The United States charges nearly 8,000 people with being good at relationships. These are our diplomats, or Foreign Service Officers. These are the people who make us look good, make sure the world gives us what we want and need and try to keep tensions at a minimum.
To try to understand how this nuanced job actually works, we speak with Alison Mann, Public Historian at the National Museum of American Diplomacy and Naima Green-Riley, soon-to-be professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton and former diplomat.
Transcript
Hannah McCarthy: Hello, everybody. Before we get started, some very quick and exciting news for you all. Civics 101 is now a weekly show. That's right. You might not have noticed, but before we were only coming out every other week, you will finally have a brand spanking new Civics 101 episode in your feed every single Tuesday. We recently joined Stitcher, and this is allowing us to do that much more for our listeners and learn so much more about American government. There are so many stories for us to explore, so many questions for us to answer, [00:00:30] and now we're going to be able to do an even better job of that for you. So stay tuned. Keep listening and check for a new civics one one episode weekly in your podcast feed.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick, earlier today I asked you, what do you think of when you think of a diplomat and before you answered, you did a little bit for me. Do you remember what you did?
Nick Capodice: Yeah, I do.
Hannah McCarthy: Can you do that again?
Nick Capodice: Diplomats [00:01:00] are kind of like, I'm a fancy lad, I'm super fancy. I solve problems around the world.
Hannah McCarthy: The reason I liked that, the reason I'm bringing it up now is because prior to about two weeks ago, if I thought of diplomats at all, I thought of fancy well-heeled people, mostly men in suits who hobnob with other fancy well-heeled [00:01:30] men in suits like polo matches and brandy mixed with international intrigue due in part, I think to Hollywood. I mean, have you ever seen the movie the ambassador with Robert Mitchum? It's pretty dramatic. The ambassador, he's through negotiating anyway. It's not accurate. I'm ashamed.
Nick Capodice: I also have this sort of vague idea of diplomatic immunity, meaning you can commit any crime and get away with it. But I [00:02:00] imagine that's probably not true.
Hannah McCarthy: Actually, it's that's a little bit true.
Nick Capodice: Really.
Hannah McCarthy: Depending on your rank, you might have carte blanche immunity unless the U.S. decides to take it away or hand it over to other authorities, which they do. Diplomatic immunity is fascinating.
Nick Capodice: Fascinating.
Hannah McCarthy: But let's start with the basics, shall we? This is Civics 101, I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: And today we are talking about the subtle system that attempts to keep our global relationships at a low simmer [00:02:30] and fix them when they boil over.
Alison Mann: Diplomacy is a practice. It's not foreign
Alison Mann: Policy.
Hannah McCarthy: This is Dr. Alison Mann, the public historian at the National Museum of American Diplomacy.
Alison Mann: Foreign policy is the directive and the foreign policy for your listeners. This is set by the administration. This is set by Congress, the administration and then formally our nation's diplomats. They will carry out that foreign policy through the secretary of State. [00:03:00]
Hannah McCarthy: Carrying out foreign policy means representing American interests to other nations and keeping things peaceful and prosperous. Diplomats establish and maintain trade and economic relations and keep an eye on politics abroad and try to keep the peace.
Alison Mann: It's about relationships, it's about building those relationships and building trust. And I think that's the greatest, that's the greatest that they have in their toolkit. And a diplomatic toolkit is building those relationships. And how do you foster that relationship [00:03:30] to withstand a period of time today?
Hannah McCarthy: Those relationships are built by people in the five different what are called cones of diplomacy of the State Department. And Nick, I'm going to run through them real quick. Are you ready? Absolutely. There's public diplomacy promoting U.S. interests abroad through all kinds of engagement and cultural exchange. There are counselors, the people who provide services to Americans abroad, passports to Americans and visas to foreign nationals. There are economic officers who build and maintain positive trade [00:04:00] and economic relations with other countries. There are political officers who keep a constant eye on politics in other countries and interpret them for the United States. And then finally, there is the management track. These are the people who are leaders at embassies. If you pass the test interviews and security clearance, you get to choose one of these tracks and then eventually you get an assignment.
Nick Capodice: I'm going to bet American diplomacy has not always been so comprehensive and organized.
Hannah McCarthy: There's quite right. [00:04:30] Thomas Jefferson was our first secretary of state, and he had six people working for him. Today, we have around eight thousand diplomats, otherwise known as Foreign Service officers. But American diplomacy nick, it started long before Jefferson and his tiny fledgling department came along.
Alison Mann: I would say the white American colonists had been practicing diplomacy even while they were British colonists.
Nick Capodice: I mean, if we're going to talk about relationships with other nations, I want to know how diplomacy [00:05:00] was done with the nations who are already here in North America. When the colonists arrived,
Hannah McCarthy: Well, let's look at it from the peaceful and prosperous angle that I brought up, right? That works best when two nations can meet in good faith with the intention of relationship building. In the case of Native Americans, the colonists did not see those complex sovereign nations as complex sovereign nations. So even as tribes played the role of trading partners and allies in war, [00:05:30] the skill of Native American diplomats was perpetually undercut by European and colonial prejudice. Colonial diplomacy with the French and Spanish, who were in North America was very different, and things got even more complicated when those colonists ceased to be British subjects.
Alison Mann: In 1776, that's when they realized they now had to do it as United States citizens, and how are they going to do that? So if you read carefully the Declaration of Independence, [00:06:00] it's really not only just an internal document, it's a declaration to the world and it is making that case for global recognition. And then you need allies, right? So almost immediately, the Continental Congress dispatched Benjamin Franklin, Arthur Lee and Silverstein over to France, which would be the natural ally of the Americans to try to broker an agreement of recognition.
Nick Capodice: It is fascinating to think of the United States as a nation that's scrambling [00:06:30] for recognition and connection at the global scale. We've been a quote unquote superpower for so long.
Hannah McCarthy: I know, but it wasn't really until the major world wars that the U.S. fully took on that label. Allison told me that the museum has these diplomatic simulations that allow people to play out negotiations and, for example, the first Barbary War in the early 19th century.
Nick Capodice: Diplomatic simulations.
Hannah McCarthy: This is speaking to your game love.
Nick Capodice: Can we do this?
Nick Capodice: Can we do the [00:07:00] Barbary, the Barbary Pirates?
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, I'll do it later today.
Alison Mann: All right. Usually the facilitator will divide them up and be like, OK, well, you're going to play this country, you're going to be the United States. And so the students are like United States. It's like, Yeah, Big Dog here, you know, and they reach in the materials and they're like, Oh, wait, a second, we actually have the least to work with here, especially the 18th century system where they don't really have that much, they don't have the upper hand. And that is so fascinating to to watch the students [00:07:30] and then the students who are playing the other stakeholders to be like, Oh, wow, we have the upper hand here. And then they go into those negotiations with a little bit more confidence. So that's been really fascinating to watch. It was, you know, decades of decades and decades and decades of, you know, learning where where was the United States place in the world.
Hannah McCarthy: For example, Nick, speaking of our place in the world, the United States [00:08:00] shouts into the global void Hey, we're our own country now. And this is a tense moment because not only is this treason? It also doesn't mean much until other countries agree. So who would you guess was the first nation to shout back? Yes, indeed. United States, we recognize you. You are a country.
Nick Capodice: I'm going to say because of our search for an ally in our early founding years, France.
Alison Mann: Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States. It [00:08:30] was not France. It was Morocco. The relationship between the United States and Morocco is the longest standing, unbroken relationship in American history. And it's over two hundred and thirty years old now, Mohammed, the third said. This is great. We have a great trading partner that we can. We can, we can box out Europe now like we're all for it. Excellent. So it was Morocco that was really like, yeah, we totally recognize the United States of America. [00:09:00] But for the United States to go to France, it was really about the military support. It was about the global recognition and the fact that they felt very strongly that other European nations would follow suit. But within all of that is that layer of the negotiation with Native American, these sovereign tribes.
Hannah McCarthy: But like you guessed, Nick, we did end up getting recognition from France as well. And in that case, it was really about needing military support for the Revolutionary [00:09:30] War and hoping that if France recognized us, then other European nations would, too. And it wasn't just nations abroad that we needed something from.
Alison Mann: In 1778 that crucial year of alliances when there was a brief moment of parity between the United States efforts of diplomacy with France, but also with the Lenape tribe in current-day Ohio kind of western Pennsylvania, the United States understood very well that they [00:10:00] needed an ally in this native nation to pass freely through those lands to prosecute the war. But they also floated around the idea of creating a sovereign Lenape state within the United States of America, possibly being a 14th state when the United States was able to conclude the war. And it's interesting then, to see how the relationship with the French strengthened, but very quickly that that agreement that was signed [00:10:30] at the Treaty of Fort Pitt in September of seventeen seventy eight dissolved a month or two later because of violence against the Native Americans.
Hannah McCarthy: By violence.
Hannah McCarthy: Alison means members of the continental militia continuing the attacks and murders of the Lenape people that had been going on. Prior to this peace treaty, and this highlights an important factor of American diplomacy, two governments can make all of the agreements and treaties they want, but citizens of those governments have to [00:11:00] play along for the agreement to mean something. In the case of the Treaty of Fort Pitt, a treaty essentially establishing a formal alliance between the Lenape and the U.S. government. U.s. citizens went on to murder members of the Lenape tribe, not on the order of their government, but of their own accord. Still, it showed the Lenape that the U.S. could not effectively stand behind their alliance, and so that alliance dissolved.
Nick Capodice: And speaking of American citizens breaking ranks. Tell [00:11:30] me about diplomacy during the Civil War in the U.S. because we have this chunk of a country which is trying to secede. So how did other nations react to that? Were we communicating with them about it at all?
Alison Mann: You know, something that's really fascinating to for our audience when they always learn like, wow, the Confederacy had diplomats were like, Yeah, because much like the United States, 80 years before, the Confederacy recognized that they only exist as far [00:12:00] as the world sees them as existing. So they lobbied very hard for the British and the French to recognize them as independent from the United States of America and the United States. In their best interest was to prevent that from happening.
Nick Capodice: I had no idea the Confederacy had diplomats, but it makes perfect sense. They're trying to, because they're trying to form their own country.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. And for the record, there were people in Europe who were like, Hey, wait a minute, didn't you? United [00:12:30] States just secede? And now you're telling people in your own country, No, you're not allowed to secede that that was one of the powerful talking points of the Confederacy.
Alison Mann: Early on in eighteen sixty one, after the violence had begun, the Confederacy dispatched a couple of guys over to Great Britain, Great Britain, it said, We're neutral like we're just, we're waiting, you know, which infuriated the United States [00:13:00] because is neutrality really neutral by the fact that you're saying you're neutral? Aren't you kind of taking their side because that means that you'll still do business with them like you can't do that? You know,
Hannah McCarthy: It was a fine diplomatic balance because confederates know that Europe is reliant on American cotton, so they appeal to that trade issue in Great Britain and France are lured by that. Meanwhile, union diplomats are just scrambling madly to keep Europe neutral to make sure that Europe is not siding with anybody. And [00:13:30] by the way, union diplomats are pushing the problem of secession. Not the problem of enslavement. It fell to American abolitionists, not official diplomats, to represent the most important cause of this national rift.
Alison Mann: And so there was a woman. Her name was Sarah Parker Redman. She was an African-American woman who went on a speaking circuit in eighteen fifty nine throughout Scotland and England, and she spoke to the working classes and she spoke to [00:14:00] them about the cotton that they were touching, that they were making in the textile mills. And she appealed to them based upon their common humanity, which is a just a diplomatic skill that is so important is to appeal to common humanity. And she was so effective in Manchester that workers, the textile refused to touch the raw cotton that they knew had come from the South. So that was a way that an American citizen was able to actually [00:14:30] influence political decision making over in Great Britain.
Nick Capodice: So while you had official diplomats trying to sway heads of state one way or another, here's this woman talking to fellow laypeople getting to the heart of the matter.
Hannah McCarthy: And that subtlety, Nick, you know, like appealing not just to the heads of state, but to the rest of the people of a country. This is a vitally important aspect of diplomacy that took a long while for the United States to refine. After we managed to preserve the union, [00:15:00] we started to grow rapidly as a nation and things really hit a fever pitch when the First World War rolled around. And then the second, as we became true powerbrokers on the global scale repping the U.S. became an increasingly complex dance because yes, it is about having good trade and economic partners who will help you. Should a war break out. But it's also about showing the world what America is like and making sure the world likes us. That's coming up after the break. [00:15:30]
Nick Capodice: Hey, we really love what we do, and we're really lucky to do it, and Hannah and I say this all the time, we say that we would do it for free if we were independently wealthy and tragically, the rich estranged uncle I never knew has yet to leave his entire state to me. Ditto for Hannah. So instead, we must work for money, for lucre. And in the case of Civics [00:16:00] 101, that money comes in part from listener donations. So if you are a kindly soul who is able to make a contribution to the show, we would be so grateful. And you can do that by clicking the donate button at Civics101podcast.org. And if you are my rich, estranged uncle I don't know about, I live in Concord, New Hampshire, and I would love to cook for you. Let's get back to the show.
Hannah McCarthy: In [00:16:30]1949, President Harry Truman did something unprecedented in the world of diplomacy. He appointed a woman. Eugenie Anderson as the U.S. ambassador to Denmark. Here's Alison Mahon, public historian at the National Museum of American Diplomacy.
Alison Mann: She's a really fascinating figure. She was politically appointed to an ambassadorship by President Harry Truman, and she is our first female [00:17:00] ambassador.
Eugenie Anderson: That we have no choice but to build up
Eugenie Anderson: Our defenses and to help our
Eugenie Anderson: Allies to restore their defense forces.
Alison Mann: But she was an early practitioner of what she called people to people diplomacy. There really wasn't that idea that the diplomat would go out among the people, right, that when they were over the stationed in there, they talk to their foreign counterparts, like they talk to the foreign affairs minister. They talk to us. But you didn't like walk around the street, you know, and talk to the people. But Eugenie Anderson said, Well, I'm going to go talk to the people. [00:17:30] So she made it a point to learn Danish before she went to Denmark, and she would go and visit the fish market, and she would talk to the people in their own language and just get on that very basic person to person level. And in that way, building the trust of the people of the country and at the same time, advocating for the United States of America.
Hannah McCarthy: When I asked Alison about her favorite diplomats, I heard stories like this. People who represented shifts [00:18:00] in American diplomacy, who innovated new ways of communicating with other nations. This form of diplomacy that Alison is talking about, quote unquote public diplomacy. The State Department did not make that a part of its mission until the late 90s.
Nick Capodice: So you you started this episode by saying you were ashamed to stereotype diplomats as fancy men with suits and brandy snifter who operated behind closed doors. But it also sounds like until very recently, it kind of was that way.
Naima Green-Riley: Historically, [00:18:30] the State Department has not been very diverse. The State Department is a place where until 1971, if a woman was a Foreign Service officer and wanted to serve abroad, she could not be married. And as soon as she got married, she had to resign at. The State Department is a place where the three primary adjectives to explain diplomats for many years 50 years ago, for example, were pale male and Yale. So [00:19:00] it's a place where there was often a huge homogeneity of the diplomatic corps.
Hannah McCarthy: This is Naima Green-Riley soon to be Dr. Naima Green Riley and a professor at Princeton. She's currently completing her PhD at Harvard and writing about diplomacy. She also happens to be a former diplomat who worked in public diplomacy.
Naima Green-Riley: I often felt like on the ground I could bring my personal experience to the job, and that was important to [00:19:30] me because America is a diverse place where sometimes people in the country have very different views from mine. At the same time, there weren't enough, and there still are not enough people who are able to do that within the diplomatic corps. And to the extent that we can increase the diversity of the State Department, I think that we'll get people abroad. We'll get a better idea of really what it means to be American and its full sense of diversity and its full and its full spectrum
Hannah McCarthy: Name is first diplomacy job was in Egypt.
Naima Green-Riley: I got [00:20:00] assigned to Egypt in late 2010, and shortly after I was told that I was going to Egypt for my first tour, a little thing called the Arab Spring happened
Hannah McCarthy: And right away. This was an opportunity where sharing her personal experience in and of America was an asset.
Naima Green-Riley: And my own experience as a black woman at the time when I was a diplomat as a pretty young black woman, had a huge impact on how I had experienced being [00:20:30] an American and so going abroad, I found that I was able to bring those experiences to the table in order to set up programing. So there were times when we talked about the civil rights movement and protests that happened during the civil rights movement in the context of an Arab Spring in which you see people who are struggling to gain greater rights in both situations. There were times in which I had a soul food dinner [00:21:00] and I got to introduce Black Eyed Peas and collard greens and fried chicken to schoolkids and in Egypt. There was a time when we did a Soul Train line in China. And so one thing that was important to me when I was a diplomat was to be able to share what my experience was as an American. And I think that that is actually something that many diplomats aim to do.
Hannah McCarthy: I read this government report assessing public diplomacy. Think this was in [00:21:30] 2005? Ok? Really recent. And it says that in this changed world, public diplomacy is as important as foreign policy and that. The State Department needs to do an even better job of it. But, you know, to me, that principle was evident back when Sarah Parker, Redmond, told mill workers in England the horrifying truth about where their cotton came from, the way other countries have perceived us has always mattered [00:22:00] since our earliest days as a country. So yes, diplomacy is about conversations, about sharing, about making sure the U.S. knows what's going on politically and economically elsewhere, and making sure our interests are not compromised abroad. But it's also about desirable culture. Does your country have the it factor that's going to make people like it? Do your ambassadors represent that? Naima and I talked [00:22:30] about this thing called soft power,
Naima Green-Riley: The concept of soft power. Originally came from academia and I have now left the State Department. I've gone into an academic role. I'm about to start a role as a professor at Princeton, and I've had a lot of time to think about what public diplomacy is from an academic standpoint and how it seeks to to capture soft power. So soft power is this term that was coined in the late 80s early 90s by professor at Harvard named Joe [00:23:00] Nye. And the idea is that through being attractive through things like it's entertainment industry or its fashion industry or its music industry, a country can somehow gain some sort of credit internationally that will translate into helping it to be more persuasive, helping it to get what it wants internationally. And so another way to talk about soft power is to say, if you're cool, if your country is cooler, then [00:23:30] you'll get brownie points and those brownie points will help you to gain something tangible in international politics. That's that's the way the concept works.
Nick Capodice: Wow. So there is such a thing as being the cool kid, even at the global level.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, there is. But you don't become the cool kid overnight. You don't develop strong international relationships overnight. You don't create or de-escalate conflict overnight. You [00:24:00] don't establish a desirable culture overnight. One major takeaway for me about diplomacy is that it is a long game. It is the long game.
Alison Mann: It's the skills. It's the tools. It's the getting to. Yes, it's the getting to. Maybe. And to understand that there really is no quick fix that what we see kind of evolving over the course of time is just very lengthy relationship building [00:24:30] of the work of our nation's diplomats, you know, to get to that point that we don't see, quite frankly, you know, the work of the diplomacy and our diplomats is quiet often.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick, you know, I struggled in this episode to pin diplomacy to the corkboard, to define it. And I came to realize the reason I couldn't is that it is so many things. It is so nuanced a practice. It takes place over such a long period of time and [00:25:00] over so many small and large interactions that you cannot pin it down. And when it comes to the diplomats themselves, I asked Naima, OK, what makes a good diplomat? And she gave me the ultimate non definition.
Naima Green-Riley: Diplomats can get training in and there's lots of training that goes into being diplomat. One thing that I always look back to and sort of laugh at is that when you first become a Foreign Service officer, [00:25:30] the State Department puts you into a class called a one hundred. And it was about six weeks when I took it in twenty ten. But basically You in a class of other First-Year diplomats all joined the State Department at the same time. And you go to a place called the Foreign Service Institute and walk around with your suit and your briefcase, and it's kind of like a Hogwarts for diplomats. So I just remember going to the Foreign Service Institute and getting this training. But as [00:26:00] much as you can have trainings on sort of what to expect in your role as a diplomat, I think that much of what makes diplomats talented is sort of innate. The people who are bridge builders and other situations, the people who are able to understand different languages are the people who have traveled internationally in the past often tend to be the people who are good at being diplomats. And so [00:26:30] I don't know that there's anything that you can learn in a class that's going to really, really when things get get tough, you know, be the magic bullet.
[00:27:00]
Hannah McCarthy: Today's episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Our staff includes Christina Phillips and Jacqui Fulton. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. We try to fit a lot into these episodes, but there is a lot on the cutting room floor and that is what our newsletter is for Extra Credit. You can subscribe by going to civics101podcast.org. And by the way, if you like the show, whether you're a regular listener or brand new, leave us a review on iTunes and let us know what you think. [00:27:30] Music in this episode by Xylo Zico Spring Tide Bio Unit Anthem of Rain and Ketsa. Civics 101 is a production of Nhpr, New Hampshire Public Radio.
