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It's not just the military that must adapt to a changing world (see BW Online, 10/27/00, "Sticks and Stones can Break an Army"). Growing evidence shows that governments have less and less control over international relations. These days, people in the streets, nongovernment organizations, the Internet, and global markets dictate the pace and course of events as much as governments.
So diplomats need to find new ways to identify these forces and trends early and to deal with them. "There's a gnawing sense that it's a new game," says one experienced Washington foreign-policy hand. "Classic management of foreign relations is out of sync."
Examples of the problem abound:
*In Yugoslavia, street demonstrators accomplished what the West's bombs, diplomacy, and threats of war-crime trials never did: ridding the country of Slobodan Milosevic.
*It was 1997 Nobel peace-prize winner Jody Williams, coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, who pressured nations around the globe to sign the land-mine treaty. Diplomats had to play catch-up. In a stunning shift from tradition, the activists were at the negotiating table, offering legal language for the pact.
*Street demonstrators in Gaza and the West Bank effectively prevented Yasser Arafat from signing a peace deal at Camp David and trumped enormous pressure from Washington.
*In Indonesia, a marriage of the Internet and protesters ousted President Suharto.
*At the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle last December, street protestors organized via the Internet were so successful at disrupting the confab that it ended in confusion and failure.
"A LOT IS NEEDED." A Nov. 13 Rand study made clear that the next Administration will have to deal frontally -- and early -- with these issues. The study, sent to both Democratic and Republican transition teams, notes: "Governments are less in control of foreign policy than they were only a few years ago." The bipartisan panel of experts who participated in the report recommended creation of a new office in the White House, modeled after the Office of Science & Technology Policy, that would keep abreast of private-sector and nongovernment-organization activities and work with them toward diplomatic solutions.
"Clearly a lot is needed," says Frank C. Carlucci, a former Defense Secretary and a co-chair of the Rand panel. One critical part of the change might be a greater emphasis on public diplomacy at the U.S. State Dept. That would mean more contact with the populace of target nations or groups and dissemination of information explaining American positions. Some experts hoped this mission would get a higher profile at the State Dept. when Foggy Bottom merged with the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) a year ago. But it hasn't happened, according to an October report by the U.S. Committee on Public Diplomacy, which concluded that the State Dept.'s bureaucratic culture has had more influence on USIA than USIA has had on State.
During the Presidential campaign, neither candidate gave much evidence of understanding how the ground has shifted. The world view George W. Bush has espoused -- a realpolitik, balance-of-power approach -- is more retrograde than forward-looking. But Condoleezza Rice, Bush's top foreign policy aide, insists the Bush team can handle the changing environment.
INNER-CIRCLE EXCEPTIONS. "Most people who have not been in Washington for the last eight years have been dealing with that world," she says. Rice points to her background as provost at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley and Vice-Presidential candidate Dick Cheney's tenure as CEO of a global oil-equipment maker. Trouble is, Rice and Cheney are the exceptions in Bush's inner foreign policy circle. Most stayed in Washington during the Clinton years, waiting for another chance to govern.
Gore shows more signs of recognizing that times have changed. In contrast to Bush, he has an expansive view of national security, which includes everything from environmental degradation to the AIDS epidemic. The Veep "has been much more involved in new agenda issues," says Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Dept. official during the Clinton Administration. "He rates those issues as a much higher priority." That may be true, but he was in charge of reinventing government when the grafting of the USIA on State didn't take as well as some had hoped.
Bush has at least talked about some far-reaching changes at the Pentagon, and perhaps he'll do the same at the State Dept. Gore always wants to reinvent things. Most encouraging is the fact that advisers to both Bush and Gore served on the Rand panel that came up with the recommendations for change. While they were unanimous on the need for an overhaul, they offered few ideas about what to do. "We don't have all the answers," Carlucci says. "It's evolving."
At least those giving the two camps advice are asking the right questions. The next President will face the difficult task of supplying the answers.
Crock covers national security for Business Week Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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