Analysis | Bring back the State Department’s “Young Turk” tradition
This piece is part of ISD’s recent series, “A better diplomacy,” which highlights innovators and their big ideas for how to make diplomacy more effective, resilient, and adaptive in the 21st century.
Squint past the falling ceiling tiles and drab, endless hallways of the State Department, and you may just see the ghosts of reforms past. 2020 saw the introduction of a slew of studies proposing reform, including from Harvard’s Belfer Center, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy of Diplomacy, the Quincy Institute, and others. Very few of these reforms have been implemented, a trait these studies share with similar attempts in 2019, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2008, 2001, 1998, 1989, and so on. One can be forgiven for concluding that the Department is unreformable. But one would be wrong — reforms have succeeded, though more often when lower-ranking officers with support from key leaders are the drivers of change.
The Department’s “Young Turks”
Change from within a bureaucracy, though counter-intuitive, has a storied history. Some of the most consequential innovations in the military were instigated by reform-minded, relatively junior “mavericks” with the support of key senior officials working against strong resistance from the old guard. Examples include the Marine Corps’ transition from naval infantry to amphibious warfare in the lead-up to WWII, the Navy’s adoption of attack aviation and carrier groups in the same period, and doctrinal reforms in the early 1980s that formed the basis of U.S. success in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The State Department had similar experiences, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. A group of self-described “Young Turks” staged an electoral coup of the American Foreign Service Association in 1967 and transformed the organization into a union and advocate for the Foreign Service. Later, allied with then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of State William Macomber, the Young Turks prepared an over 600-page study that led to, among other things, the implementation of the State Department’s “Dissent Channel.”
Another group of reformers in the late 1970s was the “Group of 44” of young FSOs (including ISD’s own Ambassador (ret.) Barbara Bodine), whose reform advocacy led to the Foreign Service Act of 1980. The Young Turks tradition reemerged in 2001 with “SOS for DOS,” an informal group that argued for many of the reforms that would be implemented under the stewardship of Secretary Colin Powell. Many within the Department continue to regard Powell the most successful institutional leader in recent memory.
The Virtues of the Mid-Level Bureaucrat
Officers toiling further down the chain of command have less baggage and present certain advantages, particularly those officers who have been around long enough to have grasped their trade but not so long that they are invested in the status quo — in Foreign Service terms, our FS-01s, -02s, and perhaps some high-flying -03s (the rough equivalent to Army Colonels, Lieutenants Colonels, and Majors respectively). Officers at this level haven’t yet obtained any bureaucratic prerogatives to protect. They are in the trenches, but transitioning into leadership; they understand the details; and they know what’s working and what’s not better than anyone. Unlike senior officials, who are building on their pasts, mid-level officers are looking to their futures in the service and have a direct and personal stake in its reform. Not yet fully indoctrinated into the old status quo, they are unburdened by it.
However, mid-level officers are also busy, relatively powerless, and fearful. Fear is the greatest enemy in a service beset by a culture of risk aversion. I recall early in my career, while still in my initial training, colleagues cautioning me to “watch my step,” that “the walls have ears,” that any error no matter how trivial could destroy my career. This, of course, is patently absurd. In the years since, I have learned that an officer’s prized “corridor reputation” has more to do with building positive personal connections and not being a jerk than sidestepping some mythical career gestapo. That said, advancement in the Foreign Service is generally contingent on having a senior sponsor weighing in on your behalf, which leads to self-censorship and a reluctance to air discordant views. The safest route may seem to keep one’s head down, not to agitate for change.
Mid-level officers are also affected by one of the toughest obstacles to change from within:time. It’s hard to repair the plane in mid-flight: everyone has day jobs, many of which can be all-encompassing. There are opportunities to take a step back and think — the Rusk Fellowship at ISD is one example. But these are few in number and many ambitious officers may eschew them, as such opportunities don’t count as ratable time for promotions — one of the ways the system disincentivizes initiatives advantageous to the institution. Finally there is the simple fact that mid-level officers do not have the power to implement change. Only in alliance with senior leadership can their creativity be channeled into meaningful reform.
Why Leaders Can’t Do it Themselves
The sad irony is that those best positioned to affect change are often the least able to, at least not without tapping into the energy and innovations of intellectual leaders further down the bureaucratic totem pole. As James Q. Wilson illustrated in his 1989 book Bureaucracy, executives who pursue change without the specialized knowledge of line officers and lower-level managers will typically underestimate costs and overestimate risks. The repeated reemergence of proposals for mid-level entry into the Foreign Service or to merge it with the Civil Service into a single personnel system present a case-in-point. Implementation has been attempted repeatedly since the 1930s, has usually failed, and when implemented the results have been disastrous, forcing the Department to back-track.
Entrenched bureaucratic prerogatives and perspectives also pose an obstacle. Even the most well-intentioned senior career official may have difficulty seeing faults in a system in which they succeeded and benefited. Structural incentives are problematic as well. Take the Department’s “clearance” process for ensuring all offices with an interest in a particular policy issue can approve and edit internal policy documents. It is a Rube Golberg machine that cultivates bureaucratic torpidity and a watered-down, mediocre product.
Ambassador William Burns remarked in his memoir, The Back Channel, how terrible the process is, pointing out the absurdity of clearance lists longer than the substantive document they were attached to. Yet he was unable to change this system despite being the Deputy Secretary of State and among the most respected career diplomats in living memory. One reason may be that with a proliferation of specialized, functional offices within the State Department, many with overlapping areas of responsibility, life becomes an ongoing struggle for relevance. To clear a document is to have power, to be removed from the clearance process is to be relegated to irrelevance. Senior officials heading many of the blocks in the Department’s line-and-block org chart may object to a constrained clearance process that could pose a threat to the perquisites of their positions. Faced with the prospect of revolt, one perhaps should not blame Ambassador Burns for opting not to pick that particular fight given voluminous responsibilities and limited time and resources.
What Can the Department Do?
The easiest issue to address is fear. The Department’s leadership has signaled its commitment to reform, but that, along with listening tours and suggestion boxes, is not sufficient. What is needed is an unambiguous green light encouraging open discussion and frank, constructive criticism of the status quo. Then comes the harder question of how to institutionalize reform. We can wait until a leader emerges who “gets it” at the same time an informal network of reformers coalesces, and the two wind up linking up. Or the Department can create the framework that can serve as an ongoing, internal engine of reform. In a previous post, I recommended the creation of an Office of Doctrine. It can house rising, innovative officers led by a respected senior official with the mandate to reform and provide them the data, the institutional linkages, and the room to think that would be key for a continuous project of reform. Until then those interested in reform should model our Young Turk forbears and organize.
Aaron Garfield is a Rusk Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. He most recently served in Cairo as the External Affairs Unit Chief in the U.S. Embassy’s Political Section, where he covered Egypt’s foreign policy on issues including Libya, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Middle East peace, and the Eastern Mediterranean.
While Aaron Garfield is a career U.S. diplomat, the views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of State or the U.S. government.
