George W. Liebmann, The Last American Diplomat: John D. Negroponte and the Changing Face of US Diplomacy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 384 pp., $99.00.

Kori N. Schake, State of Disrepair: Fixing the Culture and Practices of the State Department (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2012), 194 pp., $19.95.

John Negroponte in Honduras, 1984.Of the many dichotomies in American public life, one of the most durable is the one between soldiers and diplomats. It fits nicely with others: hawks and doves; patriots and cosmopolites; nationalists and inter- or multinationalists. There are also related operational and behavioral dichotomies: strong versus weak; doing versus talking; solving versus managing problems. We cling, as President Obama infamously said, to our oppositional stereotypes. They are at once false and terribly real.

These stereotypes can be tempting to debunk. But we must do so with our eyes open. Some fifty years ago, the late historian Ernest May wrote what became a famous, but now largely forgotten, essay called “The Nature of Foreign Policy: The Calculated versus the Axiomatic.” It is about as clear a dissection of the dichotomous nature of American foreign-policy making as one could devise. In it he pointed to several instances where policy makers tried to limit, contain or otherwise control a foreign crisis or set of problems, only to find that the calculations failed and they were left nothing to fall back upon to guide subsequent decisions—except, that is, for the small set of axioms that are passed, and occasionally modified, from generation to generation.

Axioms tend to appear in the guise of slogans or doctrines. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Monroe Doctrine—which did not originate with that name—defined the American map of the Western Hemisphere. World War II and the Cold War expanded the doctrine, or variations of it, to the North Atlantic, the Persian Gulf and the North Pacific but stopped—by way of a terrible miscalculation—in Southeast Asia. Other important axioms include the “Open Door,” the “Good Neighbor,” and, more recently, the regional idea of “Whole and Free.” (Actually, this idea has roots in the Western Hemisphere going back to the early nineteenth century but now is applied mainly to post–Cold War Europe. Imagine an Asia whole and free!) Finally, there are the axioms that are attached to historical lessons or principles: the Munich principle of appeasement, which informed much of the thinking that went into nuclear deterrence; or the “lessons” of World War I and Vietnam, which still make policy makers think twice (or more than twice) about intervention and escalation for reasons of prestige or “credibility.”

This is all to say that the ways of thinking and acting in foreign affairs can be more consequential than the uniforms of the people doing them. At the same time, bureaucracies and bureaucratic culture matter, and not just on the margins. Ways of thinking do not evolve on their own; they are honed, rewarded, penalized and molded by official and unofficial environments and networks. The old model —where you sit is where you stand—contains a good deal of truth, but it is a necessary yet insufficient way to explain why the United States government does some things and should or should not do others. Thus, for all that the Defense and State Departments represent different cultures and policy capacities—not all directly connected to their vastly disparate budgets—we must remind ourselves that this particular binary opposition is easy to oversimplify or get wrong.

THESE TWO BOOKS offer a useful corrective to others, such as Stephen Glain’s State vs. Defense, that repeat the mantra that U.S. foreign policy has become overly militarized. Dwight D. Eisenhower was not the only one to warn of this—and his warning had to do mainly with domestic affairs. George Marshall also liked to say that giving the military a problem to solve will almost certainly result in a military solution. So why does it keep happening?

The truth is that it does and it does not. The Pentagon’s largesse has a powerful self-perpetuating quality, as anyone who has ever examined budgeting practices will understand. Use it or lose it, fortunately, does not always translate directly into its decision making. Largesse brings with it a bevy of constituencies and backers that the State Department could never replicate—even if the entire U.S. population suddenly were to demand multiple passports and massive passport factories were to appear in a dozen key Congressional districts. There probably never will be a diplomat-industrial complex, although an intelligence-security-industrial complex may someday come close. Therefore many things that civilians can and should do, both at home and abroad, will continue to be done by the U.S. military.

Yet this asymmetry only tells part of the story. Generations of diplomats have excelled at doing more with less. They are, ultimately, the ones who keep the country out of wars and who clean up the mess after they have begun. Big wallets and gunships have helped in both sets of instances, but ultimately diplomats are trained to succeed by their wits, whose value is impossible to quantify. Sometimes it can lead to the strategic brilliance of a Marshall Plan, quantifiable only at the outset; other times it can just mean being in the right place at the right time. It also can occasionally backfire.

Invoking Marshall’s name here is apt. Not all America’s diplomats have been “professionals.” Some of its best, like Marshall and Eisenhower, were also military men before they were statesmen, both in uniform and in mufti. Whereas some of the people most responsible for advocating and defending the use of force, as George Liebmann demonstrates in the case of John Negroponte, have been professional diplomats or have otherwise been part of State. One is reminded here, too, of Madeleine Albright’s infamous “use it or lose it” outburst that so angered Colin Powell. The roles and the professions are not fully interchangeable and, again, professional formation matters tremendously, but both have been quite malleable throughout American history. This has been, on balance, a source of strength, especially relative to other countries with more inflexible bureaucratic structures.

It is important to bear in mind just how recent the professional vintages are. Diplomats and soldiers, including some of the very best, have been around since the founding of the Republic, and military academies (though no diplomatic academy) have existed for about as long. The imbalance of professional prestige is also longstanding (no “peace-hero”—with the partial exception of Woodrow Wilson—has ever won a race for the White House), but so was a mistrust, even fear, of a standing army, at least until the middle of the twentieth century.

The modern Defense and State Departments as they are known today only emerged in the middle of the last century. Before the Second World War there were different, and sometimes competing, departments for war and the navy, while the U.S. Army was little more than a “constabulary force.” The U.S. Foreign Service did not exist at all until 1924 when the separate consular and diplomatic services were merged. There was no policy apparatus whatever, apart from the third, later second, assistant secretary, a nearly deaf man called Alvey Adee, who held the jobs for nearly forty years and who not only oversaw but also wrote nearly all diplomatic correspondence of any consequence. Adee began his career as an aide to the minister to Spain, General Dan Sickles, U.S. Grant’s one-legged army buddy, who, among other things, succeeded in seducing Queen Isabella II, which recalls that soldiers have been appointed to top diplomatic posts for some time and that they have performed other, quasi-diplomatic functions abroad. But it was only in the latter twentieth century that these roles were institutionalized.

THERE ARE TWO important features of this most recent period in the history of State and Defense: inter- and intraservice rivalry; and a persistent and perhaps deceptive commitment to reform. Both of these books—the first by a Maryland lawyer who has written an excellent study of interwar diplomats and the second by a defense intellectual who has served in the Pentagon, the National Security Council and briefly in the State Department—address both at length.

The State and Defense Departments have been separated by a “versus” ever since the latter was created in 1947. Then as now, it was a case of prerogative versus resources. Rivalries were common further down as well. Even in the post-Goldwater-Nichols era, soldiers, airmen and Marines tend to speak different languages, and the purple color of joint operations, while far more common and accepted than in the past, has not been the most prestigious. Intraservice rivalry is less pronounced in the State Department—this being one of the few cases where the lower stakes have meant battles that are less, rather than more, bitter—but there remain sharp divisions between generalists and specialists, Asia-hands and “Euroweenies,” and so forth. These are hardly new, either. The fusion of the two services in 1924 almost did not happen because of such strong resistance from the consular service—which had raised its professional standards a bit earlier—to being lumped with so many diplomatic amateurs, as they were and still are seen in some reactionary quarters.

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