Ambassadors: Relics of the Sailing Ships?

It is an article of faith in foreign policy circles these days that the advent of instantaneous and global diplomacy has given the news media more of a voice in international affairs and robbed diplomacy of its rightful place at the helm. The power of images broadcast in real-time--bombs falling in Baghdad, marines landing on the beaches of Mogadishu, a Russian White House set on fire by die-hard Marxists, a paratrooper landing in Haiti--has never, in this view, been greater.

The Annenberg Washington Program convened a colloquium last November to test the primacy of this view. Four outstanding diplomats--Sir Robin Renwick, Britain's Ambassador to the United States; Warren Zimmermann, former U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia; Stanley Schrager, spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Haiti; and Ruth Yaron, spokeswoman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington--shared their views on the topic. Luminaries such as Paul Nitze and Edward Marks participated in the audience. About the only point that all agreed on was that diplomats are an easy target for critics who would assail their worth in a new information age.

In 1992 one such critic, independent presidential candidate Ross Perot, argued that embassies are an example of wasteful government spending. "Embassies are relics of the days of sailing ships," he said on ABC's 20/20. "At one time, when you had no world communications, your ambassador spoke for you in that country. But now, with instantaneous communications around the world, the ambassador is primarily in a social role...I would recommend we redo the whole embassy structure."

At the time, this view was wildly, and in some quarters hysterically, dismissed. The diplomatic corps closed ranks, protesting that Perot was uninformed, hinting that he was an idiot. Whatever its merit, the idea of restructuring the diplomatic corps to reflect the new realities of media technology soon faded into the rich library of campaign soundbites buried with the election. With a newly elected Republican Congress and a budget conscious federal government, the issue of embassy structure re-emerged after the 1994 elections, but few seemed engaged in a serious debate on the changes technology has visited on the world of diplomacy. The November Annenberg seminar and this paper were both designed to fill that gap, to offer some insights into the unsettling confluence of technology and diplomacy, and to rebut some of the myths that have grown up around fear of technology's impact on diplomacy.

Clearly, gone is the striped-pants courier with his classified pouch carrying state secrets in a mission of utter confidentiality. CNN President Tom Johnson, in a self-serving but nonetheless revealing comment, said recently that CNN "in many ways has replaced the diplomatic pouch." A diplomat at the United Nations was even more blunt, lamenting that CNN had become "the sixth vote on the Security Council." And former Secretary of State James A. Baker III was unblinking about the shift of the traditional message-carrying role from diplomats to journalists. In the days before the Persian Gulf War, Baker made a speech to U.S. airmen in a hangar in Saudi Arabia in which he warned that the United States was "on the brink of war" with Iraq unless Baghdad withdrew its troops from Kuwait. In a later interview, Baker explained that he was not talking so much to the troops as to one man, Saddam Hussein, sitting in his bunker in Baghdad. It was more direct and less ambiguous to convey the message through CNN cameras in the hangar covering Baker's speech than it was to send the message through an ambassador.

But if public messages are now relayed over the public airwaves, confidential messages between governments are still transmitted in more conventional ways. Diplomats have no want of work to do in keeping up with the traffic of information that floods their offices by cable, telephone, fax, and computer. British Ambassador Sir Robin Renwick makes the point that while technology allows a prime minister to pick up the telephone and converse directly with a president, he "cannot do it all the time. They both have other things to do." Disputing the contention that the media and new technology have replaced the diplomatic pouch, Sir Robin argues that "the job of the ambassador is to try to involve himself in the decision-making process before the decision is taken." For such a task, the media are the worst possible conveyance for information. Once CNN is on the story, the media drumbeat begins, public opinion is engaged, and a diplomat's options recede. So it is important to look at which kinds of messages have been usurped by the media, and which have not, to distinguish between the public message and the private one.

Former Assistant Secretary of State Rozanne Ridgway recalls her delight when Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Bessmertnyk confessed that the Soviet Foreign Ministry had access to CNN. "Marvelous," she thought. "Now we don't have to get together and argue about what happened. Now we can get together and argue about what to do about it." The media and new technology may have usurped from governments the role of describing facts on the ground but not the more substantive job of outlining options for action. Far from ceding this function to the media, most governments have entered the new media age with a vengeance, acquiring their own new tools of message conveyance. In fact, diplomats nowadays complain that their home capitals can find them anywhere, on every modern communication device from a satellite phone to a computer uplink. The lament is that the capital can update instructions and change directions before an envoy even touches down on his mission. Robbed of their ability to free-lance policy, diplomats sometimes blame the media for downgrading their assignments.

This tighter leash on ambassadors may annoy them, but it does not make them less necessary. On the contrary, envoys are still needed to deliver messages privately and confidentially, even under the watchful eye of the media--witness former President Jimmy Carter in Haiti or North Korea, Robert Oakley in Somalia, or Cyrus Vance in Bosnia. In some sense they are more needed than ever before. "An ambassador in a country can speak now with much more authority and on a much more current basis because he or she has instant knowledge of the government's position," says former U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann. "Today you don't have to make it up. You really know. You are in constant communication with your capital."

What has changed, then, is the content of the private message, not the necessity of its delivery. Some observers, like Zimmermann, argue that the speed of message delivery in the information age is less a concern than the quality of messengers who deliver it, that the tradition of presidents naming political allies to 40 percent of U.S. ambassadorial posts is the real danger. "It just seems to me that something is not quite right when in living memory we have had only one professional ambassador to London and only two to Paris," he said. "The problem is that this denigration, on a large scale, of professional diplomats, saps the effectiveness of all of our diplomacy." He calls this "a kind of diplomatic Gresham's Law, which is that bad diplomacy drives out good."

But others are convinced that technology, particularly the real-time satellite television that brings world crises home as they happen, is the real danger. George Kennan, the esteemed diplomat who fathered the West's Cold War containment policy, was critical of U.S. intervention in Somalia because he believed policy makers were bullied into action by television pictures that evoked an emotional response from the public. "If American policy from here on out, particularly policy involving the uses of our armed forces abroad, is to be controlled by popular emotional impulses, and particularly ones provoked by the commercial television industry, then there is no place not only for myself, but for what have traditionally been regarded as the responsible deliberative" voices in government, he wrote in an article written just before U.S. Marines landed on the beaches of Mogadishu. The only hostile group the marines encountered was journalists, whose bright camera lights mitigated the strategic effect of the soldiers' night-vision goggles. To Kennan, these cameras looked like the enemy.

But diplomats who have been battling in the trenches of modern media technology are not so sure. For one thing, notes Ambassador Zimmermann, the pictures of horror that prompted intervention in Somalia did not seem to have the same force in Bosnia, despite "enormously powerful pictures of atrocities," and, one might add, despite a persistent media drumbeat whose undercurrent seemed to be, "What are you going to do about it?" The explanation for this seeming impact of television pictures in one instance and lack of punch in another may lie in Stan Schrager's experience in Haiti. Schrager, a career diplomat, was spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince when the United States was reviewing its military and diplomatic options in the effort to return ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. The U.S. rationale for intervention was to restore democracy, but as Schrager noted, "The media cannot take pictures of restoring democracy." Instead, television recorded graphic instances of human rights abuses, "mangled, decapitated bodies in the streets." As a result, U.S. opinion polls found most Americans favored restoring Aristide--not to return democracy but to end human rights abuses. Before long, not surprisingly, Schrager found his official daily guidance reflecting the shift as well, evidence of the influence of television on public opinion, and hence on policy.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has been among those lamenting the media's usurpation of the public message, telling audiences that foreign governments seeking his counsel used to ask him what they should do about an important matter. Now, Kissinger notes, they tend to ask him what they should say about it. This is the soundbite-has-replaced-substance school of thought, a fear that the technologically emboldened media have made obsolete the more substantive concerns of geopolitics. A variant on the theme is the concern that political figures in the age of real-time television are forced to "do something" about the latest crisis because of the pressure of microphones thrust in the face and incessant demands for fresh quotes from journalists with 24-hour news deadlines. Former CIA Director Robert Gates notes that "it takes extraordinary discipline" to duck the questions. For Gates, even watching CNN is a luxury policy makers should avoid "because you can't concentrate, you can't think about what you were paid to do, which was not to watch the war on television but to make policy."

Robert Oakley, former U.S. Ambassador and Special Envoy to Somalia, recently suggested that governments worldwide proclaim a 48-hour ban on answering crisis-driven questions, that they simply tell reporters, "We are studying the problem and will report back to you in 48 hours what we have decided to do." This attempt to preserve contemplative time for leaders is likely to backfire, argues Marvin Kalb of Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. "You have to be prepared to pay the price." The price: an "instant analysis" by the media that delay in making pronouncements about the latest crisis suggests a government that is clueless. "If you're prepared to pay the cost, you can delay answering for a news cycle or two," says Kalb, "but there is a cost, and this requires a degree of self-confidence."

To Israeli diplomat Ruth Yaron, all of this talk of putting off the media, of ducking their questions and buying time for thought, is anathema. "The media, especially electronic media, need to fill air time," she notes. "They need those soundbites. And if you are not the one jumping in with the first reaction, there is a vacuum, and someone else will fill it." This is another way of saying that the real-time news media have the first crack at setting the international agenda. Schrager recalls "an old diplomatic adage, the first draft on the table wins." The media often have the first draft, but this does not vitiate the need for ambassadors. It may, however, change their role, requiring them to be more interpreter and less reporter, a fate, not coincidentally, that has also befallen print reporters. "The media, by reporting constantly, create a lot of noises," notes Yaron. "The task of identifying which of those noises is the real signal becomes more and more complicated." That is one of the roles of the ambassador in the age of the Internet, to cull from the cacophony of sounds the notes that are most important for his or her government to hear.

When Peter Arnett broadcast from behind enemy lines, airing news stories from Baghdad to a Western and Moslem alliance that was fighting Iraq, his reports brought yet another challenge to the ambassador's door. No longer the keeper of the public message, forced to interpret instead of report the news, consigned to give context to facts already on the ground, the diplomat now faced the task of countering enemy spin. "War will never be the same because of what Peter Arnett did in Baghdad," says Schrager. After the Persian Gulf War was over, one marine officer was asked why the marines did better than the army at dealing with the media. "We regarded them as an environmental feature of the battlefield, kind of like the rain," said Chief Warrant Officer Eric Carlson. "If it rains, you operate wet." Like Carlson, diplomats and ambassadors are learning to operate wet--learning to adapt to a seemingly ever-present media and to handle the new role of bringing context and interpretation to the public debate.

Diplomats differ about how to respond to this new Goliath of satellite information.

Renwick argues that ambassadors and other diplomats should not "quake" before the media and should bear in mind that history will judge leaders not by what they say but by what they do. "I think that [military strategist] Karl von Clausewitz will turn out to have more permanent value than Peter Arnett," he said. "We are judged by whether we win or lose. And no matter how much spin, effort, lunch, or dinner you give the media, they will not fail to notice whether we have won or lost."

Others doubt that technology has eviscerated the role of governments or their ambassadors. "Edward R. Murrow's ultimate truth [was] that the most important part of any message is the last three feet," notes Schrager. The last three feet separate the viewer from a television set, or a listener from a radio, or a reader from a newspaper. The last three feet require a communicator to turn raw footage into compelling television. That is first and foremost what great diplomats have always been, communicators. Despite Perot's critique, and no matter the latest inventions of technology to assault their profession, communicators they always will be.