With regard to the second feature, perpetual reform, Kori Schake draws an important distinction. The U.S. military has a good reputation for self-study and self-criticism. Nearly every action is followed by an after-action report. This is true, though to a lesser extent, among civilians in the Defense Department. The State Department does far less of this kind of thing, much, she argues, to its detriment. Diplomats tend to downplay losses, even paper over mistakes.

At the same time, the State Department, and the foreign service especially, has been the subject of so many reform efforts that those unreflective moments seem impossible to recall. Indeed, one or another reform effort has appeared at least every couple of years for the past five decades. Nearly all follow the 1924 precedent in advocating greater consolidation in some areas, a bit more autonomy in others and much more adaptation to current world conditions, which in practice has often meant a shift from geographic to functional expertise, reassignments to new, special bureaus and so on, often at the behest of outside pressure, notably from Congress. Nearly all, in other words, call for reaching better results with existing or slightly more resources within existing or modified structures. Most have been co-opted to varying degrees by the preexisting system over which the geographic bureaus still preside, however tenuously.

At its root, the State Department is among the more conservative bureaucracies. Schake looks upon the latest of these efforts—the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review—with a bemused eye, wondering why the review calls for so many new “specialized areas of expertise” when such should already be “core skills for America’s diplomats.” Ultimately it “has tended to reinforce stereotypes of State as self-congratulatory and programmatically inept.”

In fact, bureaucratic conservatism in both departments tends to mask something they also both have in common but which is probably more widespread at State: policy entrepreneurship. Both civilians and military personnel in the Pentagon tend to fill roles and positions that are laid down, ultimately, by orders that are issued vertically. Such systems have long and occasionally rigid time horizons; or, as former secretary Robert Gates recently stated, “The Pentagon is an organization structured to plan for war, not to wage war.” There is much jockeying for promotion and movement within this system, but it is a fairly rigid system nonetheless.

The same is true at State to an extent, but there also tends to be, at least until fairly recently, more fluidity, or at least uncertainty, with regard to personnel tracks—and therefore a greater need for shrewd salesmanship. Whereas excellent military officers can spend their entire careers, particularly in peacetime, with only one or no stars—this is a typical fate for foreign-area officers, for example—the very best diplomats tend somehow to climb to the top if they don’t give up or are not sidetracked along the way.

NEGROPONTE’S CAREER illustrates the greasy diplomatic pole well. Starting as a young officer in Hong Kong, he moved to Vietnam and leveraged that post to land a spot on the staff at the Paris Peace talks. Later he was recruited by Henry Kissinger to work for him at the National Security Council. After breaking with Kissinger over Vietnam policy, Negroponte was exiled to Ecuador, where he reinvented himself as a Latin Americanist. He would go on to achieve renown as a wartime ambassador to Honduras, where the United States was involved in vicious conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and later as ambassador in Mexico at the time of the NAFTA negotiations. From there it was on to the Philippines, the UN, Iraq and finally back to Washington as the country’s first director of national intelligence.

Throughout this career Negroponte demonstrated a strong, even rare, ability to see inside the minds (and speak the languages) of the people with whom he worked, from Vietnamese peasants to Latin American heads of state to Washington politicos. Yet in some instances—with Kissinger and later toward a few hotheads in the Reagan administration—he could take a firm stand on principle and survive with his reputation enhanced. That his professional diplomatic talents and his reputation rose in direct proportion was at once typical and ironic, for his career took him beyond the State Department to the White House and intermittently to the private sector. But this is how the American foreign-policy elite functions and, to some extent, has for a long time.

In recounting this story, Liebmann has the advantage of having been a childhood neighbor and friend of his subject. This kind of familiarity can mar a good biography, but it works in this case because Liebmann is able to demonstrate empathy with a man so impenetrable that he was once described (with George Tenet during Powell’s infamous UN address) as being “like [a] Benedictine Monk at Vespers”—while at the same time going out of his way to write judiciously, if a somewhat too copiously, about Negroponte’s career.

SCHAKE’S PORTRAIT of the State Department, on the other hand, is more of a pamphlet than a copious study. She picks and chooses, often insightfully, but at other times loses herself in stereotypes about cookie pushers. There is a bigger and more telling problem to address. At several points, Schake suggests that there is little point for the State Department besides consular activity and a greater contribution to border control. She argues that the department’s problem is not so much that it has insufficient resources to do its job but rather that it tries to do too much—and does much of it badly. It should stay lean, she seems to think, but should be meaner as well. Here she includes some valuable points about professional education.

Information gathering, reporting and similar foreign-service functions, she writes, are no longer necessary because of new technologies. Others now do them better than diplomats anyway. Of modern diplomacy’s principal purposes since it was invented six centuries ago in Renaissance Italy—to advance and protect the sovereign’s interests, to preserve peace and to be the primary official means for conducting affairs abroad—she makes barely any mention. If this perspective is widespread in Washington, the State Department really does have a problem, and Negroponte may well be the last American diplomat.

It is not difficult to imagine the reaction of an old foreign-service officer to such criticism. In public: a direct gaze and an anodyne statement about the importance of bureaucratic reform. In private: a slight rolling of the eyes, perhaps a sigh and a been-there-many-times-before-already remark. If that were to happen in this case, it would be a pity. Schake’s draconian prescriptions may strike diplomatic traditionalists as ill informed, even strange, but she issues an important challenge.

Not since Woodrow Wilson tried to invent something called the New Diplomacy has the United States faced a moment when it needs to reconceptualize the fundamental ways and means of what used to be called, in Wilson’s day, world order. For all that their hearts may in the right place, Secretary Hillary Clinton and her band of “Diplomacy 2.0” bloggers will not do it on their own. Good, serious diplomacy has always been about moving beyond the confines of ministries and parliaments. This is not new in theory; only the “modalities,” as they like to say in the Pentagon, have changed. But the changes have been so fast and dramatic that America’s diplomats and soldiers need to remind themselves of the axioms that guide their thinking and improve the practices they use to advance their country’s power and its interests—as they generally have done for decades—together.

Kenneth Weisbrode is a writer and historian. His latest book is On Ambivalence: The Problems and Pleasures of Having It Both Ways (The MIT Press, 2012).

Image: Alisjuli