Diplomacy as Political Activism...

On the trend toward macro-management in American diplomacy.

ISTANBUL— At a packed conference in Tbilisi last week, the legendary American diplomat Jack Matlock, who served as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the USSR from 1987 to 1991—and later went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (an institute which has housed, among other notables, Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and George F. Kennan), told Georgia’s assembled business, cultural and political elite that “foreigners can’t build democracy, they have to do that themselves.”

A problem that has arisen in the thirty-five years since the end of the Cold War is that both American and foreign elites (invariably American or British educated) have come to expect and believe the very opposite of what Matlock said—they believe the United States has an obligation to foster democracy and what are inevitably and lazily referred to as “democratic norms” across the globe—even 6,000 miles away in the Caucasus.

In the eyes of the activists who staffed USAID, NED and the scores of foreign NGOs those agencies funded worldwide, the US is also responsible for the economic well-being of other nations. And so the bitter complaints that arose when the Trump administration announced it was going to gut USAID. Amanda Klasing, the Director of the United States Democracy Initiative at Human Rights Watch, declared that, “it is a false choice that the U.S. government has to choose between addressing the economic needs of Americans or the rising cost of living here in the U.S. and development and humanitarian assistance abroad.” Tell that to the people of Palestine, Ohio or Chimney Rock, North Carolina.

When countries veer from the prescribed formula of "free markets" and “democratic elections” (often conducted with the “input” of the US government, a bad habit that dates to the meddling of American operatives in Italy in 1948), they find themselves under threat—of violence and sanctions.

Yet continued American interference in the post-Soviet space, for example, has hardly redounded to the benefit of those countries. Ukraine today would not lie in ruins (no they are not “winning” the war; and no it was not “unprovoked”) had it not been for American and European interference in a domestic squabble over a trade agreement in the winter of 2013-14. Many young Georgians today are likewise tempting that same fate when they call for Georgia to join NATO and become a Western outpost in the larger battle to isolate and anathematize Russia.

American politicians and diplomats have adopted an unfortunate habit of publicly meeting with opposition leaders and voicing opinions on what are matters for citizens of those countries to worry about. The US Ambassador to Russia during the Obama years, Michael McFaul, became the poster child for that sort of "diplomacy." And it backfired—badly.

What drives this behavior on the part of NGOs and US diplomats is a view of diplomacy as not simply the managing of relations with foreign governments, but as the managing and directing of the political and economic outcomes of entire nations about which, I might add, they generally know rather little. The trend toward what we might call macro-management in American diplomacy began in earnest in the 1990s.

As I wrote some years ago in my essay The Cold War Culture War, after the fall of the Berlin Wall,

…the undoubtedly well-intentioned planners in the Clinton White House, sought to harness the latent energy of Russian civil society (or at least those segments of it that were deemed to be consistent with the project of “Westernizing” the former Soviet state). As Strobe Talbott, the Clinton administration’s primary Russia hand, admitted in 2002, “ . . . we invested a lot of our bilateral aid program in trying to help Russian NGOs, independent media outlets, and local reformers change the bad habits of the past and put in place the institutions of a modern society, economy, and political culture.”

In this way, the U.S. State Department, rather than acting as the government’s lead agent of diplomatic engagement with another sovereign country, instead acted more in the manner of an NGO, picking winners and losers from among a country’s political, social, and religious life, with predictably dismal results.”

The fact of the matter is that we don't owe foreign countries that we seek to assist anything other than the truth. And the truth is that the "great game" of, as I said above, of picking winners and losers within a country's political system, as we sought to do in Ukraine and in Georgia, does more harm than good.

James W. Carden is editor of TRR.