Making American Diplomacy Relevant

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Writing in 1969 Henry Kissinger commented that "the United States is no longer in a position to operate programs globally; it has to encourage them. It can no longer impose its preferred solution; it must seek to evoke it. In the forties and fifties, we offered remedies; in the late sixties and in the seventies our role will have to be to contribute to a structure that will foster the initiative of others. . . . This task requires a different kind of creativity and another form of patience than we have displayed in the past."1

What kind of creativity and what form of patience? At first glance the task of evoking preferred solutions to the problems of a multipolar world would appear ideally suited to the powers of reason, patience and persuasion with which professional diplomats are supposed to be preternaturally endowed. The objective conditions for a rebirth of traditional diplomacy seem everywhere present. The number of nation-states jockeying for position in world affairs has never been larger. The influence of international political organizations has never been weaker. And the concentration of mutually offsetting military power in the hands of a few states has generally enhanced the bargaining advantages of national sovereignty.

Yet, paradoxically, at this most propitious of moments the professional diplomat finds his ability to influence events at its lowest ebb. The decline in his fortunes almost exactly parallels the decline in the ability of governments to conduct their relations without diplomacy. Does career diplomacy thus have a valid and continuing role to play in world affairs, or, as Maria Callas once said of opera, is it a dead art which can at best be resuscitated only for individual performances?

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