Few structural reasons behind the failure of US foreign policy

 It's important to understand few structural reasons behind the failure of US foreign policy in last two decades. You might be thinking that the ‘best and brightest’ diplomats in the US are awarded with ambassadorial postings at Beijing, Moscow, London or Tokyo. Instead the best posting which a young, bright American diplomat can aspire is Bamako, the capital of Mali. 

Why is that? American ambassadorships are now for sale. The most desirable postings go to donors of presidential campaigns. President Obama gave out a record number of American ambassadorships to rich donors. According to the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) in 2014, “in his second term so far, Obama has named a record number of political appointees, more than half, as compared to other recent presidents, who tend to name donors and friends to about one-third of the ambassadorial posts”.

Some donors were indeed quite effective e.g Jon Huntsman proved in China. However, since American presidential candidates have to raise a lot of money and since generous donors now expect to be rewarded with plum ambassadorial posts, it is virtually impossible for America to now develop a professional diplomat corps that can match what the Chinese have built. To make matters worse, even though the budget of the State Department ($31.5 billion) is truly minuscule compared to that of the Defense Department ($626 billion), many American politicians are trying to squeeze. 

Fareed Zakaria describes the danger of this approach:

Most diplomats from their respective countries receive one set of instructions from their capitals. Hence, they spend most of their time negotiating with other countries. American diplomats do the opposite. They spend almost 90% of their time negotiating with several agencies Washington, DC, to receive a reasonable and coherent set of instructions. After painfully negotiating with several Washington, DC, agencies, the American diplomats are left with positions that give them little room to compromise. Negotiations only succeed when countries have have the flexibility to make compromises at the negotiating table. American diplomats are severely handicapped in this respect. Both absolute power and conflicting demands from domestic agencies leave American negotiators with little room for flexibility.

 America has produced some of the best career diplomats like Tom Pickering, Chas Freeman, and John Negroponte. Clearly, there must have been an effective ecosystem of selecting and nurturing talent that resulted in the emergence of such outstanding professionals but clearly the ecosystem has been damaged by the poor leadership of recent secretaries of state, including Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo. American foreign policy would be significantly strengthened if the administration in office could learn the art of listening to American diplomats and developing policies that are in harmony with the views and sentiments of the global population. 

Reference: 

“Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy” by Kishore Mahbubani