open-minded or driven) people end up in the organization’s “soft” spots, where they’re arguably needed the least. To her credit, Ms. Rice understands that.
This part of her plan strikes me as especially innovate and daring, although potentially worrisome from a security perspective:
Under the plan outlined yesterday, Rice will expand the U.S. presence by encouraging the spread of new one-person diplomatic outposts, now located in a few cities such as Alexandria, Egypt, and Medan, Indonesia. “There are nearly 200 cities worldwide with over 1 million people in which the United States has no formal diplomatic presence,” Rice said. “This is where the action is today.”
The move is intended to bring U.S. diplomats — now often barricaded in fortified embassies — closer to the mood in the streets.
As part of the change in priorities, Rice announced that diplomats will not be promoted into the senior ranks unless they accept assignments in dangerous posts, gain expertise in at least two regions and are fluent in two foreign languages, citing Chinese, Urdu and Arabic as a few preferred examples.
“The greatest threats now emerge more within states than between them,” she said. “The fundamental character of regimes now matters more than the international distribution of power.”
In case you wondered, Nicholas Burns, the State Department’s number three and the rumored foe of those trying to talk about human rights in North Korea publicly (for fear of preventing Agreed Framework II, if my source is correct), speaks Arabic and has served in the Middle East.