Earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice used the term "transformational diplomacy" as the umbrella concept to explain a number of moves she was making in the State Department bureaucracy. You can read the speech here. Later, she used the phrase in budget testimony before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs. But what does the term mean? And how is it being implemented?
Rice said:
President Bush laid out a vision that now leads America into the world. 'It is the policy of the United States,' the President said, 'to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.' To achieve this bold mission, America needs equally bold diplomacy, a diplomacy that not only reports about the world as it is, but seeks to change the world itself. I and others have called this mission 'transformational diplomacy.'
So transformational diplomacy aims to end tyranny in the world by promoting democracy. Diplomacy has long been about representing the point of view of one government to another government. Some persuasion...which sometimes includes stern messages about consequences...is part of diplomacy. Finding a win-win solution when the interests of two or more nations collide is often the highest calling of diplomacy.
But transformational diplomacy may be something quite different. Rice says it "...seeks to change the world itself." In a critique of transformational diplomacy, a former chief of staff for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Pat Holt wrote:
At least until the cold war, Americans dealt with other countries as we found them. Diplomats reported on governments, tried to predict elections (if any), and described what the consequences of various outcomes might be. Under transformational diplomacy, American diplomats will try to manipulate a country's politics so that at a minimum there will be elections. After all, elections are the sine qua non of democracy. We hope that they will produce desired outcomes, but we had better be prepared to live with the results if they do not. This will be for the larger purpose of spreading democracy, but it will turn the U.S. into the world's universally unpopular busybody. And on top of that, we might lose both ways. Look at Iraq and Palestine.
So, for both the Administration and for critics, transformational diplomacy is something quite new with potentially far-reaching implications. What will it look like on the ground?
Implementing Transformational Diplomacy
Two big changes at the State Department were immediately linked to transformational diplomacy. One has to do with staffing and the other with aid money.
Hundreds of U.S. diplomats are being moved and reassigned. Many are being moved from "old" power centers in European capitals to places in Africa, South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East. More diplomats will be assigned to work on issues at the regional level. And more diplomats will be assigned to work outside national capitals.
Much of this is described in this fact sheet from the State Department. And the speed of this change is captured in this article from the British newspaper, The Guardian.
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