Day-to-day diplomats sorely missed

WASHINGTON — For two weeks now, the talk in Washington foreign policy circles has been about who should speak to whom. Should Barack Obama talk to the mercurial Hugo Chavez? Even the horrid Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Should Hillary Clinton talk to Fidel or perhaps others of those “celebrity dictators” of the world? Heck, she often doesn’t even talk to her husband!

The endlessly drawn-out row began, of course, during the July 23 debate when Obama said he personally, as president, would meet with leaders of Iran, Cuba and North Korea, however abhorrent, without preconditions. He later clarified his thinking, saying more thoughtfully: “It’s time to turn the page on Washington’s conventional wisdom that agreement must be reached before you meet.”

The problem is that Clinton and Obama could not have hit more PRECISELY on what is wrong, not only in our foreign policy, but in America itself today — although they didn’t really know it. What we should be concerned with is re-establishing and reinstitutionalizing our system of embassies, ambassadors, special envoys and mannered diplomacy instead of worrying about off-the-wall dictators.

What exactly have George W. Bush and his merry destroyers done in these realms in these last seven years? They have dangerously and willfully decimated the roles of our traditional diplomats and others with related positions, the ones who have always maintained day-to-day relations with leaders of other countries.

Local customs

It is they who are bedded down in foreign countries, night after night, knowing the locals, knowing the customs, knowing what can or cannot be done. No serious diplomat or foreign correspondent who has ever been to Iraq, for instance, would have thought we could so blithely take it over. Understanding a culture isn’t just something; it’s everything.

There are times when, having built upon this solid base of in-country professional diplomats, a president might choose to send a particularly able envoy, like James Baker III, who traveled to the Middle East for President George H.W. Bush. There are special times when a president himself will go to meet another leader, like Ronald Reagan meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva. But those times are rare — and their effectiveness depends upon their rarity.

In place of these traditional methods, George W. Bush has established an administration that is far more like a court. He is the French dauphin, Dick Cheney is Cardinal Richelieu, Don Rumsfeld was the Napoleonic figure, and the courtiers circle around them with their silent loyalties to special groups and, often, to other countries. In this strange court, there has been little space for professionals, for balancers, for, as I like to think of them, the “in-between” persons.

Who are the “in-between” people? They are the diplomats we have spoken of; they are the foreign correspondents who go out into the world, able to talk to everyone; and they are the NGOs, the think-tank scholars, missionaries, do-gooders, even some international business people.

‘Disconnected nation’

Most important, the in-between people are those who have historically filled out the weave of American political life. They provide the complicated connections between political, military and economic interests, civilizing connections that strengthen the culture of this nation and prevent any one interest from gaining too much power. That is what so many Americans mean when they say that we have become a “disconnected” nation.

The first in-betweens, the diplomats, are still out there in their fortress embassies, true. But many posts today are deemed too dangerous for diplomats’ families to live in, thus limiting their incorporation into the society they serve. Only this spring, a report by the Government Accountability Office noted that: “Security concerns have forced embassies to close publicly accessible facilities and curtail certain public outreach efforts, sending the unintended message that the United States is unapproachable.” Bye-bye to the crucial connection of diplomacy!

The second in-betweens, the foreign correspondents, are those crazy people — I was long one — who go out into the most dangerous war zones and, virtually alone, and bring back all the news. At the end of World War II, there were 2,500 American foreign correspondents. Today there are fewer than 250. Every day, you hear of newspapers cutting back on staff — 100 here, 120 there, 80 there, plus correspondents being brought home.

Universal Press Syndicate