You’ll see why I am posting the following bit of history in a minute. Just take your time and read through this carefully:
Foreign Service Officer John S. Service is dismissed from the Department of State following a determination by the Civil Service Commission’s Loyalty Board that there was “reasonable doubt” concerning his loyalty to the United States.
Service was one of a number of so-called “China hands”—State Department officials who were experts on China and the Far East—who saw their careers ruined during the 1950s by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his cohorts. McCarthy targeted Service and several of his coworkers, including John Carter Vincent, O. Edmund Clubb, and John Paton Davies, for criticism and investigation. McCarthy charged that Service and other State Department officials had effectively “lost” China to the communists, either through incompetence or, more ominously, through sympathy with the communist cause. The case against Service centered on the 1945 Amerasia scandal. In that year, FBI agents raided the offices of the magazine Amerasia and found classified government documents concerning America’s policy in China. Service was implicated because he had given de-classified background information to the magazine’s editor. A grand jury, a House subcommittee, and the State Department’s Loyalty Board subsequently cleared him. In 1950, however, McCarthy singled out Service as one of what he called “the 205 known communists” in the Department of State. In short order, Service’s case was reviewed once again, and this time he was dismissed. Service declared that the decision was “a surprise, a shock, and an injustice.” Senator McCarthy exclaimed, “Good, good, good!”
Service fought the dismissal, and was eventually reinstated in 1957, but his career never recovered from the damage. Like the other “China hands” who were hounded out of the State Department, Service’s real crime was his unremitting criticism of the Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-Shek during and after World War II. All believed that Chiang’s government—due to corruption, incompetence, and brutality—was doomed to fall to the communist forces in China. Thus, Service and his colleagues became easy scapegoats for Red Scare promoters such as McCarthy. Their dismissals severely damaged the Far East division of the Department of State, destroyed morale in the Foreign Service, and effectively squashed any dissenting debate concerning America’s China policy. All of these factors assisted in the serious underestimation of communist China’s political investment in Korea and Vietnam and indirectly resulted in the military conflicts in those countries in the years to come.
We clearly underestimated China’s willingness to intervene in Korea and subsequently overestimated their willingness to intervene in Vietnam. Both errors were extremely costly and possibly avoidable if we hadn’t purged the State Department of the expertise we had there to help guide our policy makers and military leaders.
Flash forward to today.
In December 2016, the department employed 2,580 people under the foreign affairs occupation series, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. By September 2017—the most recent data available—that number fell to 2,273, a decrease of roughly 11.9 percent.
Most employees under the series serve as foreign affairs officers, a broad role that encompasses responsibilities such as advising, administering and researching foreign policy areas like trade, drug trafficking, arms control and the environment. Foreign affairs officers also serve as key figures in international negotiations.
Foreign affairs employees made up more than 40 percent of the 836 civilians who left the State Department between January 1, 2017, and September 30, 2017—the final month of the Obama administration and the first eight months of the Trump administration.
The drop off in foreign affairs officers reflects a larger overall trend in Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s treatment of his agency’s career workforce, said Ron Neumann, a retired 37-year State Department veteran who served as ambassador to Algeria, Bahrain and Afghanistan. The most recent administration appears to have a unique “contempt” for the career workforce, Neumann told Government Executive, prompting many top policy experts to leave the government’s diplomatic arm, whether they want to or not.
The risks today are the same as they were in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s when the collective freak-out about the “loss” of China combined with the Soviet Union’s nuclear capabilities, totalitarian tendencies and expansionist foreign policy created a ripe environment for McCarthyism.
In most ways, McCarthyism was a more rational and understandable mistake than what we’re experiencing right now. There’s really no rhyme or reason to the current purge other than some kind of misguided hostility to our own government, combined perhaps with a grouping of policies so hostile to reality that expertise is seen as a positive hindrance.
We’ll be extraordinarily lucky if we don’t wind up paying a similar price in the near future to the one we paid in Korea and Vietnam. A nation cannot make itself stupid and get away with it.
The damage of McCarthyism still hasn’t been undone. It echoes in the refrain that Democrats cannot be trusted with foreign policy and causes Democrats to seek compensatory “toughness”.
Hillary Clinton’s entire foreign policy positions were aimed at (1) refuting the remaining McCarthyism, which had been kept alive by cults within the Republican party that became particularly personally malignant in 2016; (2) shake the notion that national defense disqualifies women for serving as the commander-in-chief. The latter is the reversal of our suffragist/women’s rights mothers’ dream that a female President, especially a mother, would be more likely to to avoid war. Responsibility to Protect will become the future negative story of women national security professionals. Meanwhile Henry Kissinger skulks away, his job as mentor done.
Tillerson’s policies will damage the State Department for at least 50 years without an intentional rapid rebuilding when Trumpistas and Republicans lose power. It will have to be a major institutional project with skilled leadership of the quality of Gen. George C. Marshall. I’m not sure who exactly fills that leadership role; Obama, Kerry, and Jimmy Carter might serve to chart the institutional rebuilding. Better debrief Jimmy Carter quickly.
In fact whoever “the opposition” turns out to be should have as detailed ideas for rebuilding of our institutions as the Republicans since Bush-Cheney have had for their destruction.
Wait, Democrats have no agency in this? They’re helpless? Scoop Jackson, liberal interventionism, we’re going to lay that all at the feet of McCarthy?
Well, McCarthy and Boeing.
Anyone familiar with the Department of State would agree that Tillerson’s tenure is on net doing the agency substantial damage, as I’ve suggested in other posts on this topic. That he is pruning back the overgrowth of “special envoys” devoted to specific topics, many of them narrowly focused, could be helpful, but it does not counterbalance the overall damage on the organizational side.
Some of the worst trends, however, predate Tillerson — notably the hypertrophied role of military affairs in foreign policy as compared to diplomacy, which is especially reflected in funding. SecDef Mattis has drawn attention to the importance of diplomacy as an “element of national power”‘; but it’s pathetic that State should have so little influence as to have to rely on SecDef support. Among other things, State could use better physical plant; as it is, little bits of the Department are scattered all around the Metro area in several dozen “annexes,” which is highly inefficient.
What’s needed is a long-term, bipartisan commitment to reviving the place of diplomacy in U.S. foreign affairs. Tillerson isn’t helping — but the problem is not his alone.
The United States doesn’t do diplomacy. It’s not tough enough for its manly men. It takes too long. And it doesn’t deliver to the bottom line of the defense industry, in which there are many, many jobs.
VP Pence’s sole mission to Korea is to prevent diplomacy, for example. We haven’t had a diplomatic hero in a while; most have been lackluster and incapable of persuading Americans why diplomacy is more effective than pre-emptive strikes.
McCarthyism is reaching back too far.
Kennedy and Johnson were fully invested in foreign intervention and military spending.
Kennedy won a national election running on a `missile gap.’
The current `less than manly’ reputation the Democrats enjoy is a direct result of the McGovern candidacy followed up by the feckless Carter/Iran hostage crisis which combined with Carter’s late/non-response to inflation to make Reagan attractive.
Of course, Democrats back up the Republican image-only advantages on the military by constantly appointing Republicans to head the MIIC at DoD and their image-only advantages on economics by almost exclusively reappointing Republicans to be the Fed chair.
I mean when your own party doesn’t have the talent pool to continuously run the two most important non-elected jobs in America that’s a pretty strong indictment of your own capabilities.
Yeah only in America can a legitimate war hero like McGovern (I suggest reading “The Wrong Stuff by Truman Smith for an in-person account of what being a bomber pilot was like) be considered less than manly, while a series of Republican draft dodgers take deferment after deferment while some go AWOL w/o consequences.
We truly are a nation of idiots and we deserve this President.
. . . it’s a bad thing.
WTFU!
Not until faithfulness turns to betrayal-and betrayal into trust-can any human being become part of the truth. — Rumi
Heh. Psssst, marduk, check who actually posted this parody of you-know-who.
Lordy, It’s still trolling. We don’t need to multiply the dumbfuckery.
WTFU!
Not until faithfulness turns to betrayal-and betrayal into trust-can any human being become part of the truth. — Rumi
Ok, I laughed.
. . . about this?
I don’t think it was your intent, but if you had been playing along deliberately with my little satire, your downrate couldn’t possibly have worked any better. Perfectly in character ‘n all that.
You guys are having absolutely too much fun for this serious column 🙂
You forgot “Media Strike!” ™
Something that is increasingly urgent and necessary.
They have made a career of denigrating career civil servants as incompetents “bureaucrats”. Mostly, I assumed, to take fat contracts for work that could be done better and cheaper in-house.
They can’t stop now. Their base won’t let them. and maybe they actually believe their own lies.
And mostly to cover up the major errors that occur in the private sector that are “no big deal” because you can buy it somewhere else.
The difference in attitude between taxes and prices has amused me for about 50 years. Taxes can be made avoidable with the right politicians; prices are unavoidable, non-negotiable, and forever.
Has anyone else read Jennet Conant’s book titled “A Covert Affair?” It follows Julia and Paul Child’s years in the Far East (mainly the Philippines) during WW II serving in what eventually became the CIA. And then through the McCarthy era post war.
It also documents how we used the people of the Philippines, Vietnam and other far eastern countries to help us win WWII, then turned them back over to their imperial masters when the war ended. It was a sickening betrayal of their legitimate desire to end the oppression and exploitation of imperialism and re-establish their independence and the sacrifices they made to assist us.
And, of course, when the French finally backed out of Vietnam we moved in to take their place. Because dominoes, you know.
Another good one apropos to looking back at the 1940s and 1950s is Greg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington, which mentions the Childs.
Um, the “imperial power” that we gave the Philippines back to would have been the USA. In fact, the USA gave the Philippines its Independence less than a year later on July 4th, 1946.
Oops. I meant Indonesia to the Dutch.
There’s a confusion here.
Foreign affairs officers are Civil Service staff doing foreign-policy jobs at State; they are not available for overseas positions and do not have the expertise that such positions cultivate, and they are governed by Civil Service employment rules (rank-in-position, for example). In a sense, they are Civil Service staff with a U.S.-based foreign-policy speciality. The number of foreign-affairs officers at State has tended to grow over time, in part because some State bureaus have had difficulty attracting Foreign Service officers (since service there is not perceived as “career-enhancing”). They are represented by Civil Service-oriented labor unions.
Foreign Service officers (FSOs), such as Service, are worldwide-available generalists who serve both in the United States (mainly Washington) and overseas. They have the language expertise and overseas experience typically associated with “diplomats” (although they have that status officially only outside the United States). FSOs are employed under the very different Foreign Service system, which is an up-or-out, rank-in-person system very similar to the military; and as such, they have career tracks, which foreign affairs officers don’t. Their official labor bargaining agent is the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA).
There are multiple issues seriously affecting the Foreign Service under the current administration, and Mr. Longman might find it worthwhile to address those issues separately. But it’s important not to conflate foreign affairs officers with FSOs.
That said, it’s not inappropriate to draw attention to the thinning ranks of foreign affairs officers. Because the FSO corps under SecState Tillerson is itself not recruiting at replacement level, reductions in the number of foreign affairs officers as well suggest that State is just able to do less work — an important fact when the military side of our overseas involvement is getting a major financial increase.
Nevertheless it’s the “larger overall trend in Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s treatment of his agency’s career workforce” that’s momentous, because foreign policy is becoming incompetent at all levels, as we see in the ongoing collapse of Korea policy, from Trump himself, who hasn’t succeeded in naming an ambassador to South Korea in 13 months of trying (White House literally dropped their own nominee for not being ignorant enough), to the underlings who couldn’t find out for Pence who the South Korean ambassador to the US is.
I don’t disagree that the overall treatment of the State workforce in general under SecState Tillerson — whether Civil Service or Foreign Service — is deeply troubling; indeed, my comment suggested as much in referring to the very damaging fact that the Foreign Service is recruiting below replacement level. Not only is that not sustainable in the long term; it will cause immediate problems in the short term — for example, by making it more difficult to do consular work overseas, much of which is done by newly hired FSOs.
I also appreciate Mr. Longman’s discussion of foreign affairs officers. They also do valuable work at State, and this is one of the few discussions I’ve seen anywhere about their existence and situation. So that’s helpful. But the post didn’t seem to distinguish adequately between the two types of State staff, who work under different systems and with sharply different employee status and employment paths. For people who really know State, conflating them would make the post look uninformed and reduce its effectiveness. That’s what I was trying to correct.
Lots of foreign service officers are expert in the mechanics of running an embassy and only tasked only secondarily in foreign affairs. It is amazing how much one can learn about a country from the day-to-day business of conducting the management of purchasing locally, for example.
The “scholars in residence” at State and the analysts of events is who I thought BooMan had in mind.
John Paton Davies was an instrumental one of these in the late 1940s and one who was hounded by McCarthy. The change in comparative power of China and the US as a result of McCarthy’s actions are now apparent 70 years after his speeches and 65 years after his hearings. And the US foreign policy base in Congress still hasn’t shaken his influence. Reflexive red-baiting still comes easy on both sides of the aisle even as the US squanders its power in war without end.
The Foreign Service has several broad career specializations, or “cones”; each FSO is “coned” at entry, and that cone greatly affects that person’s career. The FSO “cone” involved with operations that you describe is the “management” cone. But sharp distinctions are not possible, especially in this area. To the extent that “management” involves personnel activities, for example, FSOs in all cones carry out management functions, especially overseas. And senior staff at overseas missions (Ambassadors, DCMs, and the like) have often had careers in the political cone — and these people supervise the missions’ management sections.
I spent over 25 years at State, and it was clear to me what the original post described; “foreign affairs officers” do make up a specific job category of the kind I described. But they were not the people under attack by McCarthy — indeed, it’s not clear to me that the job category to which Mr. Longman referred actually existed at the time. The people McCarthy attacked, including Service and Davies, were FSOs; they both joined the Service in 1933. (The Foreign Service has been restructured legislatively since that time, but it is recognizably the same organization.) And one of the subtexts of the McCarthy attacks on the “China hands” was that their very overseas service in the Far East, which was what made them of special value to the country, made them suspect.
My point is that the cones give in-country practical experiences that potentially make foreign service officers more valuable for advice on actions, if not policy, than their home-based foreign affair officers, who likely have a wider range of think-tank and academic resources that can provide important insights and aggregations of data.
Yes, made them suspects and targets of the the China Lobby. Their overseas experience was liaison with the Chinese Communists (and others) in commando actions behind Japanese lines. Those Americans who were liaison with the Kuomintang had quite different postwar views. And of course, the “outs” were the ones who could become
refugeesexiles in the US and lobby Congress to set conflict with the PRC from the beginning. As the newsmaps spread the red ink across East Asia, the political drumbeats could argue for Truman’s failure.When Stalin greenlighted Kim Il Sung’s war in South Korea if Mao would provide Korea with Chinese reinforcements, Truman’s looked to have willfully failed to ensure deterrence for South Korea (not really his responsibility directly anyway but the “containment” logic required that he hold the gate closed).
From that point on, it was pure political theater on the part of desperate Republicans eager for a win.
Funny that no one ever saw Allen Dulles’s friendship with ex-Nazis as suspect in the same way that Davies and Service were tarred. And Dulles had some of those acquaintances from World War I.
>>Those Americans who were liaison with the Kuomintang had quite different postwar views.
from what I’ve read, some Americans who worked with the KMT during the war noted they were totally corrupt and militarily idiots and were bound to lose to the Communists before long. They weren’t treated any differently than if they’d advocated Communism.
This is an accurate description, although a bit condensed. Davies, for example, arranged for Service to join him in working with U.S. Gen. Stilwell, who was assisting the Kuomintang regime. Service then became part of a group sent to establish contact with Mao and the Chinese Communist rebels. Those involved in this group, called the “Dixie Mission,” reported favorably on the rebels and unfavorably on the Kuomintang, arguing that the rebels represented China’s future and the United States should cooperate with them — in part to steer the rebels away from Soviet influence. In taking this position, they were advocating U.S. interests as they understood them (and they were of course correct about China’s future). The Republican right, however, thought that U.S. mistakes, primarily by the State Department, “lost China” to the Communists — and it was under this conception that the “China hands” were fired. The right here of course was wrong; the United States could not have changed events in China as they claimed. But that concept, fostered by extremely close relationships between Republicans and Chiang Kai-Shek, strongly influenced Republican foreign-policy attitudes — especially on China but also about diplomacy more generally.
There’s a good deal of truth here. If the original post had not conflated the situation of foreign-affairs officers with the past experience of Foreign Service officers such as Service and Davies, I’d have had a lot less to say. And I of course agree that overseas Foreign Service experience in whatever “cone” is essential in forming our foreign-affairs posture; there’s a great deal about the world that cannot be adequately understood from Washington, D.C.
A somewhat similar situation exists with USAID. There are USAID FSOs, the vast majority of whom work most of their careers in USAID Missions overseas. In Washington, there is a large cadre of civil service and “program-funded” employees (i.e. their positions are tied to funding for a particular program, e.g. food security or climate change). The latter, in particular, are usually technical specialists that manage assistance programs and provide technical assistance and training. Like the use of contractors, the number and influence of this latter group has been growing steadily since at least the Clinton Administration.
~ Well aren’t you just a ray of sunshine. /s
While I’ve expressed some concerns about elements of this post, Mr. Longman is dead right here:
“There’s really no rhyme or reason to the current purge other than some kind of misguided hostility to our own government, combined perhaps with a grouping of policies so hostile to reality that expertise is seen as a positive hindrance.
“We’ll be extraordinarily lucky if we don’t wind up paying a similar price in the near future to the one we paid in Korea and Vietnam. A nation cannot make itself stupid and get away with it.”
I’d only add that the bad consequences will arrive even sooner. As I’ve pointed out, consular activities rely extensively on newly-hired FSOs. Until recently, State was recruiting over 300 FSOs each year; under Tillerson, that number has reportedly dropped to about 100 — and half of those are from special-entry categories, not the general applicant pool. That’s not going to be enough people to do the work now, and if that situation is prolonged it’s going to cause all kinds of distortions. Among other things, the National Foreign Affairs Training Center (NFATC), where State educates its staff, is going to be severely underutilized. Nor, given NFATC’s limited size and the fact that the Foreign Service does not allow “lateral entry” (all FSOs start at the bottom and work up the career chain), can any sustained hiring “dip” now be easily corrected later.
The country is going to suffer from lack of substantive foreign-affairs expertise of the kind FSOs alone can provide; but it will also suffer from deficits in other areas of diplomatic work as well. One of the first responsibilities of Tillerson’s successor — who cannot arrive too soon — will be to recognize this fact and take corrective action. Whether that can be done in this administration or while Republicans control Congress is open to question.
In Era of Trump and Tillerson, Students Lose Faith in Foreign Service Careers
Although the above Georgetown Hoya article ends with a note of hope:
“Even as entries into foreign services roles have taken a dive, applications to the SFS undergraduate school have never been higher. Last year’s application pool was the school’s largest ever, and marked the largest single spike in applications from one year to the next.”
And this from Politico last August:
Interest in U.S. diplomatic corps tumbles in early months of Trump
The number of Americans taking the Foreign Service exam has fallen to the lowest in nearly a decade