A recent issue of The Economist featured a special report on American foreign policy. One of its main points is that the U.S. economy is known for its resilience, but that its shortcomings, oftentimes, are political in nature. This is a commonplace, and not just in the United States. The report goes on to describe an aspect of this resilience that may be unexpected. “Who would have thought,” the author, Edward Carr, asks, “that the latest boom would be in an old, declining American industry like oil and gas?”
The question reminds us that innovation—economic, political, scientific, and artistic—rarely emerges out of thin air. It almost always involves the remaking or reinventing of old methods and practices in new circumstances. The best innovations are those that fuse the old with the new, such that the latter are seen to supplant the former in the name of progress. They do not really supplant them, however, as much as they refine and retool them.
This is the insight that the economic thinker Joseph Schumpeter—the man who popularized the term “creative destruction”—arrived at in the previous century. Innovation is adaptive in the name of being transformational. New ideas, products and technologies come all the time. But success with innovation means fitting them with preexisting factors of supply and demand.
Another commonplace is that Americans are especially good at innovation. This has long been said regarding the American economy. From the clipper ship to the microchip, American producers have worked hand in hand with financiers to adapt “new” inventions—some American, others not—to the world market. No matter what happens to the American economy in the next few decades, its past two centuries have left a formidable legacy.
Americans get less credit for innovation with their institutions. This is strange, because the country was invented as the expression of a new political form: the modern republic. Over time its institutions— including its political institutions—have evolved to cope with governing one of the most dynamic, expansive societies anywhere on earth. This has not been easy or always smooth. But many Americans would regard their political system with its layers of checks and balances and diffused power as a lasting success, apart from the country’s politicians.
Both public and private institutions in America have their defenders and their critics. They rise and fall in the public estimation in a way that can resemble a cycle. During much of the nineteenth century, for example, the military profession and the standing army did not rate highly with the general public (this was less the case for the Navy and for particular military officers). During the second half of the twentieth century it is difficult to find a public institution that ranks above the U.S. military. Finance is another good example. Bankers and industrialists have been so vilified and so championed over time that their cumulative reputation appears almost schizophrenic.
Diplomacy is rare among the professions and institutions in American culture for having a consistently modest, even poor, reputation. Few people can name any of the country’s leading diplomats, past or present. There are few diplomatic “heroes” akin to General MacArthur or President Eisenhower. No diplomat has ever got a ticker tape parade, apart from Woodrow Wilson—and he was not a professional diplomat and the parade took place in Paris. There have been a few honors bestowed on diplomats—Elihu Root, George Marshall, and Henry Kissinger won Nobel Peace Prizes for their diplomatic accomplishments—but these are rarities.
None of those three, moreover, was trained professionally in diplomacy, either. Carr has noted Robert Zoellick's observation that the Cold War substituted “Kremlinologists and balance-of-power merchants” for “bankers and lawyers” in the inner halls of Washington. Now that this era has passed, Carr has suggested that the United States rediscover and reapply the “old-fashioned values” of deal-making that typify the latter group's peaceful penetration of foreign markets and societies.
The diagnosis is not entirely accurate, which complicates the prescription. Zoellick (both a banker and a lawyer, as it happens) probably was referring in his former category to academic theorists, since some ardent Cold Warriors were also bankers and lawyers. But it was Woodrow Wilson who began the former practice of importing expertise from the nation's proudest faculty lounges; and though it may be tempting to date the beginning of the Cold War to 1917 instead of 1947, the professional boundaries blur along with chronological ones, especially toward the second half of the century.
This may leave professional diplomats feeling somewhat marooned in the annals of American statecraft. Many people regarded as successful diplomats such as Zoellick began their government careers elsewhere. That some of them attribute their diplomatic successes to their professional training is not surprising. But it leads to the implication that the source of their creativity is external to the profession of diplomacy. That is, they bring it with them to the job and hit the ground running, as Henry Kissinger famously said; they do not usually claim an entrepreneurial inheritance from other diplomats or from diplomatic institutions.
This is not true in practice. Diplomacy is both an art and a craft; its ways are handed down through apprenticeship, careful emulation and mentoring, which sometimes blurs into patronage. This combination tends to be under-recognized in the United States, which has no diplomatic school (besides the Foreign Service Institute) that is equivalent in size and endowment to the war colleges or military service academies. There are, however, numerous graduate schools in international affairs, but these are not in the business primarily of training professional diplomats: this includes even the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and the Fletcher School at Tufts (which has stopped using its original name: the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy).
What makes the diplomatic profession so unique, especially in the United States, is that the cultivation of its “old ways” persists in a way that is consistent with Schumpeter’s concept of innovation. “New” methods are regularly introduced, both by professional diplomats and by the infusion of “new blood” through the practice of political appointments. Foreign service officers like to decry the latter, and they do so with some justification; but the best of them also know that it is a fact of American life that is not going away any time soon; and that, in a few cases, has produced happy results, not simply because the appointees turned out to be more skillful diplomats than expected but also because the process of mutual cooptation between amateurs and diplomats has brought about a negotiated compromise in diplomatic techniques that at times has ranked greater than the sum of its parts.
This does not mean that the practice of appointing amateurs to key diplomatic posts does not carry risks or that it does not demean the profession of diplomacy. It does. But it also reminds us that creative innovation in diplomacy is a matter of combining—optimally, if possible—the best of multiple orientations, including the old and the new. This in turn has helped Americans to bridge the gap between diplomacy and statecraft. When Woodrow Wilson introduced his “New Diplomacy” a century ago, and when the architects of “Diplomacy 2.0” did so again a decade or so ago, they were met with some derision from traditionalists, followed by a retrenchment among self-described innovators. Yet boosters and critics each have been forced to understand and adopt the ways of the other. Anyone who compares the world of 1913 with the world of today must admit that it is very different but also that some concepts and principles (e.g., the “balance of power”) remain relevant. Two hot world wars and a Cold War had much to do with that, surely. But so did the aftermath to each conflict amid diplomatic renovations designed to preserve peace, however limited and compromised their record was at the time.
Who then, to paraphrase Carr, would expect that the most impressive renovation to take place in American public life would be in the old, declining profession of diplomacy? It cannot happen soon enough.
Kenneth Weisbrode is a historian and the author of "Old Diplomacy Revisited" (Palgrave Macmillan).
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Creative Innovation in Diplomacy
January 9, 2014
A recent issue of The Economist featured a special report on American foreign policy. One of its main points is that the U.S. economy is known for its resilience, but that its shortcomings, oftentimes, are political in nature. This is a commonplace, and not just in the United States. The report goes on to describe an aspect of this resilience that may be unexpected. “Who would have thought,” the author, Edward Carr, asks, “that the latest boom would be in an old, declining American industry like oil and gas?”
The question reminds us that innovation—economic, political, scientific, and artistic—rarely emerges out of thin air. It almost always involves the remaking or reinventing of old methods and practices in new circumstances. The best innovations are those that fuse the old with the new, such that the latter are seen to supplant the former in the name of progress. They do not really supplant them, however, as much as they refine and retool them.
This is the insight that the economic thinker Joseph Schumpeter—the man who popularized the term “creative destruction”—arrived at in the previous century. Innovation is adaptive in the name of being transformational. New ideas, products and technologies come all the time. But success with innovation means fitting them with preexisting factors of supply and demand.
Another commonplace is that Americans are especially good at innovation. This has long been said regarding the American economy. From the clipper ship to the microchip, American producers have worked hand in hand with financiers to adapt “new” inventions—some American, others not—to the world market. No matter what happens to the American economy in the next few decades, its past two centuries have left a formidable legacy.
Americans get less credit for innovation with their institutions. This is strange, because the country was invented as the expression of a new political form: the modern republic. Over time its institutions— including its political institutions—have evolved to cope with governing one of the most dynamic, expansive societies anywhere on earth. This has not been easy or always smooth. But many Americans would regard their political system with its layers of checks and balances and diffused power as a lasting success, apart from the country’s politicians.
Both public and private institutions in America have their defenders and their critics. They rise and fall in the public estimation in a way that can resemble a cycle. During much of the nineteenth century, for example, the military profession and the standing army did not rate highly with the general public (this was less the case for the Navy and for particular military officers). During the second half of the twentieth century it is difficult to find a public institution that ranks above the U.S. military. Finance is another good example. Bankers and industrialists have been so vilified and so championed over time that their cumulative reputation appears almost schizophrenic.
Diplomacy is rare among the professions and institutions in American culture for having a consistently modest, even poor, reputation. Few people can name any of the country’s leading diplomats, past or present. There are few diplomatic “heroes” akin to General MacArthur or President Eisenhower. No diplomat has ever got a ticker tape parade, apart from Woodrow Wilson—and he was not a professional diplomat and the parade took place in Paris. There have been a few honors bestowed on diplomats—Elihu Root, George Marshall, and Henry Kissinger won Nobel Peace Prizes for their diplomatic accomplishments—but these are rarities.
None of those three, moreover, was trained professionally in diplomacy, either. Carr has noted Robert Zoellick's observation that the Cold War substituted “Kremlinologists and balance-of-power merchants” for “bankers and lawyers” in the inner halls of Washington. Now that this era has passed, Carr has suggested that the United States rediscover and reapply the “old-fashioned values” of deal-making that typify the latter group's peaceful penetration of foreign markets and societies.
The diagnosis is not entirely accurate, which complicates the prescription. Zoellick (both a banker and a lawyer, as it happens) probably was referring in his former category to academic theorists, since some ardent Cold Warriors were also bankers and lawyers. But it was Woodrow Wilson who began the former practice of importing expertise from the nation's proudest faculty lounges; and though it may be tempting to date the beginning of the Cold War to 1917 instead of 1947, the professional boundaries blur along with chronological ones, especially toward the second half of the century.
This may leave professional diplomats feeling somewhat marooned in the annals of American statecraft. Many people regarded as successful diplomats such as Zoellick began their government careers elsewhere. That some of them attribute their diplomatic successes to their professional training is not surprising. But it leads to the implication that the source of their creativity is external to the profession of diplomacy. That is, they bring it with them to the job and hit the ground running, as Henry Kissinger famously said; they do not usually claim an entrepreneurial inheritance from other diplomats or from diplomatic institutions.
This is not true in practice. Diplomacy is both an art and a craft; its ways are handed down through apprenticeship, careful emulation and mentoring, which sometimes blurs into patronage. This combination tends to be under-recognized in the United States, which has no diplomatic school (besides the Foreign Service Institute) that is equivalent in size and endowment to the war colleges or military service academies. There are, however, numerous graduate schools in international affairs, but these are not in the business primarily of training professional diplomats: this includes even the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and the Fletcher School at Tufts (which has stopped using its original name: the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy).
What makes the diplomatic profession so unique, especially in the United States, is that the cultivation of its “old ways” persists in a way that is consistent with Schumpeter’s concept of innovation. “New” methods are regularly introduced, both by professional diplomats and by the infusion of “new blood” through the practice of political appointments. Foreign service officers like to decry the latter, and they do so with some justification; but the best of them also know that it is a fact of American life that is not going away any time soon; and that, in a few cases, has produced happy results, not simply because the appointees turned out to be more skillful diplomats than expected but also because the process of mutual cooptation between amateurs and diplomats has brought about a negotiated compromise in diplomatic techniques that at times has ranked greater than the sum of its parts.
This does not mean that the practice of appointing amateurs to key diplomatic posts does not carry risks or that it does not demean the profession of diplomacy. It does. But it also reminds us that creative innovation in diplomacy is a matter of combining—optimally, if possible—the best of multiple orientations, including the old and the new. This in turn has helped Americans to bridge the gap between diplomacy and statecraft. When Woodrow Wilson introduced his “New Diplomacy” a century ago, and when the architects of “Diplomacy 2.0” did so again a decade or so ago, they were met with some derision from traditionalists, followed by a retrenchment among self-described innovators. Yet boosters and critics each have been forced to understand and adopt the ways of the other. Anyone who compares the world of 1913 with the world of today must admit that it is very different but also that some concepts and principles (e.g., the “balance of power”) remain relevant. Two hot world wars and a Cold War had much to do with that, surely. But so did the aftermath to each conflict amid diplomatic renovations designed to preserve peace, however limited and compromised their record was at the time.
Who then, to paraphrase Carr, would expect that the most impressive renovation to take place in American public life would be in the old, declining profession of diplomacy? It cannot happen soon enough.
Kenneth Weisbrode is a historian and the author of "Old Diplomacy Revisited" (Palgrave Macmillan).
