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Home > The Delicate Art of Diplomacy in the Trump Era is Being Left to
Military Generals
The Delicate Art of Diplomacy in the Trump Era is Being Left to Military
Generals
By Vijay Prashad [1] / Frontline (India) [2]
May 12, 2017
United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is the leading diplomat of
the U.S. government. Tillerson, who was previously the head of Exxon, leads
a department that nominally directs the country's foreign policy. However,
his tenure so far has been difficult. He serves a mercurial President,
Donald Trump, who makes policy in the early hours of the morning on Twitter
and zigzags on the basis of his "chemistry" with world leaders. Harsh words
for someone today are transformed into kind words tomorrow.
How Tillerson is expected to form a sustained policy on the basis of these
pronouncements is hard to imagine. Even harder to imagine is how Tillerson
is running a department where over 200 crucial posts remain empty. There is
no movement by this administration to fill these posts, including for that
of Tillerson's deputy. For now, career officials and people nominated by
former President Barack Obama remain at their desks. But these people do not
have the temperament to serve Trump. Their sensibility is antithetical to
his.
American diplomacy has been a weak instrument of statecraft for many decades
already. It is not merely an outgrowth of the general problems of Trump's
administrative attitude. Trump's adviser, Steve Bannon, threatened the
"deconstruction of the administrative state". However, this "deconstruction"
had already been going on under previous administrations. A series of
reports from 2009, in the first year of the Obama administration, shows how
poorly run American diplomacy was even then. The U.S. Congress' General
Accountability Office (GAO) found, in July 2009, that the office of arms
control and non-proliferation had withered. The report quotes a document
from October 2005, in which 11 employees wrote that morale was poor. This,
the GAO found, was probably responsible for the attrition rates as highly
capable people left for the private sector. Much the same problem of
administrative disregard and low morale was detected by the State
Department's inspector general in its Africa bureau. Walking the halls of
Foggy Bottom, the headquarters of the State Department in Washington, D.C.,
has been a depressing business for decades. There is little excitement here.
Staff members routinely complain that the action is not at the State
Department but at the U.S. military headquarters, the Pentagon. Indeed, one
test of the lack of importance of the State Department and diplomacy in
general is in the budgetary allocation to both. The State Department's
annual budget, at this point, is $29 billion. The U.S. military, on the
other hand, takes away over $700 billion a year. The comparison is stark.
There are 23,000 employees in the Pentagon, whose workload runs from
military assessment to delivery of arms contracts to diplomacy. In 2008,
Senator Joe Biden, as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
quoted Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who had said that the State
Department had been "chronically undermanned and underfunded for too long".
This was the head of the Pentagon speaking, which was why Senator Biden
quoted him. But then Biden suggested that there was something far more
sinister going on. He warned of the "migration of functions and authorities
from U.S. civilian agencies to the Department of Defence".
Biden's warning-of the movement of diplomacy from the civilians in the State
Department to the generals in the military-had been experienced in the field
by career diplomats. Cables from Islamabad (Pakistan), Cairo (Egypt) and
Sana'a (Yemen) by ambassadors complained that visiting U.S. military
officials were setting the policy with heads of governments and with foreign
militaries, including arms sales and operations in the War on Terror. The
ambassadors suggested that they had been converted into stenographers, who
sat in meetings and took notes but were not privy to the intricacies of the
policy. Even in arenas of diplomacy itself, the Pentagon's overseas
operations were far better funded and better organised. In Somalia, for
instance, the State Department's public diplomacy effort in 2008 received
only $30,000 compared with the Pentagon's public diplomacy budget of
$600,000.
Adverse publicity for the Pentagon is immediately responded to by its
massive public relations operation. The GAO found last year that the
Pentagon spent more than $1 billion on public relations. Between 2006 and
2015, the Pentagon spent almost two-thirds of the total U.S. government
spending on public relations.
If the State Department has been weak under previous Presidents, it is
likely to be weakened further by Trump. Trump's draft budget seeks a 28.5
per cent cut in State Department spending. What this means is an even
smaller presence for American diplomacy. Tillerson has promised to cut 2,300
of its staff, almost 10 per cent of the total workforce of the State
Department. One of the reasons why he has not staffed his own department is
that he anticipates a major reorganisation of it. It is important to
indicate that the person tasked with the reorganisation is William Inglee, a
former executive from Lockheed Martin, an arms manufacturer. It is not
unreasonable to assume that Inglee will keep his friends in the military
happy while he "deconstructs" American diplomacy further. The U.S. military
budget, meanwhile, will be increased by $54 billion (this increase accounts
for 80 per cent of the total Russian military budget).
Chaos rules in U.S. foreign policy. One day Tillerson says that Syria's
Bashar al-Assad will have to remain, and then a few days later he reiterates
the old U.S. policy that "Assad must go". First he said that Iran was in
compliance with its obligations in the nuclear treaty, and then he said that
Iran had violated the treaty. Firm policy is not evident. What one sees is a
great deal of whiplash, governed largely by Trump's erratic decisions
announced on Twitter. The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki
Haley, seems at odds with the kind of soberness displayed by Tillerson. When
she brought U.N. Security Council members to the White House in late April,
Trump met them and asked: "Now, does everybody like Nikki? Because if you
don't, otherwise, she can easily be replaced." A second later, Trump said:
"No, we won't do that, I promise. We won't do that. She's doing a fantastic
job." Nikki Haley and Tillerson seem to be tacking right and left, trying to
anticipate Trump's gale force decisions. These are prompted not merely by
the whims of Trump's family-namely his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law
Jared Kushner-but also his generals. It is the military that continues to
have a major hold on decision-making. Civilian diplomats are not in the
saddle. Press conferences at the Pentagon are far more important than those
at Foggy Bottom.
In March, Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations gave a book talk
at the State Department office. Later, Zenko sent out a tweet about the
"unusually large audience" in the room. Why did so many people come to hear
Zenko? Not because he had such interesting things to say, but because, as
one State Department official told him: "We've literally nothing else to
do." Others in the Department disputed this characterisation. However, on
the day of Zenko's visit, the State Department spokesperson Mark Toner
seemed flummoxed to learn that Mexico's Foreign Minister was visiting
Washington. When asked about the visit, Toner said: "I was unaware that he.
was in town."
Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut.
