America could have had a foreign service second to none. But Washington could not accept any such rigorously selective and nonpolitical corps. And with the diffusion of authority around the globe, many entities from outside the diplomatic world are busy representing their nations abroad, for better or worse.
George F. Kennan was a career officer in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1926 to 1953, retiring as Ambassador to the Soviet Union. He has been Professor, then Professor, Emeritus, at the Institute for Advanced Study.
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Before the last war, the tasks of American foreign policy were comparatively well defined. Secretary Cordell Hull, with a Washington staff of less than 1,000, presided over our entire global diplomatic establishment from a building shared with the War and Navy Departments. The function of the 78 ambassadors and ministers stationed abroad consisted largely of reporting and analyzing the flow of events and representing the President in negotiations and ceremonial events.
Since 1914 the structure of the world has changed. Compared to the present struggle between West and East, the rivalries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sink into insignificance. Today we are faced, not with a clash of interests, but with a fight between ideologies, between the desire on the one hand to defend individual liberties and the resolve on the other hand to impose a mass religion. In the process the old standards, conventions and methods of international negotiation have been discredited. Had it not been for the invention of the atomic bomb, we should already have been subjected to a third world war.
American foreign policy is changing, but the machinery of government is not changing with it. As we try to enter what President Nixon has called an era of negotiation, it is time to ask whether the nation is well served by the immense foreign affairs bureaucracies that have grown up in Washington over the past quarter-century. Could institutional reform give new coherence to our foreign policy? How these questions are answered may well determine the success or failure of American diplomacy in the seventies.
