Latest / Global Insights / The State of Diplomacy at America 250

Transcript

The State of Diplomacy at America 250 · Global Insights

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Chaotic, amateurish, unprofessional.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you've got two guys over there who have no background either in the region, in the languages, in the history there, um, but just happen to be the president's son-in-law and and good friend.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_03: In July of last year, the State Department fired 1,300 of its own people.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: Some of those had spent their entire careers on a single country.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_03: Now, the talks on Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran run through special envoys, and the career diplomats are often not in the room.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: Simply put, uh, we've been told to speak truth to power.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: But the problem is that over the past 18 months, speaking truth to power has proven to be dangerous professionally.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_03: Unsurprisingly, allies noticed.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_03: Canada, Europe, and Asia are building trade and security arrangements that route around the United States.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: The old spheres of influence stuff might really be back.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: The United States might be in the vanguard of that.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and if that's the case, heaven help us, because that's what led not just to the Marines going into Nicaragua, but that's what led um to uh the age of the world wars.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_03: Rebuilding the Foreign Service takes decades, and its own veterans disagree about whether the old one is even worth rebuilding.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_03: This is Global Insights by Network 2020.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_03: Today, American diplomacy in its 250th year.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_03: Joining us today is John Dinkelman, a career diplomat and president of the American Foreign Service Association, Dr.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_03: Jessica Matthews, former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Professor Jay Sexton, a historian of 19th century America at the University of Missouri.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_03: Our conversation today is moderated by Courtney Doggard, President of Network 2020.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_04: So welcome to all of you.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_04: Jessica, I'd like to start with you.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_04: And one of the main stories in the news, which changes very rapidly, but today we'll focus on the escalating conflict in the Middle East.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_04: The Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen have gotten more involved in the standoff over key waterways.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_04: And this weekend, this past weekend, U.S.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_04: diplomats met with the Houthis in Oman following the group seizure of a strategic stretch of the Red Sea coast and growing fighting between them and Saudi Arabia.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_04: Washington declined to provide direct military support to Saudi Arabia.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_04: And President Trump has also threatened to bomb Oman, the country hosting the negotiations, for talking to Iran.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_04: So we see a lot of elements of today's topic in this story, kind of these traditional State Department negotiations, spurned partners, threats from the executive over social media.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_04: What does this story tell us about the state of U.S.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_04: diplomacy as a tool of foreign policy today?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_04: And which elements are new, um, and which ones are ones that we might recognize as more familiar?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say that most of what we're seeing is new because it is chaotic, amateurs, unprofessional.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: You've got two guys over there who have no background either in the region, in the languages, in the history there, but just happen to be the president's son-in-law and good friend.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: They also have the assignments to be working on Ukraine and Russia, Gaza, as well as Iran, a totally impossible task.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So this isn't serious diplomacy that's going on.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And there also is no discernible strategy uh that they could be pursuing.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's sort of uh day-to-day, uh week to week, day-to-day, really almost attempts to put band-aids or to take a step forward um and try to get.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think what we're seeing, just to put it in real terms, is that the Iranians are doing whatever they can to get gas prices as high as they can before the midterm elections.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: So when the president keeps saying that prices will come down after the elections, he's probably right that you know, after the elections, when they hope to have a you know a democratic Congress, um, then you know, then they could take the pressure off the Houthis or taking direction from Iran.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't this none of what we've seen in the context of either Gaza or Ukraine, uh, and certainly Russia, and and the Iran war would be what I think any of the three of us would call serious diplomacy.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_04: And you you reference in there, I'll turn to you for the next question, John, but you reference Jessica, the the two envoys, uh special envoys, Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_04: And so what I'd like to understand, turning to you, John, is how special envoys like Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner, when they're sitting across from, let's say, you know, Putin or Zelensky, can you help us understand what we're not seeing?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_04: How involved is the State Department behind the scenes?
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: Special advisors or envoys chosen by the president because of personal friendship or acquaintance really isn't something new to our diplomatic structure, nor, frankly, to many other nations' diplomatic uh institutions.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: What we are not seeing, and you're not seeing it, and frankly, I'm not seeing it either, but we can guess what's going on there, is the fact that uh the diplomatic core, the the expertise on which such uh such envoys would depend are not really in the room.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: From everything we can we can div decipher from as as Dr.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: Matthews said, the the chaos that's going on, is that the people who can offer the subject matter expertise, the advice, the context, the the cultural uh notes, the historical aspects of everything that is going on in that room are largely unavailable and are certainly not being utilized.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: This is to the detriment of our country.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so again, I would stress it's really not unusual that a president would choose someone because that person has the president's personal confidence or friendship, whatever it might be.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes a personal friend who has access to the president can actually add to a discussion because they can get where they need to go for an answer very quickly by simply picking up a phone.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: But that whole dynamic has been set aside.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: And we are looking at individuals who are largely working without the context of history on their side.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And can I just add, because I wanted to mention this in the answer to the first question, it just underlines what John just said.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: They have apparently, and I know this in the case specifically of their conversations with Putin in Russia, they are operating without an American translator, which is an absolutely unheard of, really crazy um way of proceeding.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you have no way of knowing uh whether what you're getting is uh is a straight translation, an accurate translation in either direction.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so no professional diplomat or even you know a serious envoy would think of going um uh to a conversation even with allies, forget adversaries, without an American translator sitting next to them, and yet they are they're working with Russian translators crazy.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_04: Uh thank you for that addition.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_04: So just as a follow-up, then so it sounds very much like state is not necessarily in the room for some of these bigger negotiations, but the other side of the story that you've written about, John, has been the reduction in forces that the State Department has gone through.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_04: Um, could you just talk a little bit about where that loss of capacity actually shows up?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: Happy to do so.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, as you've said, state is not only not in the room in an overseas negotiation, it's not in the room in the State Department itself.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: Largely, the Foreign Service has been marginalized.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: And where it has not been marginalized through either reductions in force or showing people the door by indicating that there is no further career path for them.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, last year alone in July, over 1,300 individuals were simply summarily dismissed from the organization sent patty.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: That expertise is gone.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: Individuals who've dedicated their lives to either a functional area, a geographic area, a linguistic area, whatever it is that people have come into the diplomatic core, or basically just to the foreign affairs arena, ostensibly as a subject matter expert or an aspiring subject matter expert, have largely been removed.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I won't disparage the individuals who are remaining.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: As with any good team, what we're talking about here is the depth of the bench involved.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: When you have fewer players on the field, you simply can't win the game.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what we're facing here in the United States foreign affairs dynamic.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_02: We're in the arena, but we're too thin.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: And in order to get back to where we were, it's not simply a case of hiring someone who's coming out of college with a smattering of Spanish when you have sent experts in Latin America packing, who are now off either working for non-government organizations or simply retired from careers of service to our country.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_04: You bring up some great points.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_04: I want to follow up on them, but I am going to hold my fire because I want to just zoom out a little bit with you, Jay, into the historical context.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_04: So America First is a defining diplomatic principle of the moment, as is de-emphasizing a bureaucratic approach to diplomacy.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_04: Is this style an approach?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_04: Is it a genuine break from the past?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_04: And if this kind of personalized diplomacy itself isn't particularly new, what is different about them this moment?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_04: And what are the implications that you see in general of where we are right now?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's certainly a break from the mid-20th century past, which we've kind of come to see as the norm.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Charles Frankel in the questions in the Q ⁇ A on the chat function asked a great one about does it look more like the 19th century now?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think absolutely.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: But let me answer your question by kind of locating to the audience where I'm beaming in from.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: I am here in mid-Missouri.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: The world of the State Department and of the Foreign Service feels very, very distant.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a key point because it didn't always feel very distant from those here in the heartland.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: About 15 miles from where I sit is a small town called Fulton, Missouri.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: That may ring a bell because it became a famous town in 1946 when Winston Churchill visited at the invitation of Missourian and U.S.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: President Harry Truman to deliver what became known as the Iron Curtain speech, a wonderful speech that outlined the stakes of the coming Cold War.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I always tell the students that the more important story happened after Churchill left.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: What happened in Fulton itself revealed a lot about a moment that looked so different from our present.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that is in order to honor Churchill, but also to place this small little town on the global map, civic leaders organized a fundraising drive to relocate a bombed-out 17th-century church from East London, stone by stone, to rural Missouri.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: The church was completed in 1969.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of the oldest buildings now west of the Mississippi River.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a shrine.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: It became a shrine to American internationalism as well as to Churchill himself, something that people really got behind.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it stands today, fast forward to today, as a curious anachronism.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a symbol of a bygone era when a small Missouri town celebrated its connections to the wider world.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, one of the great ironies is after the collapse of communism, a large installation of the panels from the Berlin Wall were also moved from Europe and put outside the church.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: And now Callaway County votes to build walls along the southern border of Mexico.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we've seen a fundamental transformation in how ordinary voters and citizens think of and conceive of the United States' relationship with the wider world.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: So my point here is to add into the hopper of this discussion.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: It matters what's happening, obviously, in the hot spots around the world.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: It obviously, I think, profoundly matters that the professionals have been sidelined, and I could not agree more what a tragedy that's been for American diplomacy.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: But at heart, what's really the problem, if you take a long view, is the lack of popular legitimacy that the old regime of the old American empire had come to have.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you can see that in a place like Fulton.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I don't have the answers for how we can rebuild that popular legitimacy, but I do think that losing it is how we get some grifters, grafters coming in, as Applebaum puts it, and have been able to kind of torch our alliances and to pursue their own personal interests.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: And we're not going to turn that tanker around until we resolve some of the democratic legitimacy problems at home.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_04: Jessica, kind of looking at other problem areas, uh, you've argued that the old foreign policy consensus was already breaking down even before the Trump administration.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_04: And I know that there are many people who have pointed this out.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_04: So we can look back on the past with a little bit of rose-colored glasses, but as many people are also saying, it was not also so wonderful.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_04: So if that is the case, is a rethink of the diplomatic model also long overdue?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_04: Could the administration actually be like right-sizing diplomacy for a world of strong men and rapid tech advancement?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think so.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: I because you don't you don't see any underlying strategy, any and an underlying theory of the case.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's easy to exaggerate looking backwards how unified we were or might have been in, you know, in a particular period, but there were some things, even through throughout the Cold War period and the post-Cold War period, when there were lots of disagreements about how the US should operate in the world, there were some fundamentals that this administration is torching.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Obvious things, like the number of allies that we have is a source of American strength.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think there were very few, if any, maybe none, no people in the 75 years since the end of the World War War II who would have questioned that that NATO was a source of strength.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: Although there was a period after the Soviet Union collapse when there were many people who thought that we ought to disband NATO and and sort of pull Russia closer.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: But uh that and that by and large, this one there were more disagreements, but by and large that the US ability through its size and its economic strength and its geopolitical positioning um was in a position to deliver uh what are called global public goods, to m to spend and both dollars and leadership making the rest of the world richer or safer.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that that was that then uh redounded to our credit.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I should add also that the rule of law was another given.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um I would say that this administration has torched all of those fundamentals, and that you know, that we haven't even begun to see the long-term consequences of pushing our allies and our friends away and drawing our adversaries, even our enemies, closer makes you know, you really can't explain that short-sighted tariffs and economic warfare against um countries that we used to try to strengthen because they then became our markets makes no sense and so forth.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I I um I can't see that this is um opening the era to a different kind of foreign policy, more attuned to a drastically different world.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's just um, I don't like to be repetitive, but it really is chaos.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you for that.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_04: And I hope we can follow up with uh later on with your thoughts on some of the long-term consequences.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I do want to get a similar question over to you, John, but looking at it from the inside out, again, if there are these major geopolitical shifts happening in the world, what are your concerns about the current diplomatic corps' ability to operate?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_04: And sort of along the lines of what Jessica was speaking about, how do you distinguish sort of pragmatic efficiency in a shifting geopolitical environment from a genuine loss of capacity?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate the question.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's multifaceted, and my responses are going to be from the inside looking out.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: So please keep that in mind.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to be a little bit esoteric here, in that we have based our diplomatic service on a rather reliable foundation that, as a continental nation, that is usually focused inwardly.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, let's face it, the there's a tremendous challenge in Washington for the leaders in Washington to get a sense from within our own nation of what's going on outside the beltway.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: The problem of understanding the world is exacerbated much beyond that.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so the Foreign Service has been established and inculcated with a mentality that the greatest thing that we as diplomats can provide to Washington is the unvarnished view of what is going on from wherever we might find ourselves in deepest, darkest Africa, Central Asia, anywhere around the world where we are living, we are working, where we have schooled ourselves on every aspect of the local society, so that when decisions are taken in Washington, or more importantly, when decisions are considered in Washington, the diplomatic corps can report back to Washington what those anticipated ramifications might be, even going so far as to guess on secondary or even tertiary effects, and to allow our decision makers to understand with a clarity what actions they may be taking.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes, of course, a diplomat may totally disagree with what Washington decides, but that's irrelevant because, like our counterparts in the Pentagon, our job is to implement the policies of the elected leaders of the United States.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: What we've seen over the past 18 months is a breakdown of that very structure in which individuals who are schooled in any regions who understand the issues, um the the input not only is no longer sought, but the understanding is that if the responses or the input provided to Washington to any questions um are unwelcome or heaven forbid, oops, my light goes off there, heaven forbid they are not in alignment with the conventional thinking.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: That ramifications could be visited upon the person who's presenting that information.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: Simply put, uh, we've been told to speak truth to power.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: But the problem is that over the past 18 months, speaking truth to power has proven to be dangerous professionally.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: And and that has a as we used to say when my father was working on a Chevrolet, that kind of leads to vapor lot.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: The engine just seizes up and nothing happens.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: Because frankly, everybody is afraid for themselves.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: And if it's a choice of being able to make one's mortgage payment or one's kid's tuition and tell the truth at the risk of losing one's career, then people are going to refrain from being as honest, frank, and frankly of of greatest value to their leaders.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what we're finding in today's American diplomatic core.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_04: Just as a quick follow-up, one of the criticisms that's been levied, let's say, at the State Department is that in the current moment, is that it had been too left-leaning and that there had, you know, maybe there had been a culture where it would be hard to speak up on the other side of things.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_04: Do you do how would you respond to that kind of critique?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um there is a grain of truth amid a lot of misrepresentation in such a statement.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: I myself, growing up in the western United States, not getting too far out of Salt Lake City, Utah for the first 25 years of my life, as with many other individuals, as one grows up, one enters the Foreign Service, to put it bluntly, how are you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paris, right?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: You go around the world and you experience the world and you understand a little bit more, that naturally has a curing effect on any nationalistic, isolationist, xenophobic mentality that one might have simply because we're Americans and it's such a huge nation.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yes, I think in general the Foreign Service has a an effect on people, to where perhaps we see that not all American answers are the optimal answers to public policies or or social questions or the way that things are done.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was Mark Twain who said travel is the greatest inoculator towards bigotry, right?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's it just happens that way.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: So those those criticisms, if one could call them that, probably have a grain of truth.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: But hand in hand with that criticism is the back-handed slap saying that individuals who are commissioned officers of the United States government do not have the ability to carry forth their sworn responsibilities to the Constitution and to the elected leaders of our country.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I reject that assertion wholly.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: For almost 37 years, I worked in embassies and consulates and in the Department of State.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um very seldom did I know or even care about the political leanings of those people with whom I worked.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, sometimes if you're uh down at the corner and having a coffee, you can complain about something like any other citizen.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_02: But our job was always seen, and still is always seen, as that of carrying out the policies of the elected leaders of our country.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: And the aspersion cast on a professional diplomat, that is not the case.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: I dare say that if it were levied on the military, it would be taken with a greater amount of umbrage that the general public could identify with.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um so no, I reject it out of hand.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: The sad reality, unfortunately, is that as with the rest of our nation, the diplomatic core and and the events of the last 18 months have brought this to the fore.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: Is that you have individuals, unfortunately, who see the opportunity to to let their politics show because they sense that perhaps if leaders know that deep down and secretly I agree with you, and that makes me a favored son or daughter, rather than maintaining the professionalism of someone whose political opinions don't matter in the execution of their duties.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: The effects of that will be longstanding, because whether or not we become a pendulum of a profession that is swinging in and out with the elected officials is still yet to be seen.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you for that clarification.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um, Jay, I'd love to turn to you and talk a little bit about economic statecraft.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_04: And for those who are listening, please feel free to put questions in the QA box and we'll get to those soon.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_04: Um so economic statecraft, whether it's sanctions or tariffs, this is really a central piece of what the current administration is using as uh diplomacy and what past administrations have used as diplomacy, particularly when it comes to sanctions.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_04: So, from your perspective, what can the history of finance and foreign relations teach us about the opportunities and limits of using economic leverage abroad?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: I first just want to say shout out, John, thanks for quoting a Missourian there with Mark Twain.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: We love we we love that.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I think you could probably write a uh a convincing case that, you know, sanctions and the use of those sorts of economic levers, you know, that that's not new to this administration, um though the way in which it's implementing them and without racing ahead of the uh Foreign Service certainly would be.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: But let me step back.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's where I can add some value to this.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: If you just sort of step back and think about how America fits in to the sort of global economy, the wider world order, it does to go back to that earlier question, it looks a lot more like the 19th century than the mid-20th.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so you think about immigration, high immigration rates in the 19th, low, very low in the mid-20th century, very unusual time.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: You think about empire as a mechanism of extracting wealth and power.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's a 19th century story, very different use of internationalism in the 20th.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: We're seeing more of that in the 21st.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: So when asked about Venezuela, um, certainly our the nature of our domestic politics and the political instability and the nature of the conflict uh looks more like 19th century bare-knuckled politics than it does like the uh bipartisan internationalism that Jessica was referring to earlier.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I agree that we have a danger of looking at that through rose-tinted spectacles, but my golly, give me the domestic politics of the early Cold War, man.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: Give me those any day of the week.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, the other thing that looks really 19th century-esque is this tariffs.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: Tariffs.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: This is the 19th century story.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: And you think about how tariffs played out in American foreign policy and that kind of distant past, you know, there's a lot of common denominators with today.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: Tariffs were part of an unstable geopolitical order, almost by nature.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: The instability both created tariffs and tariffs exacerbated that instability.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: They were part of programs of imperial expansion and closed off trading systems beyond the nature, the nation.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: They were linked to internal domestic corruption.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that that's what tariffs in some ways are.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: They're picking favorites in the economy at home.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: And they were also self-perpetuating.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: A tariff policy is a self-perpetuating policy.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: I always tell students they're like a tin of Pringles, you know, the old chips.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: You when you reach in, you have that first tariff, you you're not going to stop.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna reach in into that tube and you're gonna grab two or three.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things is 19th century politics generally were not like a pro-tariff and then an anti-tariff or free trade party.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: They were just both parties advocating different kinds of tariffs that suited their domestic constituents.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that being said, there's one big difference on tariff policy today versus the 19th century.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and in the 19th century, tariffs were generated by the branch of government that has the constitutional authority to generate them, which is Congress.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was about congressional corruption.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was about congressmen representing the steel mill in their hometown and so forth.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas here we're seeing uh tariffs come out of executive policy, and we're seeing either a compliant Congress acquiescing to it or doing, so far as I can tell, almost nothing to stop to stop it.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: So the exercise of executive authority is like the big flashing light here that makes this look different.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: And even without it, I wouldn't say that the story of tariffs in the 19th century has a particular happy ending at all.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_04: Just to bring it back, Jay, a little bit to what you said earlier about that disconnect between, let's say, the American public and US foreign policy.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_04: Let's take you're in Missouri, right?
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_04: Isn't that like the home of Anheuser Busch?
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_04: Is that am I right?
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_04: So Canada, 50% tariffs.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_04: We import a lot of aluminum.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_04: Is that something that could come home to roost, let's say in the beer industry or other industries?
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_04: Is that where, like down the line, you might see that connection between foreign policy and you know domestic?
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: I I think so.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh the the big one here is of course the soybeans, um the tariffs and the really smart uh retaliatory tariffs that have been put up by nations in response uh or targeting some red states and the soybeans is a key one.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't say it's led to a cratering of support uh for Josh Hawley or uh Donald Trump, Josh Hawley being our uh one of our senators here, but it's certainly not helped them.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: So the volatility that this is generating um will impact the voters.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I would just say this the this round of inflation in Red America, it seems to be hitting us harder than the post-COVID inflation round.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's just more evident, more visible, it's more volatile.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so the oil price has gone up, down, up, down a little bit more, and the upswings have been greater each time.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I do think that part of the answer to the discrediting of the current administration is gonna be how the economic policies create this blowback.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: But that's quite a different question.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: Last point here.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's quite a different matter than the broader point of okay, is the current administration gonna be discredited?
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah, probably.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, just like the Biden administration was discredited, our political culture is really good at tearing things down.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: Who's gonna try to build something fresh up?
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: How do you restore that popular legitimacy?
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: And when I look back to the mid-20th century, I see certain things that maybe are replicable, or give one example, national service.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: You want to know why voters voted for bipartisan internationalism is because so many of the voters were literally invested in the cause through national service.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: So we could think about ways in which we could foster that kind of civic nationalism, but there's certain things that are never coming back.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the key one is economic.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: America's Cold War security state and that policy that took root in the incredibly hospitable soil of an uh economic boom and an asymmetry in the global power, global economy, which the United States had pole position, that's never coming back.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna have to find our way through this mess and uh without the good fortune of having an unusual economic boom.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Courtney, can I add something to that that goes circles back to where you began and go to follows directly from what Jay just said.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um what has what is happening as a result of our pushing away our allies and our drawing, in particular Russia, closer to us, is that our traditional allies are hedging against us.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: They are trying to build new economic relationships that um evade, that circle away from the United States.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: And anybody's paying attention to what Canada has been doing and saying over the last several weeks is the classic case.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: But it's happening in Europe and it's happening in Asia as well.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: That countries um that were happy to and flourishing under a US-led global economy are now building relationships that look away from the United States.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: And boy, that is going to cost us in a very big way over time looking forward to it.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_04: And my second lightning round will be very fast.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_04: I'll go reverse, Jay, John, Jessica.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_04: Who benefits the most from this current style of diplomacy?
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: Allies of President Trump.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's easy.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: I get an A for that.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: Or adversaries of the United States.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: The I mean, I think this is a word we're all gonna have to learn to to recognize and use a lot in the coming years.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um we have built, we are an oligarchy now.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: What we used to sneer at in Russia, the the coming together of political power and economic power in small number of elites, and when we talked endlessly about the enormous dangers of oligarchy, we've got it here now.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we and the big issue that never gets talked about because it's bipartisan, is that somewhere between 800 billion and 1 trillion dollars of taxes go uncollected every year, and it's almost entirely from the ultra-rich, and probably and mostly from individuals rather than corporations.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's uh so there you've got it.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: Think what a trillion dollars a year would buy us in health care, in education, in housing subsidies, etc.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: etc.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um we have built we have a uh this administration in particular, but but it goes back 40 years and under Democrats as well, and it it stems mostly from Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision about how campaigns are financed.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: That now um uh an enormous uh um level of political power resides in a very tiny 0.1 percent of the country of the ultra-rich.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: And how we get out of that is not at all obvious.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Jessica.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna jump in here with that and turn to something you were talking about earlier, Jessica, when you were just kind of not quite projecting ahead, but almost projecting ahead.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_04: So given what Jay just said about these ideas of spheres of influence, and at the same time what you also said earlier about the oligarchs, which resonates with a conversation Network 2020 held earlier this year with Stacey Goddard when we talked about neo-royalism.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_04: How does diplomacy, trying to take it back to the root of the conversation?
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_04: How can you have an effective diplomatic strategy with those headwinds?
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_04: You're a big picture thinker.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_04: What would you advise in this case?
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think um diplomacy is the execution of a strategy which depends itself on a worldview and a and a framing of where US interest lies.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: Until you have that, you diplomats have nothing to execute.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they are the executing arm of a set of ideas and goals and aims, well, you know, strategy.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um we were coming into this administration, we were reaching the end of the post-Cold War period, and with lots and lots of fractures and debate about what our um what our posture in the world should be.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: As I said before, there were still some underlying obvious things that that allies are are a plus, not a minus, for example.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: But um and so we were entering a period where new thinking had to evolve and where people began thinking about a greater restraint in the world and trying to separate um valid leadership from um intervention and the these decades that we'd now have of forever wars.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: But now, I mean, now we're just gonna be rebuilding from a flat plane, uh from much less shared vision, I think, of where we want to be.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's gonna be it's gonna be very uh difficult because in addition to this of having to rebuild our basic assumptions, um we have lost uh the people so much who that we've lost in the State Department have been the best people.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: When life in the State Department became awful, it wasn't the people who've been there five years who who left.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's the very best people.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: They those are the ones who have job offers elsewhere.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so you lose the mentors who train the people up below them.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: So you've lost, I think you've lost uh a couple of generations, you know, till till the foreign service is as strong as it used to be.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: But any foreign service needs a strategy first, and that's that's what we we have to rebuild.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_04: It wasn't quite a fair question.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_04: So I I appreciate what where you took it.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_04: If you have that loss of talent, that talent goes somewhere, and it might go to adjacent places like NGOs or think tanks.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_04: You know, are you seeing that architecture shift to let's say more track two diplomacy?
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_04: Is that getting built up or at city and state levels?
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_04: Like, where do you see that architecture shift?
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_02: I I do not see it being built up within our own institutions, unfortunately.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_02: I see the Asian Development Bank and other international NGOs taking advantage of the talent drain that's coming from the United States, particularly on the side of USAID and the loss of that immense developmental arm of national power.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: As Dr.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_02: Matthews has said, this is a generational issue.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_02: The individuals who largely have departed were then were those who were speaking truth to power, back to the line that I used earlier.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_02: They no longer could function in the profession to which they had been trained.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_02: They are off.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_02: And those who would otherwise have been mentored and formed and created by that generation are deprived of the example.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_02: Whether or not that's intentional, I'll leave for the listener to decide.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_02: But the the ability for us to rebuild the muscle that comes from a knowledge of the institution, a knowledge of the profession, is something that we're not talking about years, we're talking about decades.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_04: Um Jay, I have a question here that is clearly for you.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, what are some lessons from US history that can help us navigate the future of US diplomacy?
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think I'd answer that in relation to what we were just talking about.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about a um a disjunction in the internal workings of statecraft and the State Department in particular.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, are there examples of that from the past and how has it turned out?
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: And this will sound like a kooky one to most of the audience, but the there is a clear example of when one kind of political order got cleared out and a new one came in and it had a transformative impact on American statecraft.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that was in the days of the Civil War, right?
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: The um State Department had been run by pro-slavery southerners for generations.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: Foreign service was packed with pro-slavery emissaries.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and then at the drop of a hat, they're cleared out.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: They're cleared out, and then we have a new era of U.S.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: foreign policy making that coincides, incidentally, with one of the first bursts of internal state making, of the central state kind of developing and beginning to exercise its own muscles, build new institutions.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the old State Department building built in the 1870s, now the Treasury Department, if I'm not mistaken.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: John, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that's the case, the French looking building.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's the Odsen Hour, the executive office building.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: Executive office building, thank you.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that was an example of how you had a disjunction at home and Foreign Service completely was transformed.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: I guess the lesson from that was though it was a clear break between one political regime to the next, it took a long time for the State Department to develop new processes, a new identity, a new form of internal systems and reviews and policies and procedures and so forth.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I suspect that if anything, it'll take even longer this time uh with whatever comes next, given the complexity of the state.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: So the lesson there, long and short, is don't hold your breath, guys.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: This is gonna be a bumpy ride for a long time, even if uh we're witnessing the end of Trumpism and with whatever comes next, don't expect a snap of a fingers, and the State Department is functioning like something different right away.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's worth looking that if you look at history, most of these big transitions and rethinking come following wars.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so what you need now is post-war thinking without the war.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_00: You need the ambition, the determination, the fresh thinking, the new look, the kinds of things that a post-war environment gives you, but without the war.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: We have come to time.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_04: I just want to say thank you, all of you, for helping give us both the historical context, the view from the inside, the larger geopolitical picture of what's happening.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_04: You know, my big takeaway is that we have we ultimately have to look forward and that it may take many decades to get back to, at least in the diplomatic sphere, a semblance of something that, you know, resonates with where we've been in the past.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and John, I just really appreciated your comment about the next generation and that they might be building something new.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_04: And if you're younger and listening to this, I would love to hear from you.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_04: Um, Network 2020 would love to hear from you about what you think about this, because I do think that that is one of the big questions moving forward.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you, everyone listening.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you, Jessica, John, Jay.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_04: You were fantastic, and I appreciate your taking your time and just sharing your tremendous expertise with us.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_04: It's a pleasure.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: Take care, everyone.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_02: Bye-bye.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Global Insights.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_03: You can subscribe to Global Insights on the podcast, Spotify, wherever you get your money.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_03: For more analysis, events, and ways to connect with our community, click on the link in the description.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_03: See you next time.