North Korea is testing its nuclear program seemingly at will. Afghanistan and Iraq struggle with enormous security threats years after the U.S. intervened to help them. Russian aggression and Chinese expansionism challenge the West. Terror and cyber attacks are on the rise. The national security challenges facing the United States are immense, yet the team of senior officials needed to confronts these dilemmas is sorely understaffed. As compared to the same point of time in recent administrations, far fewer political appointees and career professionals have been nominated by the Trump administration and confirmed by the Senate for key positions at the Pentagon and State Department.
The Cipher Brief’s Callie Wang spoke with Richard Boucher, a retired career foreign service officer who served as assistant secretary of State for South and Central Asia and numerous other senior positions, about the implications the delay in appointments is having on U.S. national security policy.
The Cipher Brief: What role do these key positions play in departments such as State and Defense? What is the impact of not having nominations/confirmations for positions like under secretary of Defense (Policy, Intel, etc.) or assistant secretary of State?
Richard Boucher: First of all, the world doesn’t wait for us. The world doesn’t wait for our nominations, the world doesn’t wait for our Senate, and the world doesn’t wait for an [internal] management study. The world goes on and things happen, and they need to be dealt with. The main problem is that if you don’t have people in place that are responsible and that are empowered, it’s hard to deal with all the breaking events in the world. Frankly, the secretary of state or his/her deputy can’t do it by themselves. They can’t make policy on the fly. They can’t individually manage the issues.
TCB: What’s the impact on daily policy/relations with countries, long-term strategy implementation?
Boucher: You have all these people around the world making decisions and looking for explanations and trying to work with the United States, and there’s no one empowered on the other side.
We have acting people in all these jobs – really qualified, career foreign service folks, who are acting as ambassadors or undersecretaries or assistant secretaries, but the fact is that when you’re acting, you’re a caretaker. I’ve been both – acting and confirmed. You just take care of business as best you can as things go. You’re not undertaking new initiatives because you don’t know if you’ll be around to carry them out. You’re not out there looking and pushing for opportunities the same way as you are once you’re empowered and confirmed.
We are missing opportunities because we’re not putting the people in place – whether they’re foreign service or political – who are empowered to make changes.
TCB: That makes sense at a strategic level. What about crisis communications once something goes wrong? I’m thinking of Korea and Japan, or Spain after the Barcelona attack – these acute, immediate concerns. Does this strike you as a vulnerability for U.S. foreign policy?
Boucher: It is and it isn’t. It isn’t to the extent that when something big happens, the secretary, the spokesmen, the deputy – they get thrown into it. They become the crisis communicators and the crisis decision makers.
The problem is the amount of time and effort that it takes to coordinate in crisis. When the Mumbai attacks happened in India, I was in touch with [then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] and our embassy and our people in India, government officials that were working it; we had very active networks of people that were talking to each other and trying to manage a coordinated response. That is what’s missing now.
If the secretary and the deputy are trying to work everything at their level, or the spokesman, that sort of coordination of countries and networks to deal with crises is largely absent.
If the U.S. has to go through more formal, Foreign Ministry channels, and we don’t have empowered ambassadors on the ground, then [the U.S.’ in-country representation] doesn’t necessarily have the ability to [set up a call from] the president to the prime minister on a moment’s notice. Unless you really have your top people out there working these issues, you don’t do all that pre-coordination that makes it an organized, international response where the United States is the organizer. It just turns it into a situation where the secretary of state is reacting.
TCB: What about ambassadors, special envoys, or White House officials assigned to specific countries? Many ambassador posts to key nations have not been filled yet. Can you think of any nations where this is especially critical?
Boucher: It makes it more difficult for us. A lot of these places – Saudi Arabia, for example – really don’t like to work through the system. They like to have a point person that they talk to, that they can just call; that becomes particularly dangerous when the person they call is in or so close to the White House. At least if they are speaking to U.S. ambassadors, it gets into the system, and the problems get worked with all the ramifications.
I don’t think the high-profile places are necessarily the ones that we need to look at though. The fact that there’s not ambassadors in neighboring countries – countries that are concerned but maybe not on the cutting edge – can be a problem. That’s where the ambassadors and the assistant secretaries of Defense and State are working the network of responses. The South China Sea is not just U.S.-China; it’s the U.S., China, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Singapore, India, etc. If you want to work an issue like that, in concert with your friends and allies, you have to have your people out there actively working the issue. Charges d’Affaires can do a lot of that, but they can’t do it at the same level as if they were empowered ambassadors, working under an assistant secretary who is coordinating a response.
That means the U.S. is reacting to events rather than organizing the event or the international response.
TCB: Some reports have indicated President Trump does not intend to nominate anyone for these posts as part of a larger effort to streamline the government bureaucracy. And, Secretary of State Tillerson has also indicated he does not want to fill vacant positions until after he has completed the overall review of the State Department, in what could be a year-long project. Can the U.S. afford to wait that long, essentially putting policy on hold?
Boucher: Sure, just push the pause button on world events. For a year.
But that’s the problem: things happen, and things continue to happen, and we’re either going to be part of it, or we’re not. You can’t wait for some management review done by people with no experience in foreign affairs, come up with a plan, negotiate it amongst yourselves in the administration, and then negotiate it through the Senate.
This is not a one-shot deal. This is not “I am the CEO, I’m going to decide how the corporation is organized.” A lot of these positions – particularly special envoys – are created by Congress; so, you’re going to have to negotiate that through the politics of the Hill. The world isn’t waiting for us to come out with a report and work it through our system. All kinds of people are making decisions that change how events turn out way before we get done with our management reviews.
The second thing is: there have to be some positions they are going to keep – undersecretaries, geographic bureau secretaries - so why don’t they have nominees for those jobs? It’s not an all or nothing situation. Maybe you don’t have to staff all the special envoy positions until you’re able to go through and decide which ones to fill. But there are key positions that you can staff because you know you’re going to no matter how the reorganization turns out.
TCB: Is there anything that can be done to address the problem or is it solely in the hands of the administration to make the nominations?
Boucher: It really is within the administration. Tillerson says that he’s found a lot of people, and he’s working them through the system, but one way or the other, it’s not happening. Or at least it’s not happening fast enough.
A lot of these decisions have policy implications. By not staffing something a foreign country has been used to dealing with, they wonder if their interests and their dealings with the United States are going to be abandoned. Countries do take this personally, and they want to know they have someone to work with and they have relationships. Not staffing sends a signal to places; you’re not important, this doesn’t matter to America.
Not staffing on this scale sends a signal that diplomacy is not important to us, and that is bad for the United States.
