July 22, 2025 • 25 mins
Please welcome Dan Spokojny, the founder of FP21, a research and advisory group focused on reforming the State Department's conduct of U.S. foreign policy.
Dan started on the hill, working on congressional policy, then as a diplomat for the State Department.
Since then, he formed FP21 to help the State Department improve its organization and processes.
A quick note: I found that the introduction had a gap. One of the voice channels fell out, so on 27 July I updated a corrected version. Sorry about that. This is part I of a two-part episode, so let's get started.
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You can learn more about FP21 here: https://www.fp21.org/
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We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com, or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org
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Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system, rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at:
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Special Thanks to Weirdlysound for the sample of July Instrumental by Noah Cyrus.
Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/HgB9QFdFnZk?feature=shared
#CAA, #FP21org, #Dan_Spoko, #Civil_Affairs
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Welcome to the Once CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines.
Once CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and
brings in people who are currentor former military diplomats,
development officers, and field agents to discuss their
experiences on ground with a partner nation's people and
leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone
interested in working the last three feet of Foreign Relations.
(00:24):
To contact the show, e-mail us at ca.podcasting@gmail.com or
look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at
www.dabbacivilaffairsassociorg. I'll have those in the show
notes. Please welcome Dance Picagini,
founder of FP21A research and advising group focused on
reforming how the State Department conducts US foreign
(00:45):
policy. Dance started on the Hill
working congressional policy, then was a diplomat for the
State Department. Since then, he formed FP 21 to
help the State Department improve its organizational
processes. This is the first of a two-part
episode, so let's get started. I've really tried.
To think about what would it take to try to advance
modernization with the State Department and recognize there's
(01:08):
just not many folks who really think about the details.
Even people in Congress often kind of generally get it, but
often don't have deep experiencewith the processes or the
institutions. So it's the rather limited set
of folks who really want to engage with the substance of
what would it look like to create a better State
Department. Well, state doesn't have a large
constituency. They don't have any domestic
(01:29):
public affairs outreach, and they have very little I'll
experience. They don't reach out and talk to
a lot of Congress staff. Yeah, I went to state from
working on the Hill and really appreciate it when I got there.
Like, hey folks, shouldn't we betalking with Congress?
They write our checks and authorize our activities and
people are very resistant. I could get into that a little
(01:51):
bit. It's something I've researched a
bit is H Bureau Legislative Affairs.
They do a lot with few resources, but it's not known to
be a very effective institution,particularly compared to what
you see from the military folks.Well, that's The funny thing,
because a lot of congressional fellows and staffers are on soap
committees that deal with these foreign policy issues.
And yet, if State doesn't show up there, how do they sell what
(02:13):
they're doing except for when they're subpoenaed to testify?
Yeah, there's a really interesting set of questions in
here, Jack, about how do we makeUS foreign policy.
The founders thought it should be made by the legislative
branch and that the executive would kind of take over in a
time of war. Of course, that's never really
happened. So the entry points for Congress
(02:33):
tend to be very occasional authorizing bills.
Hey, there's this particular task we want you to take on that
you haven't done before, a new Bureau, a new arm of government,
and then through appropriations.So a lot of the foreign
assistance work is pushed by earmarks, so to speak.
The Hill and Congress gets a lotof control on how the money is
(02:55):
spent, but I think most of diplomacy is kind of not really
finance focused. It's not about the dollars and
cents, it's about the big picture policies and the
strategies that are created by the institutions.
So yeah, appropriations isn't a very strong arm into how the
work is done and which creates, to your point, some separation
between how Congress thinks about foreign policy and how the
(03:16):
diplomats think about protectingand building it.
And then that's part of the reason you created FP 21, is to
help build out how a state creates those strategies and
codifies its practices with foreign policy, with diplomacy,
right? Yeah, that's exactly right.
You know, it was really personalfor me.
I was a diplomat and I loved thejob.
(03:36):
I loved the work. I felt the mission was very
important, but I didn't know if I was doing a good job.
There wasn't a lot of evaluationof what success or failure looks
like. There's no diplomatic doctrine.
There's no training, there's no market economy or internal
competition that says, hey, you did a great job on this or you
didn't. It's very subjective.
And I started to doubt, you know, I served through the wars
(03:58):
in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Arab Spring and the pivot to
Russia and saw a lot of failure during my time.
So I started to ask some really hard questions about what does
it mean to be effective and who are the people who are having
this discussion? You know, people debate we
should do this or that with our China policy or we should be
more hawkish towards Russia or change our posture towards
(04:19):
nuclear non proliferation. And so people are kind of
debating the substantive ideas, but not the process of how those
ideas are made and not trying tothink about how to advance the
study and practice of foreign policy.
So I found there was a gap in the space and really wanted to
be an outside objective voice tosay hey, I think we can do
better. I did read your article about
(04:41):
doctrine and diplomacy, and I did send you some notes back on
how doctrine can be helpful as aguide, but it also could be a
bludgeon or a door slam. Those who have different ideas
from the authors or the people who they consider to be chosen
to select what is to be taught and learned.
(05:01):
And I get how state uses relationships to build skills.
The challenge on that side is ifyou don't have the right
relationship, if you've got leadership that's aggressive or
over controlling and you never learn your trade well, as you go
up your FSO chain and become higher, higher in rank, you're
going to struggle with some of those more complex tasks.
(05:24):
So a second see a need for some form of study, some learning
aspect, but I don't want it to become a ball and chain.
How do you envision diplomacy and doctrine burging?
Yeah, I've never served in the Pentagon and.
I could show you volumes of stuff if you want.
Yeah, Yeah, right. Well, so I, you know, I made the
(05:46):
mistake of walking into a group of think it was soldiers, you
know, and strategists to ask about doctrine and said wouldn't
it be great if the Department ofState had doctrine?
And they all said no, we hate doctrine it.
We don't even follow it ourselves.
Exactly. We ignore it and you know, good
riddance if if you guys don't have it.
My view is that there's a healthy balance, that there
should be some baseline understanding of what it means
(06:08):
to conduct a good negotiation, what the role is between
strategists and implementers in the field, something that you
can pick up and read and say, OK, we're all going to be
executing this in the same way. And right now that doesn't exist
at all. So I think that we're far off
the scale to one side where we haven't done enough level
setting to think about here's what we think best practices,
(06:31):
and here's what we train to the next generation.
And there's a reason this doesn't exist.
It's not just because it can't exist.
Many senior diplomats don't believe it should exist.
I get told all the time by senior folks, people I respect
who say, listen, son, foreign policy is an art out of science.
And it comes from in here and they point to their brains and
(06:51):
it suggests that they're the artists and they know best.
But it's really tautological. I'm the smartest because I'm in
the highest position. And you know that because that's
how I got the job. And I got the job because I'm
the smartest. So I'm, I'm really skeptical of
this idea that diplomacy, that foreign policy in general is all
art form, It's all relationships, it's all instinct
(07:12):
and feudal. I believe that there is some
baseline of best practice. I could imagine a world in which
that best practice starts to flood into spaces of here's how
you hold your keyboard and here's the doctrine for how to
pour your coffee. OK, too far.
Yeah, let's back off. But there should be some sort of
learning, raining and evaluationprocess.
(07:32):
There should be a space for our best retired folks to say, OK,
here's what worked and didn't work over the course of my
career, let me plug this back into the institution so I can
pass these lessons on to the next generation.
Yeah, that's actually a great point.
I wonder if retired folks who did a lot of engagements in one
aspect or never could write about it, or even if they're
(07:53):
cables from that era could be resurrected and then they write
about the cable and what they were experiencing and just kind
of a this is what really went wrong at this point.
Or I really should have focused on this so that people could
pull patterns of behavior and kind of see what was successful
in the aggregate versus somebodysaying thou shalt do this or
(08:15):
thou shalt do that. That's an interesting way to go
about it. That's right, us nerdy academics
think of this as epistemology. Epistemology being the study of
what we know to be true. Diplomats kind of have a
historians epistemology meaning.I'm going to go tell this really
complicated, multifaceted version of history in order to
(08:38):
understand why this particular thing happened.
And I'm going to think about thefuture according to these
complex, interwoven, sweet, generous effects to understand
how the future will work. Social scientists, political
scientists say we want to draw patterns out of this doctrine is
an effort to draw patterns out of it.
It's a more scientific process. We don't know if those patterns
(08:59):
are right, but let's try one andtest it and learn from it.
Is it working? If so, great, keep it.
Is it failing? OK, well, then we've got to
change it. So you're really bumping up
against to a cultural belief that there can be no pattern in
foreign affairs. Everything needs to be created
from scratch. I just, I, I don't find it to be
true. I don't agree with that approach
at all. It's got to be painful to our
(09:22):
foreign partners and allies whenevery time a new ambassador or
team comes in and they're radically different in the way
they approach discussions and policy and engagements, and it's
got to kill. That's right.
Dad, have you heard anything from other foreign diplomats
about engagements with Americans?
Have they ever said had any comments like that?
(09:43):
You know, people make a practiceof not criticizing the Americans
too much. It's nice to be the superpower,
but that's fading away. Yeah, and out of drunks and
children, you get the truth. So he must have had a a martini
moment where someone said, you know.
Yeah, certainly it's humbling sitting with a French diplomat
or a Dutch diplomat or a Singaporean diplomat.
I mean, the Singaporeans, they pay their public servants an
(10:05):
extraordinary amount. They put them through school for
a very long time. They're the best of the best.
And they have very rigorous training Chinese diplomats.
They have very rigorous traininginstitutions that really prepare
their diplomats to try to be more effective.
That's just not how the United States works.
We have a much more fly by the seat of your pants approach, and
(10:26):
everybody's had to deal with it.But I think we're going to start
to see the diplomatic core, which is less well trained than
the rest of the world, which hasless clear precepts for action
and is ultimately leading to a real marginalization of the
state department of diplomacy, of civilian instruments, of
foreign policy in our national security apparatus.
And I think it's going to cost us.
(10:48):
How has it been around French diplomats or Belgian diplomats,
countries that have been famously good at diplomacy?
How do they treat American diplomats?
Let me flip my tone here. You know, Jack, Yeah.
Diplomacy is an art, not a science, right?
And those of us who have the gift of gab, I'm being partially
tongue in cheek, but I think everybody who's worked abroad,
(11:09):
whether they be diplomats or foreign aid people or just
businessmen have interacted withextraordinary diplomats who seem
to know everybody and everything.
You know, I have an encyclopedicknowledge the country and the
issues that they work on. And other people have worked
with bums. And you say, how does this
person thriving in this place, Right.
I won't be too. That's fine understanding here.
(11:30):
Well, another thing you brought up that I really liked was the
notion of an ethos or a mantra, something that everyone could
speak to, strive to. I like what's etched over
buildings, are there to inspire people to achieve better, to be
ethically better. And I sent you Colin Palace, 13
rules because Colin Palace kind of a demigod of State
(11:54):
Department. He came in and actually helped
out the program and is a decent fellow.
So what in your mind do you see as a good ethos or mantra?
What do you think would be good to inspire?
Yeah, I think there's two possible approaches you could
take here, and it really dependson what the country, what the
legislative branch, what our presidents think the State
(12:16):
Department should be good for. One is the State Department
should be the place that makes the strategy of US foreign
policy. This was kind of its ultimate
authorized role. It's the coordinator, it's the
strategist. It's the place that thinks about
everything up until war, and notthe covert intelligence
gathering, but everything else. How do we Orient our
(12:38):
relationships with these other countries in order to achieve
objectives that we are setting for ourselves?
So if you really want your StateDepartment to be your
strategist, that's one approach.If, on the other hand, you want
to continue the growth and the centralization of the National
Security Council, which is not an executive agency, it's the
bunch of special assistance to the presidents that change over
(12:58):
each time and is very poorly institutionalized in many
respects, then you want your State Department folks to just
be the implementers. So I think your ethos has to
speak to that mission. If you're the strategist, the
ethos needs to think about how do we set goals, How do we
aggressively pursue American interests or our values in our
(13:20):
strategies? If you're more of an
implementer, it's how do we run through walls to achieve success
on behalf of the president's goals.
So there have been some efforts.Mike Pompeo famously tried to
introduce ethos at the State Department.
I don't think it landed so well,but I thought the impulse was
right. Just putting an ethos without
(13:40):
giving the State Department anything else to do.
It felt like it wasn't going to really affect the culture.
That ethos should be connected with real direction about how
diplomats get their job done in a more complicated world in
which you don't need an envoy totell you what's happening.
In France. You can direct e-mail to the
president and watch France's parliament on TV if you want.
(14:01):
So the role has to change and I think our government needs to
catch up, Sure. And our ethos should reflect
that. OK.
I'm looking at Pompeo's ethos now.
We are one team 1 mission. That it You know what he said.
Oh, that's way too short. Yeah.
Through these doors come the greatest diplomats in the world.
(14:22):
You know, something like that. Yeah, I think defining success
is a major question here that threads all of my work.
What does it mean to be good at diplomacy?
I'd love more discussion about that.
Sure. Well, let's jump into it.
You created FP 21 for that role to build out not only to ask the
questions, but also to provide some recommendations on things
(14:43):
like how FSI should tackle education and development,
politically appointed diplomats versus professionally developed
diplomats. You have an enormous array of
verticals. Some are current events, some
are theory and practice, but it it really encapsulate what you
and your staff are trying to do and build an alternate picture
(15:05):
of how State Department could beand I applaud you for that.
Have you had a lot of success? Have you had a lot of reach with
your efforts? Yes, We've had really
interesting successes along the way.
We're a rather young organization.
I don't think we've been around for five years yet, but we're
kind of the only organization ofour kind that's trying to put
research against these questions.
(15:27):
And let me give you examples of a couple of successes we've had.
We proposed A federally funded research and development center.
These are pseudo government public private partnerships full
of researchers that try to studyproblems or Advanced Research or
evaluate contracts on behalf of the government, often directed
(15:47):
by government clearance. The Department of Defense has
ten of them. The Department of Energy has 8
of them. Rand and Mitre Corporation and
others are FFRDCS and they have really productive relationships.
Thinking hard about problems that you don't want your
diplomats spending their day-to-day time doing this deep
research stuff. So we proposed it and somebody
(16:08):
thought it was a good idea and picked it up and started
advancing this idea with the Department of State and has bid
out a contract that I think is currently being evaluated,
right. But I thought it'd be a great
way to do something like efficiency evaluations to give
some of these questions to researchers and say, find us the
most cost effective interventions across a range of
(16:28):
options, study these so that we can implement them at the State
Department. That seems to me to be a pretty
exciting pathway, and it seems like we're advancing towards
that. So that's often how we work.
We put together ideas of how government can be more effective
and we work quietly. We don't try to take a lot of
success. And somebody inside of
(16:49):
government says, I really like this, I want to advance this.
I'm working on something similar.
Let me take some of these ideas and push them forward.
And do you live off grants or how does your organization
survive? Is it all volunteer?
We started all volunteer, we call them fellows.
There's academic fellows and policy fellows, a lot of people
who just really care about this stuff and really want to speak
(17:10):
to the policy makers and not just shout into the ether.
We have mostly lived off of grants for paid staff.
We don't take any money from thegovernment.
Theoretically, that could change.
But when I started the organization, I made a very
clear decision that I didn't want to be a contractor, right,
or service provider to the government.
I didn't want to help them do what they already wanted to do.
(17:32):
I wanted to have some distance to say, well, I don't think
you're doing that right. And I'm not here to make money
off of you. I'm not trying to win the
contract. I'm not trying to make you
happy. So I'm not beholden to you by
being paid by you. Yeah, but I think this is a
point to mention. There's very, very little money
out there to do this sort of meta work.
(17:53):
If you want to write about how bad China is or how dangerous
nuclear weapons are, there's a lot of funders who kind of get
that and are willing to fund that sort of research.
We're kind of new and different and fall onto an interesting
space. It's something that we've been
talking about is how do we talk with philanthropists and
foundations to say we need to beinvesting in institutional
(18:13):
capacity, not just working around the government to do the
work, but working with government to strengthen the way
that they do the work. I think peace building is a is a
great example of a space where philanthropists love to like go
off and do a track to diplomacy somewhere.
But why not support the Department of State to do their
negotiations better? In civil affairs world, that's
what we focus on is how to get past conflict into a transition
(18:37):
government that's stable and doesn't get corrupted by
radicals, foreign nations, moneyed interests, so that they
could actually transform into a representative economy and
government that stabilizes and becomes part of the
international community. And in the past, I've had people
from mostly the military come inand talk about that type of
(18:58):
transition. It's hard to get the State
Department to talk about how they see and apply that type of
practice in order to move us past conflict into a stable
partnership with another nation.Yeah, It reflects this
difference of culture that the military really does think about
how do we capture these lessons and then push them back into the
(19:19):
knowledge base through the War College or into our doctrine.
The State Department doesn't have a culture like that.
So it's really hard to get people to share lessons or to
have some sort of evidence basedfoundation upon which to say,
hey, we're approaching a new negotiation to try to end the
Civil War. What approach should we use
right now at the State Department?
They think it up from scratch every time.
(19:40):
And yeah, I mean, sometimes people are brilliant and come up
with great solutions. Often not.
And that's one of the concerns Ihad whenever I served with the
State Department was that 10,000mile screwdriver.
And he had, yeah. You're sitting on a post or an
embassy and you're trying to getthings done, and you never could
get permissions forward. When I was in Afghanistan, I ran
(20:03):
grants for public diplomacy programs and I did actually have
some leeway to operate, and thatwas helpful.
Afghanistan is such an interesting example of a non
traditional war. If the war is just send the
tanks and the bombers and blow stuff up and then leave, well,
we're really good at that. If the mission is win hearts and
(20:24):
minds and install a government while people are shooting at
you, all of a sudden it becomes a lot more complicated.
Right now you're pulling across institutional divides.
Well, who should be in charge? Is it the best military mind
should be making decisions abouthow to navigate our Afghanistan
policy? Should it be the ambassador who
theoretically has the best political mind of how to build
(20:46):
these relationships and think about who we're empowering along
the way? How do we make trade-offs?
I think of the example from Iraqpaying for locals to guard their
own neighborhoods. It really, really helped to
lessen violence in the short run, but it's LED to a long run
circumstance where we really lost control and we've
militarized a lot of places thatweren't previously so violent.
(21:08):
And created a massive dependencyalso on our money.
Keep things going. That's right.
So those are really complicated political questions and God
knows I don't have the answers. But again, this speaks back to,
well, what is the role of the State Department if it's to
think about the long term objectives of these places and
build that strategy? Well, you need to work very
(21:28):
closely with the military and very closely with intelligence
and think about how all these tools of power work together.
That's really not how it works so well these days.
That job falls to the National Security Council.
You have a handful of people running huge missions like
Afghanistan who are trying to just keep the trains running on
time. And the size of the challenge is
(21:49):
too big for them to coordinate. So you get the military going
One Direction, you get the StateDepartment going the other
direction and USA going a third direction and Intel going a
fourth direction. And it doesn't seem to be some
cement, some glue at the center of that to say, OK, everybody,
pause. Here's how we're all going to
work together. Here's our strategy.
Somebody has to be playing that role in our government, and
(22:11):
somebody needs to be trained to play that role.
I mean, the reality is, is that there's very few people who are
capable of understanding both how the military and diplomacy
works. So we need to be preparing for
those challenges in the future. You brought up an interesting
point with the NSCI. Don't know how it happened, but
it seems like over the years thedecision making across the
(22:32):
agencies consolidated into the NSC where they're the ones that
are actually running programs, organizing how all the different
departments and agencies are working in the Middle East or in
Africa or in a war zone. And it throws me off because I
always thought State Department is the cross department and the
agency coordinator for foreign policy.
(22:52):
Why aren't they more involved inthe sub policy level in keeping
the departments and agencies focused on the long term foreign
policy mission and then providing up to the NFC options
or levers of government and how they can be pulled in order to
achieve U.S. policy goals or to change a adversary or
(23:13):
competitors behaviors. It just seems like too much has
gone up to the NSC for so few people to do too much.
Yeah, I completely agree with that.
I think the NSC has grown far too large and is being asked to
play a role with it, which it's kind of really struggle to play.
And by the way, there happens tobe no congressional oversight of
the NSC, no appointments. So it's really an abdication of
congressional responsibility to leave our foreign policy to be
(23:36):
created by the Executive office of the President.
That's kind of a strange setup. You know, my favorite theory
about why this is happening is because there's a long history
of presidents who are frustratedwith the State Departments
ability to really define actionable foreign policy and
execute it to get the job done. I could throw a lot of quotes at
you. JFK called the State Department
(23:58):
a bowl of Jelly. Nixon called diplomats a bunch
of eunuchs. Richard Holbrooke wrote this
famous article in the first issue of Foreign Policy
magazine. He called the State Department
the machine that fails. So this is bipartisan, getting
worse over time and continuing to this day.
And there's an interesting political partisan effect here
(24:18):
if the president doesn't feel like they have good control over
their agency. Democrats and Republicans
actually take different approaches.
This is the end of Part 1. Come back next week for the rest
of my discussion with Dan Spicageni.
We'll see you then. Thanks for listening.
If you get a chance, please likeand subscribe and rate the show
(24:38):
on your favorite podcast platform.
Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an
episode, e-mail us at ca.podcasting@gmail.com.
I'll have the e-mail and CA Association website in the show
notes. And now, most importantly, to
those currently out in the field, working with a partner
nation's people or leadership toforward US relations.
(25:00):
Thank you all for what you're doing.
This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great
episodes. 1 California podcast.
Welcome to the Once CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines.
Once CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and
brings in people who are currentor former military diplomats,
development officers, and field agents to discuss their
experiences on ground with a partner nation's people and
leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone
interested in working the last three feet of Foreign Relations.
(00:24):
To contact the show, e-mail us at ca.podcasting@gmail.com or
look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at
www.dabbacivilaffairsassociorg. I'll have those in the show
notes. Please welcome Dance Picagini,
founder of FP21A research and advising group focused on
reforming how the State Department conducts US foreign
(00:45):
policy. Dance started on the Hill
working congressional policy, then was a diplomat for the
State Department. Since then, he formed FP 21 to
help the State Department improve its organizational
processes. This is the first of a two-part
episode, so let's get started. I've really tried.
To think about what would it take to try to advance
modernization with the State Department and recognize there's
(01:08):
just not many folks who really think about the details.
Even people in Congress often kind of generally get it, but
often don't have deep experiencewith the processes or the
institutions. So it's the rather limited set
of folks who really want to engage with the substance of
what would it look like to create a better State
Department. Well, state doesn't have a large
constituency. They don't have any domestic
(01:29):
public affairs outreach, and they have very little I'll
experience. They don't reach out and talk to
a lot of Congress staff. Yeah, I went to state from
working on the Hill and really appreciate it when I got there.
Like, hey folks, shouldn't we betalking with Congress?
They write our checks and authorize our activities and
people are very resistant. I could get into that a little
(01:51):
bit. It's something I've researched a
bit is H Bureau Legislative Affairs.
They do a lot with few resources, but it's not known to
be a very effective institution,particularly compared to what
you see from the military folks.Well, that's The funny thing,
because a lot of congressional fellows and staffers are on soap
committees that deal with these foreign policy issues.
And yet, if State doesn't show up there, how do they sell what
(02:13):
they're doing except for when they're subpoenaed to testify?
Yeah, there's a really interesting set of questions in
here, Jack, about how do we makeUS foreign policy.
The founders thought it should be made by the legislative
branch and that the executive would kind of take over in a
time of war. Of course, that's never really
happened. So the entry points for Congress
(02:33):
tend to be very occasional authorizing bills.
Hey, there's this particular task we want you to take on that
you haven't done before, a new Bureau, a new arm of government,
and then through appropriations.So a lot of the foreign
assistance work is pushed by earmarks, so to speak.
The Hill and Congress gets a lotof control on how the money is
(02:55):
spent, but I think most of diplomacy is kind of not really
finance focused. It's not about the dollars and
cents, it's about the big picture policies and the
strategies that are created by the institutions.
So yeah, appropriations isn't a very strong arm into how the
work is done and which creates, to your point, some separation
between how Congress thinks about foreign policy and how the
(03:16):
diplomats think about protectingand building it.
And then that's part of the reason you created FP 21, is to
help build out how a state creates those strategies and
codifies its practices with foreign policy, with diplomacy,
right? Yeah, that's exactly right.
You know, it was really personalfor me.
I was a diplomat and I loved thejob.
(03:36):
I loved the work. I felt the mission was very
important, but I didn't know if I was doing a good job.
There wasn't a lot of evaluationof what success or failure looks
like. There's no diplomatic doctrine.
There's no training, there's no market economy or internal
competition that says, hey, you did a great job on this or you
didn't. It's very subjective.
And I started to doubt, you know, I served through the wars
(03:58):
in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Arab Spring and the pivot to
Russia and saw a lot of failure during my time.
So I started to ask some really hard questions about what does
it mean to be effective and who are the people who are having
this discussion? You know, people debate we
should do this or that with our China policy or we should be
more hawkish towards Russia or change our posture towards
(04:19):
nuclear non proliferation. And so people are kind of
debating the substantive ideas, but not the process of how those
ideas are made and not trying tothink about how to advance the
study and practice of foreign policy.
So I found there was a gap in the space and really wanted to
be an outside objective voice tosay hey, I think we can do
better. I did read your article about
(04:41):
doctrine and diplomacy, and I did send you some notes back on
how doctrine can be helpful as aguide, but it also could be a
bludgeon or a door slam. Those who have different ideas
from the authors or the people who they consider to be chosen
to select what is to be taught and learned.
(05:01):
And I get how state uses relationships to build skills.
The challenge on that side is ifyou don't have the right
relationship, if you've got leadership that's aggressive or
over controlling and you never learn your trade well, as you go
up your FSO chain and become higher, higher in rank, you're
going to struggle with some of those more complex tasks.
(05:24):
So a second see a need for some form of study, some learning
aspect, but I don't want it to become a ball and chain.
How do you envision diplomacy and doctrine burging?
Yeah, I've never served in the Pentagon and.
I could show you volumes of stuff if you want.
Yeah, Yeah, right. Well, so I, you know, I made the
(05:46):
mistake of walking into a group of think it was soldiers, you
know, and strategists to ask about doctrine and said wouldn't
it be great if the Department ofState had doctrine?
And they all said no, we hate doctrine it.
We don't even follow it ourselves.
Exactly. We ignore it and you know, good
riddance if if you guys don't have it.
My view is that there's a healthy balance, that there
should be some baseline understanding of what it means
(06:08):
to conduct a good negotiation, what the role is between
strategists and implementers in the field, something that you
can pick up and read and say, OK, we're all going to be
executing this in the same way. And right now that doesn't exist
at all. So I think that we're far off
the scale to one side where we haven't done enough level
setting to think about here's what we think best practices,
(06:31):
and here's what we train to the next generation.
And there's a reason this doesn't exist.
It's not just because it can't exist.
Many senior diplomats don't believe it should exist.
I get told all the time by senior folks, people I respect
who say, listen, son, foreign policy is an art out of science.
And it comes from in here and they point to their brains and
(06:51):
it suggests that they're the artists and they know best.
But it's really tautological. I'm the smartest because I'm in
the highest position. And you know that because that's
how I got the job. And I got the job because I'm
the smartest. So I'm, I'm really skeptical of
this idea that diplomacy, that foreign policy in general is all
art form, It's all relationships, it's all instinct
(07:12):
and feudal. I believe that there is some
baseline of best practice. I could imagine a world in which
that best practice starts to flood into spaces of here's how
you hold your keyboard and here's the doctrine for how to
pour your coffee. OK, too far.
Yeah, let's back off. But there should be some sort of
learning, raining and evaluationprocess.
(07:32):
There should be a space for our best retired folks to say, OK,
here's what worked and didn't work over the course of my
career, let me plug this back into the institution so I can
pass these lessons on to the next generation.
Yeah, that's actually a great point.
I wonder if retired folks who did a lot of engagements in one
aspect or never could write about it, or even if they're
(07:53):
cables from that era could be resurrected and then they write
about the cable and what they were experiencing and just kind
of a this is what really went wrong at this point.
Or I really should have focused on this so that people could
pull patterns of behavior and kind of see what was successful
in the aggregate versus somebodysaying thou shalt do this or
(08:15):
thou shalt do that. That's an interesting way to go
about it. That's right, us nerdy academics
think of this as epistemology. Epistemology being the study of
what we know to be true. Diplomats kind of have a
historians epistemology meaning.I'm going to go tell this really
complicated, multifaceted version of history in order to
(08:38):
understand why this particular thing happened.
And I'm going to think about thefuture according to these
complex, interwoven, sweet, generous effects to understand
how the future will work. Social scientists, political
scientists say we want to draw patterns out of this doctrine is
an effort to draw patterns out of it.
It's a more scientific process. We don't know if those patterns
(08:59):
are right, but let's try one andtest it and learn from it.
Is it working? If so, great, keep it.
Is it failing? OK, well, then we've got to
change it. So you're really bumping up
against to a cultural belief that there can be no pattern in
foreign affairs. Everything needs to be created
from scratch. I just, I, I don't find it to be
true. I don't agree with that approach
at all. It's got to be painful to our
(09:22):
foreign partners and allies whenevery time a new ambassador or
team comes in and they're radically different in the way
they approach discussions and policy and engagements, and it's
got to kill. That's right.
Dad, have you heard anything from other foreign diplomats
about engagements with Americans?
Have they ever said had any comments like that?
(09:43):
You know, people make a practiceof not criticizing the Americans
too much. It's nice to be the superpower,
but that's fading away. Yeah, and out of drunks and
children, you get the truth. So he must have had a a martini
moment where someone said, you know.
Yeah, certainly it's humbling sitting with a French diplomat
or a Dutch diplomat or a Singaporean diplomat.
I mean, the Singaporeans, they pay their public servants an
(10:05):
extraordinary amount. They put them through school for
a very long time. They're the best of the best.
And they have very rigorous training Chinese diplomats.
They have very rigorous traininginstitutions that really prepare
their diplomats to try to be more effective.
That's just not how the United States works.
We have a much more fly by the seat of your pants approach, and
(10:26):
everybody's had to deal with it.But I think we're going to start
to see the diplomatic core, which is less well trained than
the rest of the world, which hasless clear precepts for action
and is ultimately leading to a real marginalization of the
state department of diplomacy, of civilian instruments, of
foreign policy in our national security apparatus.
And I think it's going to cost us.
(10:48):
How has it been around French diplomats or Belgian diplomats,
countries that have been famously good at diplomacy?
How do they treat American diplomats?
Let me flip my tone here. You know, Jack, Yeah.
Diplomacy is an art, not a science, right?
And those of us who have the gift of gab, I'm being partially
tongue in cheek, but I think everybody who's worked abroad,
(11:09):
whether they be diplomats or foreign aid people or just
businessmen have interacted withextraordinary diplomats who seem
to know everybody and everything.
You know, I have an encyclopedicknowledge the country and the
issues that they work on. And other people have worked
with bums. And you say, how does this
person thriving in this place, Right.
I won't be too. That's fine understanding here.
(11:30):
Well, another thing you brought up that I really liked was the
notion of an ethos or a mantra, something that everyone could
speak to, strive to. I like what's etched over
buildings, are there to inspire people to achieve better, to be
ethically better. And I sent you Colin Palace, 13
rules because Colin Palace kind of a demigod of State
(11:54):
Department. He came in and actually helped
out the program and is a decent fellow.
So what in your mind do you see as a good ethos or mantra?
What do you think would be good to inspire?
Yeah, I think there's two possible approaches you could
take here, and it really dependson what the country, what the
legislative branch, what our presidents think the State
(12:16):
Department should be good for. One is the State Department
should be the place that makes the strategy of US foreign
policy. This was kind of its ultimate
authorized role. It's the coordinator, it's the
strategist. It's the place that thinks about
everything up until war, and notthe covert intelligence
gathering, but everything else. How do we Orient our
(12:38):
relationships with these other countries in order to achieve
objectives that we are setting for ourselves?
So if you really want your StateDepartment to be your
strategist, that's one approach.If, on the other hand, you want
to continue the growth and the centralization of the National
Security Council, which is not an executive agency, it's the
bunch of special assistance to the presidents that change over
(12:58):
each time and is very poorly institutionalized in many
respects, then you want your State Department folks to just
be the implementers. So I think your ethos has to
speak to that mission. If you're the strategist, the
ethos needs to think about how do we set goals, How do we
aggressively pursue American interests or our values in our
(13:20):
strategies? If you're more of an
implementer, it's how do we run through walls to achieve success
on behalf of the president's goals.
So there have been some efforts.Mike Pompeo famously tried to
introduce ethos at the State Department.
I don't think it landed so well,but I thought the impulse was
right. Just putting an ethos without
(13:40):
giving the State Department anything else to do.
It felt like it wasn't going to really affect the culture.
That ethos should be connected with real direction about how
diplomats get their job done in a more complicated world in
which you don't need an envoy totell you what's happening.
In France. You can direct e-mail to the
president and watch France's parliament on TV if you want.
(14:01):
So the role has to change and I think our government needs to
catch up, Sure. And our ethos should reflect
that. OK.
I'm looking at Pompeo's ethos now.
We are one team 1 mission. That it You know what he said.
Oh, that's way too short. Yeah.
Through these doors come the greatest diplomats in the world.
(14:22):
You know, something like that. Yeah, I think defining success
is a major question here that threads all of my work.
What does it mean to be good at diplomacy?
I'd love more discussion about that.
Sure. Well, let's jump into it.
You created FP 21 for that role to build out not only to ask the
questions, but also to provide some recommendations on things
(14:43):
like how FSI should tackle education and development,
politically appointed diplomats versus professionally developed
diplomats. You have an enormous array of
verticals. Some are current events, some
are theory and practice, but it it really encapsulate what you
and your staff are trying to do and build an alternate picture
(15:05):
of how State Department could beand I applaud you for that.
Have you had a lot of success? Have you had a lot of reach with
your efforts? Yes, We've had really
interesting successes along the way.
We're a rather young organization.
I don't think we've been around for five years yet, but we're
kind of the only organization ofour kind that's trying to put
research against these questions.
(15:27):
And let me give you examples of a couple of successes we've had.
We proposed A federally funded research and development center.
These are pseudo government public private partnerships full
of researchers that try to studyproblems or Advanced Research or
evaluate contracts on behalf of the government, often directed
(15:47):
by government clearance. The Department of Defense has
ten of them. The Department of Energy has 8
of them. Rand and Mitre Corporation and
others are FFRDCS and they have really productive relationships.
Thinking hard about problems that you don't want your
diplomats spending their day-to-day time doing this deep
research stuff. So we proposed it and somebody
(16:08):
thought it was a good idea and picked it up and started
advancing this idea with the Department of State and has bid
out a contract that I think is currently being evaluated,
right. But I thought it'd be a great
way to do something like efficiency evaluations to give
some of these questions to researchers and say, find us the
most cost effective interventions across a range of
(16:28):
options, study these so that we can implement them at the State
Department. That seems to me to be a pretty
exciting pathway, and it seems like we're advancing towards
that. So that's often how we work.
We put together ideas of how government can be more effective
and we work quietly. We don't try to take a lot of
success. And somebody inside of
(16:49):
government says, I really like this, I want to advance this.
I'm working on something similar.
Let me take some of these ideas and push them forward.
And do you live off grants or how does your organization
survive? Is it all volunteer?
We started all volunteer, we call them fellows.
There's academic fellows and policy fellows, a lot of people
who just really care about this stuff and really want to speak
(17:10):
to the policy makers and not just shout into the ether.
We have mostly lived off of grants for paid staff.
We don't take any money from thegovernment.
Theoretically, that could change.
But when I started the organization, I made a very
clear decision that I didn't want to be a contractor, right,
or service provider to the government.
I didn't want to help them do what they already wanted to do.
(17:32):
I wanted to have some distance to say, well, I don't think
you're doing that right. And I'm not here to make money
off of you. I'm not trying to win the
contract. I'm not trying to make you
happy. So I'm not beholden to you by
being paid by you. Yeah, but I think this is a
point to mention. There's very, very little money
out there to do this sort of meta work.
(17:53):
If you want to write about how bad China is or how dangerous
nuclear weapons are, there's a lot of funders who kind of get
that and are willing to fund that sort of research.
We're kind of new and different and fall onto an interesting
space. It's something that we've been
talking about is how do we talk with philanthropists and
foundations to say we need to beinvesting in institutional
(18:13):
capacity, not just working around the government to do the
work, but working with government to strengthen the way
that they do the work. I think peace building is a is a
great example of a space where philanthropists love to like go
off and do a track to diplomacy somewhere.
But why not support the Department of State to do their
negotiations better? In civil affairs world, that's
what we focus on is how to get past conflict into a transition
(18:37):
government that's stable and doesn't get corrupted by
radicals, foreign nations, moneyed interests, so that they
could actually transform into a representative economy and
government that stabilizes and becomes part of the
international community. And in the past, I've had people
from mostly the military come inand talk about that type of
(18:58):
transition. It's hard to get the State
Department to talk about how they see and apply that type of
practice in order to move us past conflict into a stable
partnership with another nation.Yeah, It reflects this
difference of culture that the military really does think about
how do we capture these lessons and then push them back into the
(19:19):
knowledge base through the War College or into our doctrine.
The State Department doesn't have a culture like that.
So it's really hard to get people to share lessons or to
have some sort of evidence basedfoundation upon which to say,
hey, we're approaching a new negotiation to try to end the
Civil War. What approach should we use
right now at the State Department?
They think it up from scratch every time.
(19:40):
And yeah, I mean, sometimes people are brilliant and come up
with great solutions. Often not.
And that's one of the concerns Ihad whenever I served with the
State Department was that 10,000mile screwdriver.
And he had, yeah. You're sitting on a post or an
embassy and you're trying to getthings done, and you never could
get permissions forward. When I was in Afghanistan, I ran
(20:03):
grants for public diplomacy programs and I did actually have
some leeway to operate, and thatwas helpful.
Afghanistan is such an interesting example of a non
traditional war. If the war is just send the
tanks and the bombers and blow stuff up and then leave, well,
we're really good at that. If the mission is win hearts and
(20:24):
minds and install a government while people are shooting at
you, all of a sudden it becomes a lot more complicated.
Right now you're pulling across institutional divides.
Well, who should be in charge? Is it the best military mind
should be making decisions abouthow to navigate our Afghanistan
policy? Should it be the ambassador who
theoretically has the best political mind of how to build
(20:46):
these relationships and think about who we're empowering along
the way? How do we make trade-offs?
I think of the example from Iraqpaying for locals to guard their
own neighborhoods. It really, really helped to
lessen violence in the short run, but it's LED to a long run
circumstance where we really lost control and we've
militarized a lot of places thatweren't previously so violent.
(21:08):
And created a massive dependencyalso on our money.
Keep things going. That's right.
So those are really complicated political questions and God
knows I don't have the answers. But again, this speaks back to,
well, what is the role of the State Department if it's to
think about the long term objectives of these places and
build that strategy? Well, you need to work very
(21:28):
closely with the military and very closely with intelligence
and think about how all these tools of power work together.
That's really not how it works so well these days.
That job falls to the National Security Council.
You have a handful of people running huge missions like
Afghanistan who are trying to just keep the trains running on
time. And the size of the challenge is
(21:49):
too big for them to coordinate. So you get the military going
One Direction, you get the StateDepartment going the other
direction and USA going a third direction and Intel going a
fourth direction. And it doesn't seem to be some
cement, some glue at the center of that to say, OK, everybody,
pause. Here's how we're all going to
work together. Here's our strategy.
Somebody has to be playing that role in our government, and
(22:11):
somebody needs to be trained to play that role.
I mean, the reality is, is that there's very few people who are
capable of understanding both how the military and diplomacy
works. So we need to be preparing for
those challenges in the future. You brought up an interesting
point with the NSCI. Don't know how it happened, but
it seems like over the years thedecision making across the
(22:32):
agencies consolidated into the NSC where they're the ones that
are actually running programs, organizing how all the different
departments and agencies are working in the Middle East or in
Africa or in a war zone. And it throws me off because I
always thought State Department is the cross department and the
agency coordinator for foreign policy.
(22:52):
Why aren't they more involved inthe sub policy level in keeping
the departments and agencies focused on the long term foreign
policy mission and then providing up to the NFC options
or levers of government and how they can be pulled in order to
achieve U.S. policy goals or to change a adversary or
(23:13):
competitors behaviors. It just seems like too much has
gone up to the NSC for so few people to do too much.
Yeah, I completely agree with that.
I think the NSC has grown far too large and is being asked to
play a role with it, which it's kind of really struggle to play.
And by the way, there happens tobe no congressional oversight of
the NSC, no appointments. So it's really an abdication of
congressional responsibility to leave our foreign policy to be
(23:36):
created by the Executive office of the President.
That's kind of a strange setup. You know, my favorite theory
about why this is happening is because there's a long history
of presidents who are frustratedwith the State Departments
ability to really define actionable foreign policy and
execute it to get the job done. I could throw a lot of quotes at
you. JFK called the State Department
(23:58):
a bowl of Jelly. Nixon called diplomats a bunch
of eunuchs. Richard Holbrooke wrote this
famous article in the first issue of Foreign Policy
magazine. He called the State Department
the machine that fails. So this is bipartisan, getting
worse over time and continuing to this day.
And there's an interesting political partisan effect here
(24:18):
if the president doesn't feel like they have good control over
their agency. Democrats and Republicans
actually take different approaches.
This is the end of Part 1. Come back next week for the rest
of my discussion with Dan Spicageni.
We'll see you then. Thanks for listening.
If you get a chance, please likeand subscribe and rate the show
(24:38):
on your favorite podcast platform.
Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an
episode, e-mail us at ca.podcasting@gmail.com.
I'll have the e-mail and CA Association website in the show
notes. And now, most importantly, to
those currently out in the field, working with a partner
nation's people or leadership toforward US relations.
(25:00):
Thank you all for what you're doing.
This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great
episodes. 1 California podcast.
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