By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Everyone who has represented the U.S. abroad knows what it’s like to be among fellow Americans who haven’t the foggiest notion of what the State Department does or, for that matter, what on earth diplomacy is good for. Julian Assange and Wikileaks may have lifted the veil. That's not entirely to the bad.
I experienced a powerful aha! moment a few years ago when I was touring the southeast quadrant of Turkey with a group of Americans I’d never met before we gathered in Istanbul. All members of the group were college grads. All held professional positions. But they knew nothing of how treaties are crafted, how win-win bargains are struck, how U.N. votes are solicited, how trade is facilitated, how—well, you name it. To them the State Department was an entity so mysterious as to be non-existent, which may be an argument for changing the Department’s name into something more informative in modern English. Anyone knows what a Ministry of Foreign Affairs does, but the U.S. has an oddly-named Department of State. State? How quaint.
My companions weren’t untraveled provincials with no foreign experience. They were comfortable in Turkey, which isn’t the UK, although it is pretty well-developed and highly organized. Even so, my new friends didn’t know that help would be available at a U.S. mission should they be mugged or robbed. Contrary to the assumptions behind certain virulent spam campaigns now emanating from Nigeria, an Amcit in desperate financial straits can negotiate a ticket home by contacting a U.S. Embassy or Consulate. As for an American who’s involved in a traffic accident, he or she won’t be road kill, if the American mission in that country can help it. (I could tell you some tales, amusing as well as god-awful, from my own experience in Lagos and Santa Domingo and Jakarta.)
The Wikileaks dump of diplomatic cables doesn’t deal with the State Department’s vital assistance to ordinary American citizens in trouble abroad. Illuminated in vivid detail are the (sorry Amcits!) core diplomatic functions that don’t attract much attention in the mass media. We’ve been exposed to the film Restropo, which showcased a poorly sited outpost in Afghanistan through a story that offers the classic dramatic intersection of battling and boredom. But what’s to film of long conversations over a table? The brand of bottled water offered? The flower arrangements around which carefully calibrated words will make their way? An eye brow that shoots up? Lips that get pressed together? Worse, while a firefight may be over in minutes, it takes weeks, months, years for diplomatic efforts to come to fruition, at which point the news may be buried under the latest murder or another crisis precipitated by Israeli intransigence. Look at it this way: how many computer games are built around diplomacy in action?
So why should the unauthorized release of these classified cables, however embarrassing, be good for the State Department? The scandal has drawn front page attention to diplomacy, and the cables themselves show that America’s foreign service officers are very busy indeed attending capably to matters of grave importance to every American. Although, in recent years, it’s often seemed as if the Pentagon were the sole instrument for securing American interests in a dangerous world, these cables prove otherwise. The foreign service is the first line of defense (to put it crudely) in a complex world of cross-cutting interests and obligations, and our representatives abroad work wonders on a starvation budget. Consider what State could do if it were adequately funded. The savings on missiles and bomb-proof personnel carriers, etc., would be huge. See the amazing shrinking deficit!
Wonders did I say? Yes. Now that the quality of American diplomats’ work has been exposed for the world to see, kudos for State officers’ reporting are rolling in. Consider this: “U.S. Diplomats Aren’t Stupid After All: How WikiLeaks restored one journalist’s faith in the State Department.” That’s the title of an article in the latest issue of Foreign Policy. Author Joshua Kucera continues: “U.S. Foreign Service officers might not like their confidential correspondence aired in public, but overall, the [leaked] cables portray them as smart and perceptive, and with no illusions about the countries they are dealing with.”
And Andrew Rettman reports in the EUObserver that “Some EU officials are envious over the quality of its [the State Department’s] reports,” which “set a benchmark for diplomacy.” By contrast, one EU official complained, “Our reports are incredibly long and written in a kind of administrative jargon. We have no opinions. We hide our opinions behind bureaucratic language because we are not allowed to have opinions in a highly hierarchical structure.”
Perhaps Americans, too, will learn that we are well represented by our diplomats, who, it must be said, here and now, are not spies, as some recent media reports have suggested. American diplomats represent themselves openly as what they are. They aren’t clandestine agents. They are American officials unabashedly pursing American (or common) interests when they meet with citizens, leaders and counterpart officials in other counties. It is fully expected that all diplomatic parties to such conversations, whether the dialog takes place during negotiating sessions or over quiet dinners or in someone’s office, will be reporting what they've gleaned to their respective governments. What's more, for every cable an American foreign service officer sends back to Washington it’s likely that another report will be turned in to another government.
It’s this simple: you won't get anywhere if you don’t know the people you're dealing with. Strengths and weaknesses. Tics. Hobbyhorses. Biases. Character. Political culture. Ad infinitum. If the cabled language is blunt sometimes, so much the better for clarity. As for humor, well, humor beats pomposity, doesn't it? None of this is gossip. It’s crucial information. It helps in crafting arguments and answers an important question: can you trust the people you’ll be pitching to?
Which brings us to the core issue re the leaks: the risk to confidentiality. I leave to another occasion any consideration of whether secrecy is essential to effective diplomatic relations. What’s relevant here is that it has traditionally been assumed that conversations between diplomats will be handled discretely. Hence classification. Even a cable with a very low “confidential” stamp isn’t meant for global headlines. These days, of course, there’s another complication: compromised computer systems. The good guys are locked in constant struggle, trying to stay ahead of the hackers, crooks and leakers—and failure, unfortunately, is an excellent teacher.
By contrast, the degree of confidentiality is more formalized when diplomats talk to journalists. In such cases, the terms are set at the beginning of the conversation. On background or quotable? By name and title or from “diplomatic sources”? Only then does the Q&A begin. With amazingly few exceptions, so far as I have been able to tell, journalists honor such commitments. However, whether a diplomat talks to a foreign counterpart or to a member of the press, a certain calculation is made: what are the consequence if I go beyond the boilerplate? How far can I go? In my time, I took a few risks and never got burnt, but others did, and there was always a tiny bit of anxiety. Had I judged this person correctly? Would I regret my candor? Ditto in the case of the leaked cables. How many foreign leaders and diplomats are gnashing their teeth these days and vowing, “Never again.”
The possible loss of openness and forthrightness is a legitimate concern. But self-interest is a powerful stimulant. If you want something you have to give something. No one is going to stop talking to American envoys, who, by and large, are highly skilled, very persistent and, often, charming.