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  Diplomacy is a human enterprise, rooted in interactions between people. Americans are often tempted to believe that the world revolves around us, our problems, and our analysis. As I learned the hard way, other people and other societies have their own realities, which are not always hospitable to ours. That does not mean that we have to accept or indulge those perspectives, but understanding them is the starting point for sensible diplomacy.

  The process by which American diplomacy is implemented is also all too human, full of the moments of clarity and courage, as well as shortsightedness and clumsiness, that characterize any other human endeavor. Policymakers and diplomats are often compelled to make decisions under unforgiving time pressures, with inevitably incomplete information. That is hard to grasp from outside the arena, where those realities can seem simpler and clearer than they do inside.

  Diplomacy and the world it seeks to navigate have certainly evolved in the nearly four decades since I joined the Foreign Service. Nonstate actors—from the benign, like the Gates Foundation, to the malign, like al-Qaeda—have steadily eroded what was once the near monopoly on power enjoyed by states and governments. The addition of cyberspace to the global commons, and advances in artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and other technological domains, have added a new dimension to international competition, outpacing the capacity of governments to devise rules of the road. Global challenges like climate change and resource scarcity are no longer vague “emerging threats” but present-day crises. In American policymaking, there has been a growing tendency to centralize control and even execution in the White House, and to overrely on military force while allowing diplomatic muscles to atrophy, with dramatic military interventions squeezing diplomats to the margins.

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  AMERICAN DIPLOMACY IS adrift at a moment in history in which it means more than ever to our role as the pivotal power in world affairs. It will take a generation to reverse the underinvestment, overreach, and strategic and operational flailing of recent decades, not to mention the active sabotage of recent years under President Trump. The reconstruction of American diplomacy will require renewed investment in the fundamentals of the craft—the core qualities and roles that have always been the essence of what is required of effective diplomats: smart policy judgment, language skills, and a sure feel for the foreign landscapes in which they serve and the domestic priorities they represent. It will also require a more strategic adaptation than we’ve mustered during the course of my career, one that ensures we are positioned to tackle the consequential tests of tomorrow and not just the policy fads of today. Most important, it will require a new compact with the American people—leveling with them about the purpose and limits of American engagement abroad, and demonstrating that domestic renewal is at the heart of our strategy and priorities. Effective diplomacy begins at home, but it ends there, too—in better jobs, more prosperity, a healthier climate, and greater security.

  What I learned all those years ago in that splendid hall in Madrid, and time and again throughout my long career, is that diplomacy is one of our nation’s biggest assets and best-kept secrets. However battered and belittled in the age of Trump, it has never been a more necessary tool of first resort for American influence. Its rebirth is crucial to a new strategy for a new century, one that is full of great peril and even greater promise for America.

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  Apprenticeship: The Education of a Diplomat

  MY FIRST DIPLOMATIC mission was an utter failure. The most junior officer in our embassy in Jordan in 1983, I eagerly volunteered for what at the time seemed like a straightforward assignment: to drive a supply truck from Amman to Baghdad. It all seemed to me like an excellent adventure, a chance to see the thinly populated, rock-strewn desert of eastern Jordan, and visit Iraq, then in the midst of a brutal war with Iran.

  The senior administrative officer at Embassy Amman was a grizzled veteran renowned for his ability to get things done, if not for his willingness to explain exactly how he accomplished them. He assured me the skids had been greased at the Iraqi border: Getting across would be no problem. The seven-hour drive to the border went uneventfully. Then, at the little Iraqi town of Rutba, adventure met Saddam Hussein–era reality. The skids, it turned out, had not been greased. An unamused security official rejected my paperwork and ordered me to remain in the truck while he consulted with his superiors in Baghdad.

  I spent a cold, sleepless night in the cab of the truck, incapable (in that pre-cellphone age) of communicating my predicament to my colleagues in Amman or Baghdad, and increasingly worried that my diplomatic career would not survive its first year. At first light, an Iraqi officer informed me that I’d be proceeding to Baghdad under police escort. He allowed me one brief phone call from the local post office to the on-duty Marine security guard at Embassy Amman. I explained what had happened, and he was able to convey to my colleagues in Baghdad the circumstances of my delay.

  With a dour policeman who introduced himself as Abu Ahmed beside me, I began the long drive through many of the dusty towns of Anbar Province that America’s Iraq wars would make all too well known—Ramadi, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib. My travel partner had an unnerving habit of idly spinning the chamber on his revolver as we drove along the rutted highway. At one point he pulled out a popular regional tabloid with the cast of Charlie’s Angels on the cover. “Do all American women look like this?” he asked.

  As the late afternoon sun was beginning to fade, we stopped for gas and tea at a ramshackle rest stop run by two of his brothers, just outside Fallujah, his hometown. As we sipped our tea, sitting on wobbly plastic chairs, Abu Ahmed’s nieces and nephews appeared to see the exotic American. I’ve always wondered what happened to them over the tumultuous decades that followed.

  Abu Ahmed and I, weary and running out of things to talk about, finally arrived at a large police compound on the northwestern outskirts of Baghdad in early evening. I was relieved to see an American colleague waiting for me; I was less relieved to learn that the Iraqis refused to accept our customs documents and insisted on confiscating the truck and its cargo. There was nothing particularly sensitive in the truck, but losing a dozen computers, portable phones, and other office and communication equipment was an expensive proposition for a State Department always strapped for resources. We protested, but got nowhere.

  My colleague made clear that he’d take this up with the Foreign Ministry, which elicited barely a shrug from the police. Now separated from the truck and released by the police, I went back to our modest diplomatic facility and told my story over a few beers. The next day, I flew back to Amman. As far as I know, neither our truck nor our equipment was ever returned.

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  A LIFE IN diplomacy seems more natural in retrospect than it did when I was stumbling along from Amman to Baghdad all those years ago, learning my first lesson in professional humility. But public service was already in my blood. I grew up as an Army brat, the product of an itinerant military childhood that took my family from one end of the United States to the other, with a dozen moves and three high schools by the time I was seventeen.

  My father and namesake, William F. Burns, fought in Vietnam in the 1960s and eventually became a two-star general and the director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was an exemplary leader, thoughtful and exacting, someone whose high standards and model of public service I always wanted to approach. “Nothing can make you prouder,” he once wrote to me, “than serving your country with honor.” His was a generation accustomed to taking American leadership in the world seriously; he knew firsthand the dangers of ill-considered military conflicts, and what diplomacy could achieve in high-stakes negotiations. My mother, Peggy, was the devoted heart of our family. Her love and selflessness made all those cross-country moves manageable, and held us all together. Like my dad, she grew up in Philadelphia. They met in the chaste confines of a C
atholic high school dance—with nuns wielding rulers to enforce “six inches for the Holy Spirit” between them—and built a happy life shaped by faith, family, and hard work.

  Making our close-knit Irish Catholic family whole were my three brothers: Jack, Bob, and Mark. As in many Army families, constantly bouncing from post to post, we became one another’s best friends. We shared a love of sports across seasons and places, and looked out for one another on all those first days in new schools.

  My upbringing bore little resemblance to the caricature of the cosmopolitan, blue-blooded foreign service officer. Through the years, however, a few useful diplomatic qualities began to emerge in faint outline. Because we moved so often, I became adaptable, constantly (and sometimes painfully) adjusting to new environments. I grew curious about new places and people, increasingly accustomed to trying to put myself in their shoes and understand their perspectives and predispositions. I developed a detachment about people and events, an ability to stand back and observe and empathize, but also a reluctance—born of many departures—to get too close or too invested. I also came to know my own country well, with a feel for its physical expanse and beauty, as well as its diversity and bustling possibility. I grew up with not only an abiding respect for the American military and the rhythms of Army life, but a vaguely formed interest of my own in public service.

  In 1973, I went to La Salle College on an academic scholarship, my dreams of a basketball scholarship long since surrendered to the hard realities of limited talent. A small liberal arts school run by the Christian Brothers in a rough neighborhood in North Philadelphia, La Salle offered a valuable education inside and outside the classroom. It was then a school with lots of first-generation college students, mostly commuters, who worked hard to earn their tuition, took nothing for granted, and prided themselves on puncturing pretension. La Salle, like Philadelphia in the 1970s, was not for the faint of heart.

  The summer after my freshman year, I spent three months in Egypt with one of my best high school friends, Conrad Eilts, and his family. Conrad’s father, Hermann F. Eilts, had become the American ambassador to Egypt when the United States restored diplomatic relations after the October 1973 war. An astute diplomat of the old school, Eilts was full of initiative and had a sure grasp of the region.

  For a raw and untutored eighteen-year-old, that summer in Egypt was a revelation. It was my first time outside the United States since I was a preschooler at an Army post in Germany. It was also my first time in the Arab world, and I was entranced by the scents and sounds, the commotion of the souk, and the rich intonations of Arabic. Conrad and I roamed across Cairo, then mostly barren of tourists and bursting with street life and the endless cacophony of its traffic. One night after midnight, we eluded narcoleptic Ministry of Antiquities security guards and a pack of wild dogs and scrambled in pitch darkness partway up the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Giza, looking out across Cairo’s skyline until dawn began to break. We traveled to Luxor and Abu Simbel in Upper Egypt, and to the Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert, not far from the great World War II battlefield at El Alamein. It was the kind of adventure I could only dream about during previous summers bagging groceries in the Army commissary.

  Later that summer, we went with Ambassador Eilts to visit President Anwar Sadat at his retreat in Mersa Matruh, on the Mediterranean coast west of Alexandria. While the ambassador met in private with Sadat, we swam in the warm blue sea, surrounded by the president’s massive bodyguards. We then had a casual lunch on the veranda of Sadat’s modest seaside home, with the president and his family all still in their swimsuits. Sadat was the picture of relaxation, puffing on his pipe and describing in his deep baritone his hopes for further steps toward peace with Israel. It was my first taste of the Middle East, and of American diplomacy, and I was already getting hooked.

  During my senior year at La Salle, I won a Marshall Scholarship to study for three years at Oxford University. No one from La Salle had ever won a Marshall before, and I had applied with no expectations and minimal effort. Established by the British government in the early 1950s to commemorate the generosity of the Marshall Plan, the program gave thirty Americans each year a chance to study in the United Kingdom. The Marshall opened my eyes to a new, and initially intimidating, world of possibility. I felt out of my depth, surrounded by what seemed to me to be more worldly Ivy Leaguers, and out of place on Oxford’s storied quadrangles.

  From my base at St. John’s College, I pursued a master’s degree, and eventually a doctorate, in international relations. My supervisor in the master’s program was an Australian academic named Hedley Bull. With a dry, self-deprecating wit and considerable patience for unformed young minds like mine, Bull was a superb intellectual guide. History was the key to understanding international relations, he insisted, and leaders most often erred when they thought they were immune to its lessons. His book The Anarchical Society remains as clear and compelling a framework for thinking about international order as I have ever read. Bull’s thesis was straightforward: Even in a Hobbesian world, sovereign states have a self-interest in developing rules and institutions to help shape their interactions and enhance their chances for security and prosperity.

  “You Americans,” Bull told me at one of our weekly tutorials, “tend to be impatient about the world’s imperfections, and convinced that every problem has a solution.”

  I asked what was so wrong with that.

  “Nothing, really,” he said. “I admire American ingenuity. But diplomacy is more often about managing problems than solving them.”

  I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the use of economic aid as an instrument of American policy toward Egypt in the Nasser era. The core argument was that economic assistance could reinforce areas of shared purpose, but it rarely had much effectiveness as a “stick” to alter fundamentally policies where no such common ground existed. Withdrawing aid for the Aswan Dam project, or American food aid, would not compel Egypt to abandon ties with the Soviets; it would more likely harden Egyptian defiance. Hardly a groundbreaking insight, but one that successive U.S. administrations would have to learn and relearn.

  Beyond academics, Oxford was rarely dull. Grittier than its dreaming college spires might suggest, it was caught up in all the early turmoil of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, with angry labor unrest at the Cowley motor works on the eastern edge of town, and protests in support of Provisional Irish Republican Army hunger strikers on a square across from St. John’s. I played on the university basketball team, and traveled widely around Europe and the Middle East during long vacation periods. Those years were a chance to see my own country through the eyes of others, and I soon discovered a genuine sense of pride and satisfaction in trying to explain America to them. That was not easy in the late 1970s, with Vietnam and Watergate still weighing heavily on American society and our image abroad.

  Shortly after Iranian militants took American diplomats hostage in Tehran in November 1979, I took the train down to London to sit for the written portion of the Foreign Service exam at the old U.S. embassy on Grosvenor Square. A fellow American graduate student at Oxford had mentioned casually that fall that he planned to take the test, and encouraged me to come along. I wasn’t yet convinced that diplomacy was the profession for me, nor was I sure that the State Department would think I had much to offer as a diplomat. But my experience in Cairo several years before, my admiration for my father’s public service, and my curiosity about other societies and life abroad all made me want to give it a try. To my relief, the exam was straightforward—a combination of general knowledge questions, American civics, and geography 101.

  I was thrilled to pass and later to navigate successfully the more nerve-racking oral exam with a trio of grim-faced officials. “What’s the biggest challenge in American foreign policy today?” one asked. “I think it’s us,” I replied. Then, channeling my inner Hedley Bull, I explained, “After Vietnam, we have to do a better job o
f understanding which problems we can solve, and which we can manage.” I cited Jimmy Carter’s success in the Panama Canal Treaty and in the Camp David negotiations with Egypt and Israel as examples of the former, and grinding Cold War competition with the Soviets as an illustration of the latter. The examiners looked a little bored, and more than a little skeptical, but a few weeks later I got a formal letter of acceptance.

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  IN EARLY JANUARY 1982, I showed up to Foreign Service orientation in a dreary office building across the Potomac River from the State Department. I was seated alphabetically next to Lisa Carty—a tall, lovely New Yorker whose easygoing charm, kindness, and good humor soon captivated me. Lisa and I fell in love at a pace wholly out of character with our two relatively careful personalities, and would be married two years later.

  The Foreign Service of the early 1980s was still a relatively small, somewhat insular institution, with about 5,500 officers staffing some 230 embassies and consulates overseas and a variety of Washington positions. Its “pale, male, Yale” reputation was well earned. At the time, nine out of ten foreign service officers were white, and fewer than one in four were women. It had only been a decade since married women and women with children were allowed into the service and since annual performance reviews stopped evaluating the “hostess skills” of wives. Homosexuality was no longer a basis for denial of employment, but it wasn’t until 1995 that President Clinton banned the government from denying security clearances on grounds of sexual orientation.