Better funding the State Department is a rally call for many on the political left and, increasingly, the political right. Critics of underfunding Foggy Bottom are correct that diplomacy effectively applied can avert the necessity to engage in far more expensive military strategies. Throwing money at Foggy Bottom, however, is not a panacea for the simple reason that onerous State Department security restrictions on its personnel undercut their effectiveness. It’s hard to win the battle of ideas or successfully engage government officials and the public when living in, working in, and seldom leaving diplomatic compounds.
Too often, diplomatic culture also undercuts diplomacy’s effectiveness. Too many ambassadors believe the headlines that derive from showering autocratic leaders with false praise signals diplomatic success.
Consider Frank Ricciardone, who, as ambassador to Egypt during the George W. Bush administration’s push for democratization, lavished praise upon Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s autocratic leader. “President Mubarak is well known in the United States,” Ricciardone told a group of Egyptian university students. “He is respected. If he had to run for office in the United States, my guess is he could win elections in the United States as a leader who is a giant on the world stage.”
If Ricciardone truly believed that statement, he should have been recalled immediately. He completely misread Egypt and the frustration and anger within Egyptian society that ultimately led to the Arab Spring ouster of Mubarak. If he did not, then he traded U.S. efforts to push liberal reforms and loosen the pressure in the pressure cooker for the sake of his own personal relationship with Egypt’s ruler. Either way, his actions did a disservice to U.S. diplomacy.
Alas, for a certain class of foreign service professionals, the tendency to lavish praise on autocrats is a continuing problem.
Consider Turkey: A series of U.S. ambassadors downplayed the threat Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s autocratic leader, posed to U.S. interests and liberalism more broadly. Speaking in Gdansk, Poland, in 2005, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried commented that Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party was simply the Islamic equivalent of a European Christian democratic party. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised Erdogan’s march toward Europe at a time he was sprinting in the opposite direction. Many U.S. ambassadors deflected criticisms as unfair and instead praised Turkey. Ross Wilson, who served as U.S. ambassador to Turkey between 2005 and 2008, seemingly endorsed Erdogan and pulled the carpet out from his secularist and liberal opponents when he dismissed the Turkish opposition parties as just a “cacophony.”
Alas, David Satterfield, a career U.S. foreign service officer who assumed the ambassadorship in Turkey seven months ago, appears to be pursuing the same strategy in the face of dictatorship as Ricciardone and Wilson once did.
Just ten days ago, Erdogan’s administration claimed that Turkey had no cases of the coronavirus, as if Turks’ Ottoman genes rendered them immune from the coronavirus, and that Turkey could deliver test results within minutes. In the days since, the fallacy of the claims Erdogan’s government put forth have become clear as acknowledged cases in Turkey mount and anecdotally, many dead of respiratory failure are never tested. Even a week ago, visitors said via Signal that Turkey was not screening those passing through its main airport.
The opposition is angry and, with its victories last year in Istanbul and Ankara, has momentum on its side. So what does Satterfield do? According to the Turkish press, he declared, “The Turkish government’s response has been swift and thorough, and I want to thank them for that. Turkey’s medical professionals, in particular, are heroes.”
Make no mistake, Turkey’s doctors and nurses are heroes, especially those who have risked everything to blow the whistle on Erdogan’s efforts to deny Turkey’s own vulnerability to the pandemic. Erdogan may be grateful for such positive affirmation; it helps him deflect blame and shield himself from accountability for his own mismanagement. But Satterfield’s efforts to praise Turkey’s government will not change Erdogan’s attitudes toward the U.S., nor will it diminish rampant anti-Americanism inside Turkey. If anything, it continues the U.S. Embassy in Ankara’s tendency to prioritize sycophancy toward Turkey’s leaders over a realistic assessment of their actions.
Satterfield may believe such counterfactual praise helps advance U.S. interests. As history has shown in Turkey and elsewhere, he is wrong and does U.S. diplomacy a disservice.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
