Profile | Meet this year’s Rusk Fellows: Oliver Mains
Thoughts on trauma-informed foreign policy, dissent, and State Department retention from a clarinetist-turned-diplomat.
This piece is part of ISD’s Fall 2021 blog 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.
Oliver Mains is a 2021–2022 Rusk Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. As a career member of the U.S. Foreign Service, he served most recently as Turkey desk officer for political-military affairs, where he led the desk’s work on defense trade, basing, and countering Russian malign influence. He previously coordinated U.S. government approaches to interethnic reconciliation in Kosovo and South Sudan, and worked to protect operating space for NGOs implementing $500 million of U.S. assistance in Pakistan.
Last week, he sat down with one of The Diplomatic Pouch’s editors, Emily Linn, for a conversation about his decision to trade a career in music for a “slightly less cut-throat” career in diplomacy, his plans for his time at Georgetown, and his thoughts on the importance of creative dissent in the Foreign Service.
Q: First, let’s talk about your background. Did you always want to be a diplomat?
A: No. In college, I actually trained to be a classical musician. I did a double degree program at Oberlin College in clarinet performance and history. Right from the beginning, I knew that I was interested in a lot more than just music. But I was very serious about music coming out of high school and I intended on becoming a professional musician. I think it was probably my semester abroad in college at Cambridge University that kind of flipped things around for me. It was there that I developed a real interest in international relations for the first time. That’s when things started to turn and I began to ask myself whether I wanted to work in the very cut-throat world of professional music or whether I wanted to work in the slightly less cut-throat world of foreign policy.
Q: Do you think your training in classical music performance prepared you for your ultimate career in diplomacy?
A: I think training to be a classical musician teaches you how to work hard and how to work independently, while also working as a part of a team. When you’re practicing, the task of improving your own playing is really in your hands. You need to be self-directed: it falls to you to figure out how you’re going to get better and be the best you can be. But at the same time, you can never forget that you are part of a larger whole. When you’re in an orchestra, you have to be a team player, you have to learn how to take instruction, you have to learn how to listen really carefully to those around you, and those are skills that I think really do translate well to the field of diplomacy.
Q: What have been some of the highlights of your diplomatic career thus far?
A: The highlights from my career have all come from the most difficult places I’ve served in. When I was in South Sudan, which was my first tour in the Foreign Service, I had the opportunity to expose human rights abuses and draw Washington’s attention to atrocities that were going on that in my mind didn’t have enough visibility in Washington, DC. As difficult as it was to see those things unfolding on the ground, it was a real honor for me to get to work with people there, highlight what was happening, and do what needed to be done to flag it back in Washington. I actually ended up co-authoring a dissent cable with a colleague that pushed Washington to take a bit of a different tack. Our cable didn’t instigate the fundamental changes we had hoped for, but I was proud to write it and it taught me a lot of lessons about what it takes to shape U.S. policy on the ground.
Another highlight was during my time in Pakistan. I was working in the assistance coordination office and I was really proud of the work I did there, in close coordination with one of the political officers, to identify a couple of ways in which one particular U.S. program was, in fact, undermining one of our foreign policy goals in a certain part of the country. I was proud of the fact finding work we did and the ways in which our reporting allowed us to redirect programming to make sure the programming and the policy were in sync.
Q: Let’s go back to South Sudan and the dissent cable. For those who don’t know, what is a dissent cable and how is it used? What was it like to write one?
A: Dissent in the Foreign Service is an interesting challenge. I think a lot of people have the impression that there’s no room for dissent. They think that it’s your job to represent U.S. foreign policy abroad, which it is, but that there’s no room for internal debate, and that’s not really true.
The dissent channel is an official tool that’s designed to circumvent the bureaucracy and allow officers at any level in the department to go straight up to higher levels with a concern. Sometimes it’s a policy issue, sometimes it’s a management issue. Recently, there have been a lot of dissent cables in the news that have leaked and were designed to be leaked. What my colleague and I did was quite different; we really did intend for it to be an internal document and it in fact stayed an internal document. We used the dissent cable as it was meant to be used, rather than as a tool of attracting public attention to an issue.
But leaving aside the mechanism of the dissent cable, what I’ve found throughout most of my Foreign Service career is that there really is room for creativity and for new ideas and for presenting new ideas that grate against the status quo. When the system is working well, there are tons of opportunities — even at the entry level — to influence policy in important ways.
Q: What are you working on currently as a Rusk Fellow at Georgetown?
A: This fall, I’m co-teaching a course on statecraft that’s led by Professor Jim Seevers, along with all the other State Department and military fellows. So far, that has been absolutely eye opening for me. I’ve really been impressed with the caliber of students at Georgetown, what they bring to the course in terms of substantive knowledge, but also their commitment to bringing new ideas and interesting thoughts into the class. I am absolutely learning in every session as I listen to the presentations of other fellows and as I listen to the students. It reminds me of how much I still have to learn about this profession, even 10 years into this career.
In the spring, I’m planning to teach a graduate capstone course focusing on how U.S. diplomats engage with traumatized communities in conflict or post-conflict environments. I’ve been put into several situations in my career, such as in South Sudan or in Kosovo, where I came face to face with communities that had either just been through quite traumatic experiences or for whom traumas of the past formed a central part of their identity. I felt quite unprepared to deal both with their personal realities of loss and also for the way in which those experiences colored the country’s politics. In the graduate capstone course, I want to look at two basic questions. First of all, what should diplomats do in these cases? How can diplomats effectively engage with these communities in our broader efforts to forward U.S. interests? What are our responsibilities when engaging those communities, and what kinds of knowledge do we need to have coming in so that we’re not going into these places and retraumatizing or making things worse in any way?
And second, I want to address the broader policy question. How do those experiences of trauma impact policymaking in these countries? A lot of times, we’ve been shocked to see countries enact policies that seem totally anathema to what we think would be in their national interest. But we haven’t done a good job of understanding how these experiences of trauma impact how these countries view their own interests and how that turns into foreign policy. Are there things we can do, ways we can analyze these experiences to better understand how they might influence politics and pop up in policy in ways that harm U.S. interests? That’s what I hope to cover in the course.
Q: Last question. What do you think are the biggest challenges facing diplomats today?
A: One big challenge is making sure that the State Department has the expertise it needs to address these emerging challenges that we see around the world, such as cybersecurity and disinformation. Certainly from what I’ve seen, it seems to me like Georgetown students are gaining these vital skills, as well as skills in critical thinking and compelling writing that have been important for so long and will continue to be important no matter how these sort of geopolitical challenges change.
The State Department is also facing a challenge in recommitting itself to recruiting, training, and retaining the right types of people, a diverse cohort of people. I hope that students entering the Foreign Service commit themselves not just to making good policy, but to helping State meet the needs of its people. Innovative work on personnel issues needs to be incentivized within the bureaucracy.
Emily Crane Linn is a research assistant for the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. She is in her second year of her Global Human Development master’s degree at Georgetown, with a Certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Emergencies. Emily is also one of ISD’s inaugural McHenry Fellows.
While Oliver Mains 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.
