At Home Abroad.

• Author: STARR, ALEXANDRA
• Position: Reform of the Foreign Service is needed

Why it's time to reform the Foreign Service

In the early '90s, American foreign service officers could not get enough of Mexican President Carlos Salinas. They marveled at his free-market economic reforms and vigorous promotion of the North American Free Trade Agreement. They were pleased he had done away with the Yanqui-go-home rhetoric that had long been a staple of Mexican politics. When Salinas' term ended, the United States pushed him as the next president of the World Trade Organization.

Then all hell broke loose. The Mexican currency lost almost half of its value in less than a month. The Zapatista guerrillas staged a rebellion in Chiapas. As the crisis deepened, it became apparent that American foreign service officers--FSOs--had been grossly mistaken in their analysis. Far from being Mexico's savior, Salinas had presided over what was probably the most corrupt administration in the country's history.

How did our foreign service officers misread Mexico so drastically? You can't pin the faulty reporting on inadequate staffing: 479 Americans were stationed in the country in 1994, according to the General Accounting Office. Add the locals employed by our embassy and eight other diplomatic posts in Mexico, and you have 1,252 people working for Uncle Sam south of the border. As former Assistant Secretary of State Bill Maynes points out, huge staffs do not ensure top notch analysis. "Our Foreign Service could be much smaller," says Maynes. "But it has to become a more focused and better trained organization." FSOs, he continues, should receive in-depth instruction in the language, culture, and history of the country of their assignment and spend several years on their overseas tours. "If we invested in our foreign service officers that way," he concludes, "we would not have made the mistake we did with Salinas."

The point of Maynes' suggestions is to improve FSOs' understanding of foreign countries. The Service doesn't have to master all of the technical issues crowding today's foreign agenda. U.S. domestic agencies have been setting up shop in our embassies to monitor everything from immigration (Immigration and Naturalization Service) to the spread of infectious diseases (Center for Disease Control and Prevention)--and Maynes says that's fine. The State Department will never compete with the FBI in apprehending terrorists, or with the Federal Aviation Agency when it comes to inspecting planes, he points out. What foreign service officers can do better than anyone else is provide policy makers in Washington with a broad picture of the political and social situation in foreign countries.

That is not an easy job. Our diplomats must be prepared to gauge the reaction of Asian societies to economic austerity measures. They should be able to explain the power struggles among the Chinese political elite. And they will have to understand the chasm between the position of the Saudi Arabian government on terrorism and the views of the country's militant classes. Shoddy diplomacy extracts big costs: in Mexico the price tag came in the form of a $20 billion bailout package. And at this point, it's not clear whether our overseas presence is solid enough to make sure a disaster like Mexico doesn't happen again.

A World Apart

My first brush with the Foreign Service occurred in Venezuela, where I worked as an economics reporter. I was not an expert in the subject, to put it charitably, and I frequently called specialists in Caracas for help. At one point, I crossed paths with a U.S. Foreign Service officer who lead me through the thornier issues of Latin American monetary policy. A few months later, however, I spoke with his replacement, who seemed even further lost in the quagmire of Venezuelan economics than I was. Far from answering my questions, he asked me to send him some of my articles. The officer seemed intelligent and driven, but he mentioned how difficult he found it to understand Venezuelan Spanish. If he could not communicate with the locals, I can only imagine how hard it was for him keep abreast of the news and make the necessary contacts to do substantive reporting.

I never met my telephone acquaintance, but I did come into contact with many of his colleagues. I ran into most of them at the commissary bar, where FSOs would regularly congregate. They were bright and personable, but they seemed to live in a world divorced from Venezuelan society. The majority of them spoke only middling Spanish. With few exceptions, their socializing appeared to be confined to the English-speaking expatriate community. Most of the officers were housed in apartments just a few blocks from the embassy, and as far as I could tell, their day-to-day activities were confined to that small geographic area.

Venezuelans did not have a high opinion of the American embassy...