Adam Ozimek will get the reference.
Hopefully Anonymous thinks we should all be atwitter about Obama’s picks for ambassadors. He was too lazy to make a front-page post at his own blog about it and I thought the OB open thread was a poor location to focus discussion, so I’m putting it here.
My impression from years back was that ambassadorships were cushy jobs where you get to travel and don’t have much responsibilities (Carol Moseley Braun was from my state). H.A views them through a more technocratic lens where we want the most competent people there (with caveats about comparative advantage). H.A’s link indicate that usually they go to career foreign service officers and so Obama is deviantly engaging in patronage for campaign donors. I remarked earlier that the standards for FSOs seem to have dropped a lot recently, so maybe we’re not missing out on any George Kennans. The State Department in general is in bad shape, with Defense having gobbled up many of its former duties. In “Bureaucracy” James Q. Wilson writes that State has one of the vaguest missions – representing and advancing the interests of the United States abroad – which is a major factor in its perennially disappointing performance.
Entitled to an Opinion 
January 8, 2010 at 6:16 am
Obama wishes he had Conklings dynamic personality.
Seriously though, my question for those like HA who are so upset about this is what’s the worst case scenario? And what poor performing ambassadors have mattered in the past?
January 8, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Mr. Ozimek, does the name April Glaspie perhaps ring a bell?
I don’t share HA’s concern, because we have to understand that under the Bush and Obama administrations, we have seen the holders of such offices fully-reduced to figure-heads a la Yes Minister.
Condi Rice’s era was fraught with failure because of her desire to assert herself as an individual power over the collective established bureaucracy and her successor, Clinton, is entirely a compliant figurehead.
What this means, in terms of governmental structure is that we get political figureheads for photo-ops and so forth, and an expanded bureaucracy who actually does the work.
The real problem is that all diplomats in question are Americans, and diplomacy is a subject wholly alien to the American mind, left-right and particularly center (in which they try to emulate the Europeans. Europeans, cringing, scheming or belligerent, never make the best role-models).
Referinng to basic Moldbug theory here, we probably infer that Americans are trained to wield power poorly or not at all, by the conditioning of fifty years of refusing to admit to being a world power or acting the part.
The problem with technocratic CEO’s like
Eric Schmidt is that firstly, they are socio-economic creatures, (which makes them universally acceptable and successful, in contrast to mere technologists).
For example, Schmidt says renewable energy is cheaper than nuclear energy.
And why? He adheres to fashion, firstly, but secondly basic economics will always trump long-term planning which never falls within the range of 21st Century CEO. A decade is a lifetime to a technocratic CEO.
A general example of this, is a meeting I just came out of, regarding the subject of whether to place trace-wire on new pvc-pipe-lines. Yes, everyone likes the idea for maintaining water-lines and eventually it will be made mandatory, in all likelihood, but it costs more, which now is the trumping factor for many companies.
Is money any object to the technocractic futurist? Do I digress? Not really?
Is Schmidt going to do things differently, as an ambassador? No, he’s just going to do them more competently.
Assuming bureaucracy is not allowed to undercut his powers as an ambassador, (a great assumption in itself) he’s still naturally going to confirm to the mores of an incompetent system.
One can guarantee that something Schmidt has in common with Eric Raymond is their common devotion to the faux Iranian green-revolution-whatever movement.
American policy towards the Third-World, for example, thus enabling potential nuts like Chavez who make things even worse.
What is the amoral technocrat’s parallel foreign-policy?
January 8, 2010 at 1:54 pm
Ambassadorships to posts like London, Paris, and Rome have quite typically gone to big campaign donors. This is partly because they are the great cultural capitals of the world and are cushy jobs without much responsibility; partly because it is expected that the ambassador will be a rich man who can draw on his own resources to live in an expensive city and to entertain foreign dignitaries in a style that is beyond the means provided by his official budget. Career FSOs are sent to the hardship posts or to places where it is felt that whatever special expertise they may be thought to have will be necessary.
I write “special expertise they may be thought to have” because it is not at all clear to me that career FSOs have represented the United States abroad any more effectively than have patronage appointees. Indeed, the career foreign service has been a hindrance to the implementation of foreign policy as envisioned by a president as often as it has been a help. This is undoubtedly a reason why presidents of both parties have continued to rely on patronage appointees despite the objections of career State Department officials. Of course it doesn’t hurt that appointment to a choice post is also a valuable reward to give a generous donor.
January 8, 2010 at 5:19 pm
Thanks for doing this.
To be clear, I don’t think that all ambassadorships should go to career foreign service (probably not more than 40-60% or so) if anything, I think the current rate of 66% going to career foreign service may be too high.
I think they should go to the most qualified, not to the people who turned out the most votes or who bundled the most campaign cash.
I’m not surprised most of your commenters don’t care. I was more surprised, for example, that Daschle and Caroline Kennedy actually lost their plumb appointments to HHS and the New York Senate respectively, the latter transparently on job competency grounds (the few competency critiques of Daschle never got the traction they deserved, in my opinion).
If the foreign service generally is shitty, that is its own problem to be corrected, not an excuse to shoe horn donation bundlers into ambassadorships.
Like administration positions generally, I think that the private sector, the nonprofit sector, research universities, and other sectors of the government outside of the state department should all be looked at for determining the best ambassadors. It’s noxious to me that a big donor would have priority over a regional expert with demonstrated diplomatic aptitude, all other things being equal.
And giving an ambassadorship to a fucking heiress for giving away money she inherited?
I shouldn’t care about this stuff yet (I’m not yet a decabillionaire) but it rankles me to my credentialist, technocratic, meritocratic core.
January 9, 2010 at 2:49 pm
H.A., the question here is how we define “most qualified.”
The skills required of a diplomat are, at bottom, still those of a courtier – not perhaps in every detail of the age of Castiglione and Machiavelli, but in the general character applicable in every age: to be socially polished, able to mingle easily with the powerful and rich, to ingratiate oneself with them, to observe and remember what might seem to be trifling remarks and behaviors on their parts, but which might at some point prove useful – all this while seeming affable and harmless.
Does one learn to do these things in schools, or does one learn them by growing up in such an environment that they are absorbed by the daily experience of life?
Of course the present-day American elite from which big campaign donors are drawn is very far from being an aristocracy, but it is still as close as we have to one. It is the vanity and delusion of the modern age that it is more ‘meritocratic’ than all previous ones; but success as a courtier was no less difficult to achieve centuries ago than success in the academy, bureaucracy, or business is now, and perhaps more so.
The old aristocratic education, derived ultimately from Quintilian’s curriculum for the heirs of Domitian, gave its pupils a firm grounding in history and their cultural heritage, and taught them the skills of leadership. Is there any institution in U.S. society today that avowedly undertakes to educate this country’s future leaders from childhood? The British public schools and the American prep schools patterned after them used to say this was their mission, but such claims would be condemned as ‘elitist’ today. How can ‘credentialist, technocratic, meritocratic’ principles coexist harmoniously with the politically correct and egalitarian refusal to cultivate leadership? They can’t, and don’t. As important as the Third World is to U.S. policy today, we probably couldn’t find a single foreign service officer in the State Department who could hold a candle to Sir Richard Francis Burton, or many others like him but less well known, who served Britain in the heyday of her empire.
January 9, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Gary Sick gives an anecdote about an ambassador acting on his own without consulting Washington, though it’s unclear if anything came of it. Mark Moyar claims in Triumph Forsaken that ambassador Lodge (who LBJ appointed for political reasons) caused the overthrow of Diem, which subsequently led to defeat in Vietnam. Hillary Mann Leverett (one of the few openly dissenting from fans of the “Green Revolution”) defending herself from Jeffrey Goldberg says experience as an FSO resulted in her learning some things and changing her mind.
Savrola: did Condi do a worse job than Powell? From what I had heard, she actually did a good job of holding back Cheney & his clique.
The complaints I heard about Daschle was that him and his wife were heavily involved in lobbying. How damning do you think that is for his proposed position, H.A?
January 10, 2010 at 10:42 am
I really think that Gates had more to do with forstalling Cheney’s Zionistic cabal.
January 11, 2010 at 3:08 am
“The complaints I heard about Daschle was that him and his wife were heavily involved in lobbying. How damning do you think that is for his proposed position, H.A?”
Fairly damning, but also different and separable from the competency critique of his proposed appointment.
“The skills required of a diplomat are, at bottom, still those of a courtier”
This is the the frame I’d like to see the discussion: defense of the concept that ambassadorships in great vacation spots are most competently filled by donation bundlers to winning candidates. I’m open to these arguments, though my intuition goes in a different direction.
“Seriously though, my question for those like HA who are so upset about this is what’s the worst case scenario? And what poor performing ambassadors have mattered in the past?”
To Obama’s credit, overall his appointments seem to me to be more technocratic than Bush’s and very technocratic on an absolute scale. Perhaps Biden and Rodham Clinton are bigger concerns, but I probably already blew my wad on them, at least for now -months ago. Also, I’m concerned that the Obama administration is discriminating too much against people from the private sector in favor of professor-experts, perhaps overcorrecting for Bush’s choices.
January 11, 2010 at 12:36 pm
A further point to consider in favor of patronage appointees – which is true regardless of the party in power – is that they are more likely to represent the views of the president who appointed them loyally and faithfully than are career foreign service officers. Every president in recent memory has struggled with the institutional culture of the State Department.
This is also true of the domestic civil service. The theory of a non-partisan civil service made up of competent professionals is so far from actual practice that it would be laughable, if the consequences were not so unhappy. Can anyone maintain seriously that the daily business of government is done better today than it was in the heyday of the spoils system? The old-fashioned ward heeler actually had to get his job done. If he didn’t, he could be dismissed; if enough ward heelers didn’t, the politicians who appointed them were voted out, and a new set of patronage appointees replaced the old lot. By contrast, the modern civil servant is like a damp squib – he won’t work, and you can’t fire him.
January 11, 2010 at 2:03 pm
I just took the fso test and I’m writing my thesis on the structure of the state department. As for the testisnt hard, but it still has a very high fail rate. Imagine an SAT where they only took 1400s and up.
As for State, it has a suprisingly large number of competent people that achieve suprisinly little. Wilson is right about their mission, but their whole structure is just wong, and it breeds an utterly dysfunctional culture. my thesis is basically a secret plan to turn state into a modern day colonial office
January 11, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Savrola, I’d be interested in hearing more about Gates vs Rice. From what I’d heard Rice was one of the few people Bush really listened to.
It’s probably already been seen, but a chart comparing the proportion of Obama’s appointees from the private sector to other administrations is here.
Michael, to play Devil’s Advocate, it is questionable whether we actually want the views of elected officials to be implemented! Also, while I’m not fond of puns I like your squib line.
cassander, best of luck in your nefarious subversion. Also, what do you mean by “structure” of the State department?
it has a suprisingly large number of competent people that achieve suprisinly little
Thanks for making my point about comparative advantage.
January 12, 2010 at 2:48 pm
The question isn’t really whether “we” want the views of elected officials to be implemented, it is that they do. Therefore there will always be patronage posts, because regardless of party, politicians will want loyal placemen in critical positions, rather than bureaucrats who are not dependent on their favor and therefore not easily controlled.
The support that exists amongst elected officials for enlarging the supposedly independent civil service comes almost entirely from those politicians for whom government employee unions are significant sources of money and/or votes. My support for the spoils system is predicated on the view that this is an indirect and dishonest way of dispensing patronage, and that a more direct and honest way is preferable. Furthermore that direct and honest way is less likely to lead to an entrenched bureaucracy that overwhelmingly supports one party.
January 13, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Another possibility would be simply excising some functions/positions.
January 11, 2010 at 10:02 pm
Literally the bureaucratic guts, just about every institution is poorly designed. The place is built around the national mission, and there’s a tradition of deference to the ambassadors, but they’ve been bolting on extra bureaus since WWII. So now every ambassador is supposed to report to a half dozen secretaries, each of whom has their own goals and agenda and none of whom have any real control. Plus there are a bunch of diplomatic efforts being run directly from Washington that have little or no communication or coordination with the national missions. The whole place is just horribly muddled. Classic bureaucratic mess.
January 14, 2010 at 4:03 pm
TGGP – true enough that some functions or positions could and should be excised. But even a downsized government will still need its functionaries. Is it better that they be chosen by straightforward patronage, or by some means that pose as objective or meritocratic, but which can always be ‘adjusted’ in practice to deliver patronage indirectly?
Consider, as exemplary of such an adjustment, “affirmative action.” As another, the requirement that government employees belong to a labor union. And so on…
January 14, 2010 at 4:16 pm
Government employees are not required to belong to a labor union. My sister (who works for a city) complained to me recently that despite her law degree she was being paid less than secretaries she works with because they are unionized but lawyers like her are not allowed to form a union. I don’t think the military is unionized either.
The agreement New Haven agreed to requiring the use of objective/meritocratic tests was actually the obstacle in the way of affirmative action.
January 15, 2010 at 1:51 pm
Not all government employees may be required to belong to a labor union, but many are.
A lawyer would be considered a professional employee and possibly a supervisory employee, thus not required to join a union (of course a lawyer will be a member of the bar association, which is becoming more and more like a labor union every day…)
On the other hand, applicants for unionized government jobs must join the union if hired, as in any union-shop situation. Wasn’t the creation of the TSA (as a replacement for private-sector airport screening)largely about creating a vast new class of government employees who would, of course, be members of a government employees’ union?
January 16, 2010 at 12:37 pm
This is the most spirited conversation on this topic on the internet. So in a nation of 300 million, no one gives a fuck.
File this under “HA’s disjunction from a complete coordination”.
January 16, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Michael:
The TSA has been around for a while, but apparently unionization is a new thing for them.
HA:
So in a nation of 300 million, no one gives a fuck.
Could be that people are talking about it off the net. Unlikely, I know.
HA’s disjunction from a complete coordination
An unusual phrase. Does it mean “Other people have priorities other than maximizing HA’s probability of persistence?”
January 17, 2010 at 6:43 pm
I don’t know where eliminating the spois system for ambassadorship appointments maximizes my persistence odds, if anything, this is probably motivation drift on my part.