|
|
|
|
A New First Line of Defense
By Henry E. Mattox, Editor
For long those who pondered questions of America's international relations viewed the Foreign Service of the United States as the nation's first line of defense against global threats in a perilous world. Secretary of State Dean Acheson in the 1940's probably first enunciated the concept, one based on the potentially hazardous interplay of opposing interests in the Cold War era. This evaluation was accepted as a useful insight without any intent, of course, to belittle the importance of the armed services, the ultimate arbiters of international disputes if other means failed. The concept of the Foreign Service's role derived from the proposition (as articulated by Henry Kissinger in 1957) that diplomacy is "the art of relating states to each other by agreement rather than by the exercise of force" (A World Restored). Diplomats thus manned the front lines in confrontations or threatened clashes with the then-USSR and the Soviet bloc.
Arguments can be made about what factors and which world leaders played the largest roles in ending the Cold War after more than forty years of tension. American foreign policy assuredly was one of the factors. U.S. diplomatic representatives in trouble spots around the world faced off with their Iron Curtain opponent and its allies daily for decades—receiving, coping with, and counteracting initial probes and pressures, reporting and making recommendations to Washington often under extreme pressures of time and circumstances, and implementing guidance instructions steadily and calmly.
Secretary Acheson manifestly got it right when he called the Foreign Service the nation's first line of defense. It was surely that over a substantial period of time, the political/economic/policy equivalent of a Distant Early Warning system.
The picture patently has changed during the past ten years or so. Now we and like-minded democracies live in a trying time of international terrorism. Fanatical, religion-driven extremists pursue their ends through violence, sometimes very large in scale, visited quite deliberately upon civilian targets. The nature of the problem makes it improbable that members of the Foreign Service—embassy political, economic, and consular officers and the like—would play a central role in gaining early awareness of terrorist intentions.
The new front line for defense of the nation in this changed, terrorism-plagued world, now consists of the various intelligence services. The American 9/11 Special Commission—the bipartisan National Commission on the Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States—lays this out in detail in its recent almost-600-page report of its hearings and study of the evidence on the 2001 aerial suicide attacks on New York and Washington. The Commission's hard-hitting report concludes that U. S. intelligence agencies failed to do their duty: The counter-terrorism measures taken over the past several years failed to disturb or even delay the 9/11 attacks. The unanimous report strongly recommends sweeping changes in intelligence leadership, organization, and responsibility as a consequence of this failure. The newly designated first line of defense likely will undergo a structural streamlining soon, and that is profoundly to be hoped for.
Meanwhile, the Foreign Service, no longer bearing the designation as the first line of America's defense, nonetheless would, in the Commission's construct, be faced with a daunting task. Diplomats' responsibility would be no less than attempting to persuade rulers in Muslim countries to adopt programs and measures leading to greater openness in their societies and political systems. Not an easy assignment, to put it mildly, no matter how important in a long-run resolution of the terrorism threat.
So, because of the waning of traditional cross-border wars and rumors of wars dangers, and the rise of clandestine terrorist threats, the Foreign Service early in the twenty-first century no longer plays the vital role of the first line of defense in a global conflict. A myriad of vital duties nonetheless remains. Its most important terrorism-related task as delineated by the 9/11 group (above) is hardly less challenging and difficult than serving as an early warning system.
August 5, 2004