Throughout this week, the Washington Examiner’s Restoring America project will feature its latest series titled “Reforming the Deep State: Reining in the Federal Bureaucracy.” We invited some of the best policy minds in the conservative movement to speak to the issues of what waste, fraud, abuse, and unaccountability exist throughout the federal government and what still needs to be done.
In 1979, Iran’s Islamic Revolution caught the State Department by surprise. Even after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Tehran, the State Department believed in his moderation. Because diplomats believed that Khomeini would put democracy over religion, that he had turned his back on hard-liners, and that it was possible to resume relations, the storming of the U.S. Embassy and the hostage seizure caught Washington by surprise.
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It was not the only time seminal events caught the State Department flat-footed. A decade later, the Tiananmen Square uprising surprised Washington. More recently, no U.S. diplomats saw the Arab Spring coming.
Diplomats often advocate engagement with the worst regimes and oppose severing diplomatic relations. Having an embassy in the center of an enemy capital is an intelligence asset, the logic goes. Diplomats can meet government officials and better understand their personalities and perspectives. Many political and economic officers work day and night, attending meetings, coffees, and meals with businessmen, officials, politicians, and civil society representatives.
It is an open secret within the State Department that diplomats cable reports, memorandums of conversation, and other memos, but that the audience for most of these is only a small handful of diplomats working related subjects back home. Diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Ulaan Bator, for example, might write several cables each week, but they would be lucky if anyone other than the Mongolia desk officer at the State Department read them. Essentially, diplomats are like hamsters in a wheel, constantly working but advancing nothing. It is not just a make-work function for the author, but it sucks up time up the chain as higher-ups need to edit and clear the cables that perhaps only a dozen people will ever read.
Nor is the content necessary worth the time. Reports of a conversation with a deputy minister or lunch with a political party representative seldom advance understanding significantly for two reasons. First, there is often as much distance between elites in third-world countries and their citizens as there is between American diplomats behind embassy walls. Essentially, the conversations diplomats have in their host countries are elites talking to elites about what the masses might think, with few, if anyone, involved in the conversation actually knowing the elite. True, it is often the elites who make decisions, but information has evolved in the past century. Washington receives information from newspapers, television, and radio. Diplomatic conversations are an archaic artifact of the past.
Conducting diplomacy as if the year were 1925 rather than 2025 does not advance understanding. Rather, it sets the multibillion-dollar Foreign Service up to repeat the failures of its past. Many diplomats are talented, and they seek to understand the countries in which they represent America. At the same time, America depends on them to be the tip of the spear in its understanding of other countries.
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Rather than viewing the number of cables written as a metric of productivity, ambassadors should demand that young diplomats take a holistic approach. They should ride public transportation, take lunch in coffee shops in neighborhoods across the capital, including those areas where diplomats seldom set foot. Promotion boards should assess them not on the politicians they meet, but on opening channels to ordinary people. Rather than cable every conversation, embassies should instruct their officers to write no more than a single cable each week, but to use that essay to identify the pulse of society beyond the political circles. Sitting in a taxi or on a bus while convoys stop traffic or as Chevrolet Suburbans carrying politicians or American ambassadors pass and hearing the grumbling of ordinary people matters. So too does sitting in a working-class coffee shop, playing backgammon with unemployed youth.
Some diplomats, those with language and writing skills, will flourish. Others will flunk, but the value of diplomatic cables will increase exponentially. At a time of transition and upheaval across the globe, understanding the masses matters far more than the spin of yet one more politician.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.