Dr. Hwang, I’ll Need Ten Copies of Lavrenti Beria by Next Week
Via a reliable source — though it’s third-hand information — I’m told that William Stanton is still very much in the running to become the next de facto U.S. ambassador to Taiwan (head of the American Institute on Taiwan). Stanton’s recent comments about Laura Ling and Euna Lee (“stupid,” “a distraction from the bigger issues” — and this to a delegation of congressional staffers, no less) tell us about all we need to know about his suave diplomatic skills. He’s now going to a diplomatic post of extreme diplomatic sensitivity, where his words could conceivably invite disaster for the people of Taiwan, China, and the United States … and if you don’t see what the big deal is, then you’ve obviously forgotten the name April Glaspie.
On a related note, the experienced diplomat Joseph Nye appears to have been sidelined as ambassador to Japan in favor of John Roos, whose only apparent qualification for the job is that he’s a wealthy lawyer and generous Obama donor. Roos is also an unknown in Japan. It’s long been an American custom to reward generous campaign donors with ambassadorships to nations of relatively less global significance, but since when has Japan, the world’s second largest economy today, been one of those? And more fundamentally, in an age when the most “insignificant” nations are the most likely to be taken over by terrorists and pirates, isn’t it time for that custom to be retired?
Admittedly, I’m not completely sold on the idea that professional diplomats are necessarily better qualified than talented amateurs. Diplomacy, like journalism, is not an empirical science. Superficially, both disciplines seem to be little more than refined styles, either style can be learned, and either can be done quite badly by an experienced “professional” practitioner. Just look who we sent to Baghdad.
Yet we err gravely if we fail to look beyond style. Too many critics and practitioners of diplomacy have focused on it to the exclusion of more important qualifications of substance, such as the relatively cheap but not unimportant commodity called “subject matter knowledge,” and then the scarcer ones: ethical and intellectual honesty, good judgment, principle, analytical reasoning, creativity, critical thinking, and above all, negotiating skill. Shortly after writing the list in the previous sentence, I realized why I’ve become such a ferocious critic of our diplomatic corps: a good lawyer must also possess the very same qualities. We can take the analogy a step further and say that a diplomat is the “lawyer” who represents a country and its citizens in a foreign capital. And after a dozen years in practice, I’ve bluffed and cajoled my way through enough negotiations with other lawyers to spot our diplomats making some of the same mistakes as some of the more inept opponents I’ve faced in a courtroom, or across a conference table.
In which case, maybe John Roos is not inherently less qualified than a seasoned professional diplomat, provided he’s tough, principled, and has good judgment. The same analysis suggests that Bill Stanton will do poorly, even if no journalist or congressman ever speaks ill of him again. Given Roos’s apparent lack of previous interest in Japan and its international relations, the Senate will have an important responsibility to explore what he brings to the job. Watching the Senate blow its oversight responsibility when it confirmed Chris Hill without asking him a single intelligent question makes me pessimistic about that.
If there is a point to this post, it may be that there is no way to look at the state of our diplomatic corps today and not be depressed by the almost complete absence of minimal diplomatic competence. I do not believe that most of the diplomatic advocates who represent this country would last long in my profession. I’m starting to understand why politicians feel the periodic tendency to purge their bureaucracies.