The National Interest
Winter 2001/02

Retail Diplomacy

by Suzanne Nossel

 

. . . In A Dangerous Place, an account of his experience as U.S. Ambassador to the UN in the mid-1970s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested that the United States use its bilateral ties to advance multilateral priorities. Absent other compelling bilateral goals, Moynihan argued, the U.S. Ambassador to Togo, for example, should make it his or her number one objective to secure that country’s backing on key matters in the UN and other forums. By mobilizing support in this way, he suggested, the United States might have headed off the "Zionism Is Racism" resolution that sent U.S.-UN relations into a decades-long downward spiral.

Unfortunately, Moynihan’s proposal went nowhere. Multilateral issues remain a sidebar at best to bilateral relationships. Ambassadors have no incentive to push remote and contentious multilateral issues that have little direct bearing on their day-to-day jobs. When the State Department asks that a typical UN issue be raised, embassies tend to simply fax off a background paper to the foreign ministry. When it is brought up at all, the issue is generally raised in isolation, rather than as something central to the give-and-take of the relationship. Even where embassies are willing to push, they rarely have sufficient information to persuade. Though the United States has unparalleled capacity to wage effective campaigns on the global stage via its network of diplomats, this machinery rarely kicks into gear.

On pressing issues, ambassadors need to be held accountable for delivering the support of their host countries and, in turn, they need to be equipped with the tools and incentives to do so. During the dues debate, the limitations of traditional channels, whereby only the State Department can "instruct" an embassy to raise an issue, became immediately apparent. Instruction cables, required to go through multiple "clearances" by various regional and functional bureaus, were too slow, formal and routine to elicit the necessary advocacy and energy. Instead, once the instructions were given, U.S. diplomats at the UN established direct relationships with their counterparts in various capitals, providing detailed, country-specific information in real time. Traditionally, when UN issues are raised in capitals, they are brought up only once, with the ambassador reporting back via cable whether the host country said "yes" or "no." On the dues issue, by contrast, since countries’ initial reactions were invariably negative, the first approach needed to be supplemented by a campaign to turn "no" into "yes." U.S. diplomats at the UN implored their colleagues in embassies to press on in the face of opposition, and to raise the issue repeatedly whenever the country’s relationship with the United States was discussed.

While the United States knows how to mount an aggressive diplomatic campaign when it needs to, the efforts tend to be confined to a handful of countries routinely judged as major players, irrespective of whether these governments are actually calling the shots on a given issue. During the dues campaign, these stepped-up tactics were deployed around the world, with more than fifty embassies actively engaged. In this way, the United States was able to ferret out some unlikely ringleaders—Oman for the Gulf Cooperation Council, for example—who were ultimately behind unfavorable groups’ positions.

The UN dues campaign illustrates that the multifaceted relationships between the United States and most other countries make it possible to use both carrots and sticks to elicit cooperation. When a collective incentive such as the salvaging of the U.S.-UN relationship will not sway a country, a more targeted individual inducement may. Most nations count the United States among their most important relationships, a position that confers substantial leverage.

But links between bilateral and multilateral agendas are rare. The State Department strictly separates responsibility for multilateral and bilateral priorities, and the bureaucracy is deeply skittish about quid pro quos. The conventional wisdom is that linking unrelated issues complicates bilateral relationships, risking charges of abuse of power. While other countries routinely trade votes on candidates for election to international bodies, U.S. policy forbids it. As a result, on the Human Rights Committee vote we were deserted by some of our closest friends who had committed to trades with other countries in order to advance election campaigns they were waging.

The U.S. government maintains no central ledger in which bilateral relationships are tracked. There is no place to turn to find out what the United States has done for a particular country lately, or what a country may want or fear. We do not keep formal track of which U.S. officials have trusted relationships with which foreign counterparts, of who in the business world might bring influence to bear, or even of what we have learned about how each government makes decisions. An ambassador or State Department desk officer will have part of the picture, but so will officials in Defense, Commerce and other departments and agencies. Likewise, no one tracks what the United States is seeking from others, so that just as one Executive Branch department is trying to curry favor on a top priority, another may be complaining about something petty. Because they are smaller, and their relations with the United States are of high priority, other countries’ right hands are much more likely to know what their left hands are doing when it comes to relations with the United States. While they can play off a range of policy issues to get what they want out of the Americans, the United States is poorly organized to do the same. . . .