The U.S. State Department: on the way out?

Great Debates
1

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Margaret MacMillan’s Nixon and Mao, and it amazes me how much Nixon and Kissinger went out of their way to marginalize the State Department. Granted that their Secretary of State, William Rogers, wasn’t any great shakes, but whose fault was that? Nixon chose him!

My political science book also mentions that for at least forty years, the State Department has lost ground to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in negotiating trade agreements with other countries.

Of course, Nixon’s way of managing foreign policy isn’t exactly without its critics. And some presidents since Nixon seem to have relied rather more on the State Department than Nixon did. Reagan let Alexander Haig take the lead in negotiating between the UK and Argentina over the Falklands (fat lot of good that did). ISTR George H.W. Bush leaning heavily on James Baker as his lead man in China. And Clinton in turn would appear to have relied on Albright and the other one (was it Warren Christopher?) to do a lot of his foreign negotiating, with mixed results: pretty good in the Balkans and NAFTA, just barely missing success in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and pretty much botching North Korea and the Kremlin.

Come the George W. Bush administration, however, it looks like the State Department is out in the cold again. Back in the 2001-2003 period, I couldn’t find a neoconservative who didn’t simultaneously despise Colin Powell, and gloat that he was impotent. See Lawrence Kaplan : “But, try as he [Powell] may, Israel policy no longer rests with the State Department. It’s in safer hands now.” We’re now a long way removed from those heady days, but I have a hard time seeing any revitalization of the State Department under Condoleeza Rice.

So I see three main questions for debate:

  1. Why have presidents increasingly abandoned the State Department as a diplomatic tool, and why have some done so more than others?

  2. Will the State Department decline into irrelevance? And if so, what will take its place as the President’s prime diplomatic tool? The National Security Council? The U.S. Trade Representative? The Vice-President’s office? Something else? Or a combination thereof?

  3. Assuming that the State Department has indeed lost influence, is this good or bad for America and the world?

2

I dont know if its being abandoned so much as it sometimes doesn’t suit the agenda of a president that wants to shake things up. Government bureaucracies are institutions that like the status quo. In the case of the State Department its also sometimes been seen as an obstacle to administration policy that was decided on a political rather then a strategic basis. This is notably the case in relation to Israel. It makes little strategic sense to blindly ally yourself with a small nation of several million if the price of doing so is to alienate several hundred million people, and to increasingly put yourself at odds with global opinion in so doing. Foggy Bottom is often suspected by neo-conservatives as being ‘unsound’ on this issue ie it would, if allowed, seek a more balanced and less totally pro-Israel policy. I think the pendulum is now swinging the other way as we have seen the cost of the ignorance-driven fiasco in Iraq. The State Department will become more prominent again. Expertise matters.

3

Presidents haven’t increasingly abandoned the State Department. As you said, Clinton and Bush I relied a great deal on the Secretaries of State. Just because Foggy Bottom and the White House haven’t seen eye to eye over the last seven years speaks only to the current Administration, not to the overall relevance of the State Department.

Why do some presidents use the State Department more than others? Because the building and our embassies are full of people in striped pants who speak in ways well measured. Some presidents like that, others don’t.