jaw jaw or war war
reflections on the recent prison exchange
U.S. citizens tend to advocate for military prowess as the answer to everything because we have had more power back to World War II. Hard power, as we like to call it, certainly led to victory in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters in 1945. Military power still provides a nuclear umbrella over dozens of allies as it has for 75 years, preventing a Soviet, then Russian attack in western Europe. It was crucial to forcing Saddam Hussein to reverse his seizure of Kuwait forty-five years later. Using military power was essential to forcing the North Koreans back north of the 38th Parallel after their 1950 aggression. Sustained military presence is deterring the PRC from forcibly reuniting Taiwan with the mainland. No question of its role in any of those cases.
However, if military power is a pivotal instrument in any nation’s kit, so is the ability to persuade or cajole others, also known as diplomacy. Our instruments are not either diplomacy or military power because both are vital and reinforce each other.
The photograph above the fold of today’s Wall Street Journal, showing three people Vlad the Impaler exchanged for his thugs and murderers incarcerated abroad, are evidence of the imperative diplomacy provides in concert with several instruments of national power.
We in this country don’t tend to like diplomacy sometimes, for several reasons. First, the public often buys the tired idea that Foreign Service Officers are all white men in pinstriped suits who shop at Barney’s in New York or were born on Beacon Hill in Boston. Sure, men, particularly Ivy Leaguers, dominated the field for generations as service academy graduates overwhelmingly received flag officer ranks instead of their fellow officers from civilian universities.
With the advent of law suits forcing reform in the late 1970s and early 80s, women make up about forty percent of the Foreign Service Officers, that extraordinarily select cadre who represent us as diplomats. They serve at all levels. Attempts to expand minority representation was a major consideration for incoming personnel for most of the past thirty years, although less so under the tenure of Secretary Tillerson who was hostile to his own department’s professionals altogether anecdotally. A more representative face of this country to the world gives us advantages as the world itself changes by seeing us at times.
Second, critics charge diplomats spend much of their careers representing us overseas so they likely become prone to “clientitis”: privileging the interests of the country where they are stationed over that of the United States. Some of the people who have read this column over the past 670 days since I started writing have disdained diplomats as “weak” or “useless”.
Associated with this is the unspoken assumption that diplomats are the cause of “foreign aid”, another instrument Americans see as “throwing money down a rat hole” as the late aid-hating North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms used to say.
In my years teaching these professionals along side military officers, I can name a single “soft” or unrealistic diplomat. FSOs are far more “realist”—meaning they count raw power as the coin of the realm—than the overwhelming majority of military officers. The difference is that FSOs recognize other incentives to change the mind of a peer or an adversary may be much less costly, if not as immediate, but sometimes we have to go in big with hard power in the eyes of diplomats when other things fail. But theFSO often believes issues can tolerate, painful as it may be, more time to work them out. But I have not heard FSO opt for an option which won’t work at all (though it happens, I am sure). FSOs knew that ousting Saddam by military invasion in 2003 meant a whole additional level of effort that we were not ready for—and the military officers generally paid the price for their own naïvete about changing a society.
Third, Americans tend to privilege action over the value of talking because the use raw power will surely get our way. Discussing an issue ad nauseum supposedly leaves us weaker and more vulnerable.
Certainly talking with no end in sight is a recipe for problems at times but diplomats are exquisitely sensitive to feasibilities and build on minuscule steps to build momentum in negotiations. FSOs recognize the power of iterative work rather than “one and done” but challenges are not all amendable to a single approach. Plus, the negotiator requires some empathy for the position the other side confronts. Who wants to be weak all of the time as the government ruling on behalf of its people? It’s not a successful position so harsh pressure often creates wedges rather than concessions needed to accomplish something like a prisoner exchange.
But diplomacy and those conducting it are different today in many ways from the stereotypes. The Diplomatic Corps, known as the Foreign Service, has roughly 8,000 members broken into general jobs in political, public diplomacy, economic, or consular “cones”. Beyond that number, embassies almost invariably have other functions requiring specific tasks such as foreign commercial operations but those technically are not FSOs. The Armed Forces, on the other hand, have 1.29 million active duty personnel, just under 750,000 in the reserves/National Guard, and three quarters of a million civilians supporting efforts, a far cry from the tiny FSO corps.
Diplomats discuss. That is their jobs, listening at least as much as they talk. Listening is actually an active verb requiring a shrew ability to hear with incredible precision an interlocutor‘s positions while passing it with our policy goals. The positions also mandate knowledge of the other side’s perspectives, history, aspirations, language, and overall context because misconstruing any of those will often trash hopes of progress on negotiations.
Not all diplomats, however, are FSOs. Heads of state function in that capacity as well but their role is somewhat different. Of course the commitments any FSO makes on behalf of the United States must include an iron clad ability to deliver or that individual’s and nation’s credibility craters. This is why the Foreign Service does not have too many rogue actors signing us up for something we can’t do. Occasionally political ambassadors, those named to a post as reward for a financial contribution or campaign, get into trouble when they act on their own but not often.
The value heads of state bring to negotiations is a Rolodex of links to world leaders. It is here that a president can play an extraordinary role as seems to have occurred yesterday with Joe Biden, the subject of so much hyperbole about his age, cognitive skills, and energy. While he is now out of the presidential fray for the last time as he enters his final five months in the Oval Office, Biden’s half century in foreign relations came into its own.
Knowing who to approach in a problem is far from obvious at times. Biden obviously is on a first name basis with hundreds of senior foreign leaders. He is generally, I would imagine, respectful of their time, their positions, their experiences (with Vlad in this case), their equities, and the leverage we might have to incentivize them working to achieve our goals. Repeat: getting the other guy to do our job makes negotiations go far more effectively.
And it is that little piece at the end of the last sentence so central to diplomacy but antithetical to our national increased sense of fractiousness and entitlement over the past few years. We succeed most effectively and expeditiously when we induce others to do what we want (or need) as their first priority. Inducing sounds a bit more positive as it means offering a positive idea worth pursuing.
Biden, like George H.W. Bush four decades ago, built a foreign policy career seeing who, why, what, where, and when matter in foreign policy. He applied that knowledge and experience to seeing what would incentivize others to provide Vlad with something to satisfy him in exchange for the four Americans. It required patience, energy, readdressing questions from multiple sources several times, and adjusting our conversations with our interlocutors—pleasant and annoying ones—to achieve the goal.
Sometimes those choices are extraordinarily distasteful, such as releasing an assassin in this deal. The Kremlin is now admitting some of the exchanged prisoners were their spies who had operated in the west, indeed disappointing. But the ultimate objective—for us, releasing multiple people held unjustly for up to six years—outweighed the distasteful. The Chinese have a wonderful phrase for this: eating bitter fruit. We may have ingested bitter fruit but believed the outcome merited the sourness. That shot of Ella Milman swinging in her son’s arms yesterday attested to her willingness to eat bitter fruit to reach bigger joy. The families in Israel still awaiting their hostage family members are willing to do the same.
The real world in 2024, however, behooves us to make these choices and to pursue these negotiations. Ironically, Biden was amid his most intense period of self-reappraisal and hosting a major NATO summit as he met with family members, his German and other European counterparts, and our won national security team while tooling and retooling the talks to reach the finish line.
As I have said, governing (or diplomacy) is not for the faint of heart or those who don’t do detail. It’s not a handwave but it’s a messy, iterative, rigourous, sometimes mind numbing process of weighing options, consequences, objectives, costs, and everything else as is strategy; it must feel boring at times as it works its way through the wants on all sides of the talks. Perhaps Jimmy Carter was too involved in details but a successful negotiator must confidently understand the context, then incentivize the change in someone else’s behavior that will get that country to release our hostages in this case.
Americans too often fall back on threats, intimidation, and hard power as if there were no alternatives. Occasionally there are not alternatives but much of the time it’s knowing how to build a diplomatic package with sufficiency to satisfy the players that matter. It’s always the case that studying the case to understand the ins, outs, and actors is the predicate to doing anything rather than blustering our way with proclamations of what we don’t accept because we are the United States.
Taking that time may appear weakness to some but it’s actual a manifestation of the strength of our national reputation, our aspirations, our commitments and our role in the world. Thank goodness Biden understood that in this case; I hope successors for decades learn from this experience. His record is not perfect but no president’s ever was or will be. Whether you like him or abhor him, we will miss his experience and studied grasp of the rest of the world when he departs the scene in January. We have no one else quite like him these days.
I appreciate your time reading Actions today. Please feel free to offer me any comments. Thank you for those whose subscriptions mean so much.
It was a lovely morning but it’s a beastly hot day.
Be well and be safe. FIN
“How many people in the U.S. military? A demographic overview”, usafacts.org, 21 February 2024, retrieved at https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-are-in-the-us-military-a-demographic-overview/
Dan Ladden-Hall, “Kremlin Finally Admits Swapped Russian Prisoners were its Top Spies”, thedailybeast.com, 2 August 2024, retrieved at https://www.thedailybeast.com/kremlin-finally-admits-swapped-russian-prisoners-were-its-top-spies
Andrea Starno, “Foreign Service Women Today: The Palmer Case and Beyond”, afsa.org, March 2016, retrieved at https://afsa.org/foreign-service-women-today-palmer-case-and-beyond